Grackle starting to think this isn’t St. Louis after all.
Russian Squirrel
Squirrel pondering his investment options.
Prairie Dog performing Comedy of Errors
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion.
Keep then far league and truce with thy true bed;
I live unstain’d, thou undishonoured.
Cow
Some cows aren’t tall enough to lick the food out of people’s hands.
Some cows have developed workarounds.
Pallas Cat
One of these guard cats only tells lies. The other only tells lies as well.
Basically, cats don’t care about your petty human concept of “truth”.
Prairie Dog performing Timon of Athens
“Thou wilt be throng’d to shortly.”
Porcupine
Porcupine that just downloaded the Shazam app and is realizing that it is of no use whatsoever in identifying the plaintful music that he hears in his dreams, echoing strains of melody like tendrils holding his mind hostage until the wee hours of the morning yawn and spread wide to welcome the day.
Pallas Cat
Pallas cat kittens are not all equally brave.
Meerkat performing Hero and Leander
And then he got him to a rock aloft,
Where having spied her tower, long stared he on’t,
And prayed the narrow toiling Hellespont
To part in twain, that he might come and go;
But still the rising billows answered, “No.”
Giant River Otter
Giant river otters play in the water just like small ones.
Wombat
The wombat enclosure at the LA Zoo is kept so dark that it is almost impossible to see anything. For those who follow such things, this show was a 1/6 of a second exposure at f/3.3 and ISO 12,800. I am optimistic that my newer experiments with low light photography will allow me to do better the next time I visit.
Dead Tree
Some people are taking civil war erasure a bit too far.
Short Nosed Echidna
The echidna is a monotreme like the platypus. They can be found in some zoos but, with them being very nocturnal, it can be very hard to get good photos of them. I lucked out that on this one day, there were two of them just wandering around as if they didn’t know it was daytime.
Now I just need to photograph three more species of echidna and a platypus and I’ll have collected the whole set.
Tasmanian Devil
Tasmanian devils are unpopular at parties – they always hold onto the joint.
Cinereous Vulture
“Cinereous” means “color of ash” because “grey vulture” sounds stupid.
As I was reading about grey, I stumbled upon the claim that you can define grey as all solutions of the inequality: 0 ≤ (R = G = B) ≤ 255
There are rather more than 50 options.
Tapir
The tree is starting to worry that the dwarven armorer she met in the previous village might not have been entirely truthful about the magical properties of the chain mail he had sold her.
Perente
This lizard doesn’t think it’s right that Minnesota’s abbreviation “MN” looks more mountainy than all the other states and thinks it should swap names with Colorado.
Peninsular Pronghorn
The pronghorn is doing fine. This is, however, a sub-species of pronghorn that lives on the Baja California peninsula in Mexico.
It looks almost entirely like the regular pronghorn, from which it has been isolated long enough to start to form its own species. However, this particular breed of pronghorn is down to 150 individuals in the wild. Several zoos are working to species.
But what happens if they fail? If we lose this species, and the Baja area no longer has these “ghosts of the desert”? Will we let them fade into myth, a fading memory that only pops up here and then when someone gets a glimpse of white and tan in the far distance? Will this become their Loch Ness monster, their Bigfoot?
Or will we take some of our existing pronghorn from elsewhere in North America and just plop a herd back in that area? If we did that, would it be the same? For many, yes. Could the transplanted animals thrive? Quite possibly. Would there be any practical difference between letting the current pronghorns die out and just replace them once the land has been repaired? Most would say no.
150 would say yes.
Bongo
Bongos prefer the caramel bits.
Harpy Eagle
According to a recent study by Aguiar-Silva, the type of prey most preferred by this fast-flying predator with razor-sharp beak and talons is … the sloth.