A small town in the Bay State is besieged by a very special kind of pilgrims...
- Yes, my dear raven, the humans are denying direct realism again. They apparently think we don´t exist, or that we can´t see them.
- Nor do they know that we´re not really dinosaurs at all, but descendants from the Great Eufalconid in Asgard, which only *we* can directly perceive!
- Exactly, my dear raven, exactly.
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| Credit: Frank Vassen |
In case you have absolutely nothing else to do 1:20 AM Swedish time...
There are some really, really weird goddesses in Hinduism. Wikipedia links below!
I hope this isn´t a hoax. Elephants in India are said to bury their dead calfs. Could create problems for the theologians, I suppose. Should I or you tell them that corvids also bury their dead?
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| "Excuse me, dear sir, is this the way to the heartland?" |
“Wild Scandinavia” is a three-part BBC series about nature in the Nordic countries. I just glanced at the episode titled “Heartland”. In Sweden, it has been given a somewhat different title: “Sveriges hjärta” or The Heart of Sweden. Which is kind of odd, since some parts of the docu were apparently filmed in Norway and Finland! Cough, cough, cough…
“Heartland” takes us to the Scandinavian and, I suppose, Finnish boreal forests. For some reason, the winter section is more extensive than the summer ditto. Perhaps the Nordic winters are more fascinating for an international audience? Animals featured include lynxes, bears, beavers, reindeer, wolverines and wolves. One high point of the documentary is a struggle between bears and wolves over a reindeer carcass. Another is a similar struggle involving golden eagles and ravens. Ospreys are also shown. We even get to meet human ice-skaters! A strange oversight is that no deer or moose are shown.
The production ends with
the lekking (mating rituals) of the black grouse, a relatively large galliform
living in the “heartland” forests. The film team had to spend the night at the
lek grounds in freezing winter temperature. Geezus, can´t footage of this kind
be obtained with drone technology these days? Or no?
I admit
that “Wild Scandinavia: Heartland” could be of some interest to somebody who is
completely uninformed about “our” local wildlife. Personally, I tend to avoid
the wilder parts of our land, preferring more urban congregations, but I
suppose YMMV!
Not sure what to make of this: psychotic breaks, turkey vultures seen under very strange conditions, or misplaced Irish fairies?
Thunderbirds are divine creatures from American Indian mythology, but it seems even White people see them...and frequently despair. While the Thunderbird is usually thought of as a gigantic raptor, there are also weird reports of impossibly large crow-like birds. And not just from Pennsylvania!
From a blog devoted to find "the missing Thunderbird photo".
Thundercrows over Pennsylvania
Probably just a poor single mutant, hyped up by the Internet. Including my blog, now!
The Great Red-Beaked Raven of Russia
A sneak peek (or rather eavesdropping) into the weird and wonderful world of cryptid *audio*. I´m not an expert on this niche topic, but from the top of my head, the Sierra sounds are frankly ridiculous.
The most fascinating recording could be a Blue Jay (a known and extant species) mimicking an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (an extinct species)! Either the jumbo-sized woodpecker is still around, or Blue Jays have been mimicking it for generations after it went extinct...
I also wonder what´s up with the Japanese Wolf, claimed to be extinct for over 100 years. Yet, freakin´ close-range photos of the beast exist?! With apologies to C S Lewis: Really, we are hard to please! If the Honshu Wolf is tojour vivant, that would be fascinating since they are believed to be the last surviving lineage of the Pleistocene Wolf, the direct ancestor of domestic dogs (the Grey Wolf apparently being a side lineage).
Of course, we have to kill the wolves anyway, LOL. Just make sure to send a frozen specimen to your local bio-lab for closer inspection...
This is why philosophy should be banned. (The raven must be of an unknown species, btw. I mean, a yellow-billed and yellow-legged raven?)
Maybe we can use this to cancel the next elections and make Justin PM for life?
Investigators puzzled by large numbers of sick, dead crows in Charlottetown
Seen a lot of these lately, everywhere around where I live, usually don´t see them at all?! Yes, it´s an "Eurasian Jay". Europe is just an Asian peninsula with an attitude. LOL.
All of Nature is crying out for redemption. Or something like that. Oh, I´m sure there is a perfectly reasonable naturalistic-robotic explanation for this c/o Descartes.
Or no?
"Omvänd rasism" bland skator? Från artikeln: "Det är ganska ovanligt. De här vita individerna av fåglar är normalt sett ovanliga för att de ofta blir utstötta av sina föräldrar när de är små."
Okej, jag skojar.
Visste ni förresten att skator är kråkfåglar, och att kråkfåglar är tättingar? Tänk vad man lära sig på en obskyr blogg i nätets bakvatten kl. 1:30 natten mellan söndag och måndag...
An even more desperate attempt to debunk "crow funerals" than the one in my previous blog post. This one would be considered gross slander (literally gross) if directed against naked apes, pardon, humans...
Please note how this article *completely fails* in debunking the claim that crows hold funerals for their fallen comrades. By skeptical standards, it´s "not even wrong". LOL.
I know this is highly subjective, but I´m beginning to like cladistics. You know, that annoying shit which has created havoc in the evolutionary tree we all learned in senior high science class circa 1985. With some help, I might add, from the phylogenetic species concept (still don´t like that one) and the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy of birds (which does make sense).
I always suspected that starlings were really a kind of petty crows, and yepp, you guessed it, Sibley and my man Jon did prove that sturnids and corvids should really be treated as the same family. Indeed, if Anatomically Modern Man disappears, the next intelligent (and highly destructive) ruler of this space rock will probably be...Sturnus vulgaris, hell bent on a campaign of extermination against crows, gulls and, I suppose, anatomically less modern men. Of course it´s a bloody corvid.
As for cladistix, one clade that certainly makes sense is the Eufalconimorphae, within which falcons are grouped with passerines and parrots, meaning (of course) that falcons are *not* closely related to hawks, eagles or the highly aberrant stork known as "California condor". No surprise there, I always thought falcons looked more similar to said parrots, rather than to raptors of the diurnal persuasion.
Now, it has come to my quality attention that some prominent cladisticians have proposed the existence of a *huge* clade known as Pancrustacea, regrouping both insects and crustaceans. Bingo! All my life, I wondered about the sinister similarity between the half-dead crayfish at my parents´ dinner table and the Insecta in our backyard, now I know the reason why, thank you.
I have stopped worrying, and learned how to love cladograms. Yeah, really.
