Entries from May 2008 ↓

I plan to change web hosts today, if anything weird happens, that is probably why! If all goes well, there won’t be a thing to notice but faster page loads!

Edit: I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused! I have decided to move back. I guess this was another learning experience???

Via Malingering’s Flickr photostream.

I really like subterranean animals, but there are so few good pictures! I was surprised to find out that these moles were alive after the photographer found them while gardening. They look so vulnerable!

(I’m getting better at predicting what taxa an animal may belong to, but for the first time in a while, I still had to look up the superorder of a mammal, I wasn’t sure if moles were Euachontoglires, the superorder that includes rodents and primates and their allies, or Laurasiatherians, which is composed of, among other things, bats, carnivorans (cats, dogs, walruses, etc), pangolins, and ungulates), or if they were a member of a completely different superorder. It turns out they are a member of Laurasiatheria, in the order Soricomorpha (which also include shrews and the rare solenodon), which seems to mean they’re more closely related to whales, bears, and bats than any mouse. WELL, NOW I KNOW THAT.)

Via Tracy Lee Carroll’s Flickr photostream.

I got you a pheasant!

The satyr tragopan is a pheasant that lives in the eastern Himalayans. This brilliant plumage is a characteristic of males of the species. Like a number of other pheasants, the plumage of the females is a bit more modest. (I think the females are very pretty though! Brown is an under-appreciated color!)

Via Kuribo’s Flickr photostream.

The mara is another one of those animals that people really ought to be more aware of. A relative of the capybara, the mara is the fourth largest rodent in the world (after capybaras, beavers, and porcupines).

The mara is notable for their combination of communal nesting and monogamy, each relatively rare in mammals, and each rather extreme in the mara (the mara has been observed to nurse young not their own, a behavior called “allonursing,”).

I’ve seen the mara described as a cross between a rabbit and a capybara, or a deer and a capybara, but to me it looks most like a kangaroo and a capybara. (I should note that the capybara is its only close relation, the rabbit a distant second, followed by the deer, and although I think it looks like a kangaroo, out of all of those animals, it would be least closely related to the kangaroo.)

Via Kiyo’s Flickr photostream.

The title the photographer gave this tapir was “sing a song.” If it is making a sound, I wish I could hear it! I love tapirs but have no idea what they sound like. I think it looks more like the tapir is just taking a breath after a refreshing drink though.

Via Suneko’s Flickr photostream.

I featured a picture by Tambako before in a post that also happened to have a picture of a baby hippo with its mother. I had not realized that they too had taken a picture like this.

Like these wonderful hippos, I must sleep!

Via Tambako’s Flickr photostream.

The red river hog is such a lovely creature, I’m surprised I had not known of it before! I wonder what the benefits for sleeping in such a formation is.

Via Ron Dunnington’s Flickr photostream.

From the Flickr photo description:

he is such a sweet baby, but he got picked on by some other birds and caused some damage to his feather folicles so [I] adopted him , he still sings pretty , I call him my vulture canary. 

It’s really nice that somebody would choose to care for a bird that’s been hurt this way!

Via Sharon Taylor’s Flickr photostream.

There was a very large political rally in my hometown of Portland, Oregon yesterday, and I wanted to see what the crowd was like. I wasn’t looking for anything to post here, but I really like this picture!

Via Ryan Harvey’s Flickr photostream.

(I’m all for political discourse and activism, but please don’t make any political comments, a comment made on an animal blog is not going change anybody’s mind.)