Ragu

Måtte Krishna förbanna dig, fräcke avgudadyrkare! 

Edward Blom gjorde ragu av Gynnings påfågel: "Riktigt gott"

En höna och en fjäder

 

En helt annan höna

Dramat kring påfågelhonan (eller hönan) "Rödvit" alias "Berit" (sic) fortsätter. LOL. 

Rödvit hoppade över Skansentaket

Påfågel på vift

 

Undrade just vart den tagit vägen...

Påfågel på rymmen från Skansen - vill inte komma hem

Food reviews

 

Some legal and culinary tips from hell´s kitchen, LOL. 

Bird brains disprove materialism

 

Scientists have finally started to use "the brains God gave geese" and realized that (non-human) animals are - wait for it - conscious?! I mean, maaaan, who knew? Or was it *self*-conscious? Same thing.

No surprise there. But thanks for noticing, I suppose. What´s more intriguing is that different kinds of brains can give rise to the same kind of (self)-consciousness. Brainy creatures mentioned in the video above include humans, birds (and not just the inevitable corvids), crocs and even ants. 

So how can entirely distinct kinds of physical structures cause animals to be equally conscious? Please don´t tell the Idealists, LOL. 

Therefore God. 

The meme next time

 

At the moment, it´s apparently Egg Meme Month, but since the coffee prices are going up too, I expect May to be coffee meme season! I don´t eat that many eggs, but as a caffeine junkie of some standing, yeah, I´m getting worried now. I mean, do I have to imbibe more energy drinks instead? Dude. 

The meme is from one of JMG´s fora, but he may have picked it up somewhere else.  

At least he believes in evolution

 

- Yes, I attained herd immunity in 2025!

It seems RFK Jr doesn´t have jurisdiction over agriculture, but he seems to be lobbying hard for his somewhat peculiar approach anyway. Well, at least he believes in evolution through natural selection! So does Mother Nature, I´m afraid...

Peculiar fact: none of the articles seem to contain interviews with the chicken farmers. What do *they* say about this situation?   

RFK Jr wants bird flue to spread on poultry farms

RFK Jr says let bird flu go through farms

Happy does it

 

- Yeah, I´m sure you guys are happy!
Credit: Frank Schulenburg 

Happy Thanksgiving...to everyone! 

The aesthetics of evolution

 

The Atheist Party Line crowd will "counter"-attack in 10, 9, 8, 7...

I never read "The Wedge" (as in Scott Carney´s book with that title), but I suppose this 15-minute video is a kind of teaser trailer. The title is "What the Theory of Evolution Gets Wrong" and it´s posted on a channel jokingly called "backchannel"...

Short story: Consciousness plays a greater and more independent role in evolution than we usually assume. Maybe even love and aesthetics! Yes, it´s the peacock again...

In leopard country

 

"The Leopard Rocks" is a documentary about leopards living in the Aravalli mountains of Rajasthan in northwestern India. I´m not an expert on leopards, but apparently the big cats in this particular region are unusually gregarious. They live in caves in the hills and supposedly never attack the humans in the area. 

The documentary tries to paint a picture of primitive shephards living in balance with Nature, but this is obviously a truth with some modification. The area is advanced enough to have a large dam providing water during the dry season, the lack of suitable prey animals for the leopards suggests human impact on the surrounding environment, and when leopards sneak into the villages to abduct and kill farm animals, the local business community pays the poor farmers money in compensation so they won´t hunt the leopards. Why? Because of tourism, that´s why. 

The balance around the Leopard Rocks seem very precarious.

Other highlights include Hanuman langurs (yes, they really do live around a temple on one of the rocks), the striped hyena (they, too, are gregarious in this particular region), the mongoose, peacocks, parakeets and antelopes. Frankly, the langurs and the temples were more interesting than the big cats, but that´s me!

End of reflections.    

This is not science

Credit: H. Raab

OK, my headline is click bait, but I was surprised to learn that soft tissue *has* been extracted from dinosaur fossils. I mean, the local Skeptic (TM) association assured me it was impossible. Otherwise, I assume most of this articles were published during the more "wild" period of LiveScience! 

Could evolution ever bring back the dinosaurs?

Dinosaur blood vessels survived for 80 million years without fossilizing

Controversial T-Rex tissue explained

Dino-chicken gets one step closer

Is it possible to clone a dinosaur?

The white galliform

 

Last year, a clip supposedly showing "the legendary White Phoenix" went viral in China. Two versions of the clip are linked above. But nah, it wasn´t a phoenix (legendary or otherwise), it´s a silver pheasant (a bird I read about already as a kid). The third clip shows such a bird from a more obvious angle. Per Wiki, these birds aren´t even particularly rare... 

Heartland

 

"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!

Thank you, Sweet Lord

 

Glad to finally have this issue sorted out by a real expert...

Turkish Thanksgiving

Credit: Mary K Hanson

Turkey changes its international name to Türkiye. Which means Turkey in Turkish. In case you wonder. 

Thank Pan for Bidenflation

 

"Thank god for Bidenflation, at least that means I can live a year longer!" 

