For your late evening, Eastern Daylight Time, diversionary enjoyment pleasure.
anyway here’s the most carefree deer in the world prancing along the beach at dawn ? pic.twitter.com/MIKtsOtDYb
— Ian Laking (@IHLaking) October 8, 2018
Open thread!
by Adam L Silverman| 84 Comments
This post is in: Because of wow., Faunasphere, Nature, Open Threads
For your late evening, Eastern Daylight Time, diversionary enjoyment pleasure.
anyway here’s the most carefree deer in the world prancing along the beach at dawn ? pic.twitter.com/MIKtsOtDYb
— Ian Laking (@IHLaking) October 8, 2018
Open thread!
This post is in: Birdwatching, Open Threads
Here’s a squawking common gallinule:
I’ve decided to focus on waterfowl today and ignore all the other shit going on in the world. I feel better already.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Pet Rescue
A respite from politics, from frequent commentor, gifted gardener/photographer, and general Friend of the Blog Ozark Hillbilly:
I thought people might like to meet the newest member of the Hillbilly family Ozark, Percy.
Percy first showed up at my neighbor’s “B” house with a friend, and the pair soon picked up the nom de guerres “Beavis” and “Butthead” (he was Beavis). “B” was really unsure about taking in 2 dogs, one of which was very hyper (that would be Butthead, a very sweet female of unknown heritage, lanky and loves to run). I was helping her get them settled in, with crates, proper food and sufficient living arrangements (“B” also has 2 older and very much fatter house cats) and helping her to understand dog behavior better. From time to time the 2 would show up at our place and hang around chasing various critters.
Then Hurricane Gordon came thru with a two-day soaking and Beavis just refused to leave. I set him up on the porch with a dog bed, food bowl, and water, knowing full well it was a mistake. Sure enough, after 2 days he had pretty much decided he liked things here and just refused to leave.
So we changed his name to Percy, short for Persistent.
The top pic is as he showed up, the long hair tangled in burrs.
Living where we live the long hair was impossible, so we got his hair cut short where it will be from now on, as in the second pic. You can see 2 of the 3 scars he has on his forehead. The signs of abuse have piled up till I can no longer deny it. He is a very sweet dog, loving and not aggressive (except towards chickens) in any way, but he cowers when I bend over to pet him, tucks his tail when getting petted, hates getting into vehicles and hates staying in them even more, is very insecure especially when it comes to me (he always has to be near me)(except when chasing a rabbit, then fuhgeddaboudit), etc etc.
The 3rd pic is not a very good one (they wouldn’t sit still competing for my one available hand) but it pretty well captures the Woofmeister’s attitude about all this.
Having had experience with Beagles I had sworn I’d never own one. Percy seems to have just enough Spaniel (?) in him to temper the urge to chase anything and everything till the cows come home as he tends to chase for only 10-15 minutes.
Due to Woof’s congestive heart disease I have been trying to convince my wife to adopt a 2nd dog as a bridge for the post Woof days but she was resistant. Percy took care of it for me.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Percy, for PersistentPost + Comments (109)
This post is in: Faunasphere, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All
— Chalupa Cabra (@chalupa_cabra) August 27, 2018
What a terrible day for Paul Bronks’ twitter feed to go to ‘protected status’. (I sincerely hope it’s temporary.) Apart from @BoringEnormous, which are your favorite sources for fauna-related respite japes?
when u just have had enough of hearing this guys shit again pic.twitter.com/mEB73ZtmvI
— darth™ (@darth) July 9, 2018
Ever had a dog who just thinks too hard? pic.twitter.com/HT5cwALCzM
— Neko Case (@NekoCase) July 22, 2018
He saw what the world had to offer and turned his back on it pic.twitter.com/onqcLAY94Q
— Haru ? (@RelktntHero) July 29, 2018
Do wolves ever just sing to make music, as we do? For wolves, the social glue is song. https://t.co/bOEevxv5Dg pic.twitter.com/sNyXxTZpzI
— NY Wolf Center (@nywolforg) April 28, 2018
Respite Open Thread: LOOK! ANIMAL MEMES!Post + Comments (90)
by TaMara| 64 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Nature & Respite, Open Threads
Come on over here for a little break. One cute kitteh who has found his very own private place among my grape vines. He was a little annoyed I found him. But thems the rules, you want to play outside in the backyard, I must know where you are. He is magnificent, isn’t he? But don’t tell the others I said so.