Pardon me for thanksgiving

 

I admit that this annual "pardoning of a turkey" is quite funny. Joe seems to be a natural when it comes to stuff like this. But why is the turkey white? Some kind of pardon-friendly subspecies, perhaps? Happy Thanksgiving, btw. ;-) 

Here be dragons...and peacock-plumed tall tales

Credit: Mick Lobb

Now, this one is *very* hard to believe! It´s not even clear whether this is folklore sensu stricto, or some kind of fakelore. 

According to local legend (or local pub tall tales), the area around Penllyn Castle in Glamorgan, Wales, UK was inhabited by - wait for it - peacock-plumed flying serpents as late as the 19th century, said plumed serpents having a notorious penchant for munching and feasting on the chicken of the local fakelorists. 

Eh, come again?! 

That these "snakes" were really misidentified pheasants, peacocks or parrots is hardly likely (for starters, not even Welsh peacocks eat chicken nuggets). Nor is the idea of a misidentified exotic cryptid bird very likely, since the local game-hunters and voracious Victorian collectors would surely have come across it, shot it and placed it in a local cabinet of curiosities, where Richard Owen would no doubt have spotted it, too. 

That leaves fairies (but fairies don´t leave reptile skin) or a local Cymric bard with story-telling abilities far surpassing those of good ol´ Iolo Morganwg!  

The peacock-plumed flying serpents of Glamorgan

Cracid extravaganza

"Curassows and related birds" is a 476-page volume published in 2004 by Lynx Edicions (Spain) and the American Museum of Natural History. The birds in question are curassows, chachalacas and guans. Together they form the family Cracidae within the order Galliformes. They are thus evolutionary cousins of chickens, turkeys and pheasants. 

The work is a new and fully updated edition of a book originally published in 1973 (under the same title). Most of the original text and illustrations are included in the 2004 version. The authors of the original version were Jean Delacour and Dean Amadon, the paintings were provided by Albert Earl Gilbert and others. The original was sponsored by John H Phipps, a Florida businessman and polo player who supported various conservationist projects. The 2004 edition has been updated by Joseph del Hoyo and Anna Motis. Del Hoyo is the chief editor of the multi-volume "Handbook of the Birds of the World" (HBW), and wrote the chapter on curasows and their allies. He is considered a leading expert on cracids.

The cracids are found in South and Central America. Many species are threatened by extinction at the hands of humans. They are tame, hunted for their meat by the rural population, and many live in the Amazon. The good news is that two species believed to be extinct in 1973 were later rediscovered! 

Just like HBW, "Curasows and related birds" is an information overload extravaganza. It includes essentially everything there is to know about cracids: the wing-drumming mating display of the guans, variations in the windpipe (trachea), wattles and other beak ornamnets, hybridization... The systematics of this group is frequently confusing, with unclear numbers of species, subspecies and even superspecies. The species presentations contain information on range, habitat, nesting and birds in captivity. 

It´s obvious that the teams making this book looked pretty much everywhere for facts pertaining to cracids. Sometimes, *they* were involved in the original research. Thus, we learn that a pair of chestnut-winged chachalacas were sent to Delacour already in 1910. And who could have imagined that some children once stole the eggs of a nesting bare-faced curassows from the zoo at Chester, England? (Not clear whether some of the authors´ kids were involved!) There is also a discussion about whether the rufous-vented chachalaca was introduced by humans to the Grenadines (quoting a letter from 1925) and if so, when it happened. I believe the update says Tobago during the late 1600´s. Some cracids still have secrets: nothing is known about the breeding of the chestnut-bellied guan in Brazil and Bolivia. 

The color plates are spectacular. The plates from the original version have been kept, and new plates show downy chicks of many species. The new edition also includes the cracid plates from "Handbook of the Birds of the World". 

Recommended, even if you are completely uninterested in Cracidae and their ultimate fate. The book is so well-produced that it´s a "must have" for all book collectors! 

The art of peacock illustration

I have the 1991 edition of this book, "The Art of Bird Illustration" by Maureen Lambourne. It's one of the best art books I've ever seen, and will work perfectly both as a birthday gift or a coffee table book for you own humble self.

The author admits that the book is "a pictorial introduction" rather than a "comprehensive survey", but I think its comprehensive enough for the general reader. It shows paintings and other illustrations of birds from ancient Egypt, Rome, medieval bestiaries and the Renaissance. The modern period is represented by Audubon, John and Elizabeth Gould, Archibald Thornburn, among others. Weirdly, the accomplished Swedish bird painter Lars Jonsson have been left out - the only drawback with this otherwise excellent work.

On a funnier note, a few illustrations by John Ruskin have been included, including "Study of a Kingfisher". I didn't know Ruskin was into birds! I always imagined he was more interested in Venetian churches and perhaps mysterious red-headed females...

The book also contains an appendix about print collecting. Although "The art of bird illustration" is a real book with both texts and illustrations, I found the illustrations (all in color) to be its strongest side. My favourite: "Peacock and peacock" by Archibald Thornburn, a painting which shows a peacock looking down at a peacock butterfly! OK, that's my humor.

Please note that this is a review of the 1991 edition. I don't know how the current edition looks like. Hopefully, it's even better!

:-)