I am tuned out today. How are you taking care of yourself?
This post is in: Faunasphere, Garden Chats
From desert gardener and intrepid front-pager Cheryl R:
Here are a couple of photos of a covey of metal quail I bought from an artist at a Roseburg arts and crafts show while I was in Oregon.
I am reworking my flowerbeds and plan to plant a trumpet vine behind them. The other side of the wall is a six-foot drop to the driveway. I removed several Russian sage. Nobody told me they send up suckers – ugh! I notice they’re not being sold as widely as they were for a while.
I am pleased with my quail.
What’s going on in your garden(s) this week?
***********
And for those among us who have ever been frustrated by the indigenous wildlife’s ‘landscape redecoration’, a bonus story from the Toronto Star — “Toronto built a better green bin and — oops — maybe a smarter raccoon”:
In January, as the city of Toronto rolled out its final fleet of new raccoon-resistant green bins, Suzanne MacDonald was flooded with emails from citizens fretting about the fate of the masked bandits known for pillaging our food waste.
The worried residents wrote to MacDonald, an animal behaviourist and known raccoon sympathizer, because they hadn’t seen the creatures creeping through their backyards lately, and were beginning to wonder: Where are they? Are they starving to death? Have they been forced to relocate in search of nourishment? What have we done to the raccoons?
Designed with a special raccoon-resistant lock, Toronto’s new organic waste bins, which the city began distributing to great fanfare in 2016, were perhaps the greatest human effort in what we like to call our “war” against the raccoons. The animals had been effortlessly pillaging our first-generation green bins for more than a decade, leaving morning messes for us to scrape from our driveways and sidewalks. The city’s search for a new-and-improved bin had identified animal resistance, “especially for raccoons,” as a top priority.
The $31-million contract gave us roughly half a million bins, a decade of maintenance and a promise: that raccoons would have great difficulty penetrating the clever new receptacles. City politicians called the bins “raccoon-proof.” The bin maker — and MacDonald, who ran field tests on the prototypes — used the term “raccoon-resistant” because, well, you just never know…
Twelve months before the rollout of the new bins in Toronto’s west end, MacDonald had started logging the body mass index of raccoons killed in traffic. “Very glamorous work,” she called it. Her goal was to find out whether the loss of a steady food source would make our famously fat raccoons leaner.
MacDonald said I was welcome to join her for the next weigh-in. I put the appointment in my calendar: “Measuring dead raccoons.”
Over several months, I followed MacDonald’s research, expecting to learn how raccoons were adapting to life without green bins. But as a long winter melted into spring, things got weird, and my simple inquiry turned into an accidental investigation. A viral video with a curious backstory and suspicious activity in my own laneway shifted my focus from whether the green bins were starving the raccoons, to whether the animals had found a way, once again, to outsmart us…
Sunday Garden Chat: Garden Art (with Bonus Yard Varmints)Post + Comments (161)
by Adam L Silverman| 190 Comments
This post is in: America, Cat Blogging, Faunasphere, Nature, Open Threads
Apparently everyone’s a wee bit stressed out, which is understandable. So rather than explaining the vetting process* on how a series of white supremacists, plagiarists, conspiracists, economic illiterates, white collar criminals, and some, I assume, are good people, I thought something relaxing might be in order. Everyone say awwww!!!!
Open thread.
* I have a bit of inside insight here, which I won’t go into, but basically the vetting is done based on expressed and perceived loyalty to the President. Republicans, former Republicans, and self described conservatives who were NeverTrumpers or who ever wrote or said anything negative about the President on social media or on TV or on talk radio are excluded unless they take great pains to get right with the President. The same loyalty test applies to professionally non-partisan subject matter experts who did similar things out of their professional concern over what was observable during the campaign and has been happening ever since.
How About We All Take a Deep Breath and Go Awwwwww!Post + Comments (190)