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| Credit: Rhododentrites |
Breaking news: for the first time ever (literally ever), a red-eyed vireo has been spotted in Sweden. At Djurgården in Stockholm, to be exact. Usually, these little critters only annoy the denizens of the North American continent.
But...
There is something strange about the report. Yes, you´ve guessed it: it hasn´t been properly vetted yet. Or peer reviewed, if you like that term better. LOL. This reminds me of scientists who publish pre-prints of their papers on-line, before proper peer review.
In fact, it´s even more extreme, since it´s the chair of the bird-watching committee vetting reports who broke the news to the media...before his own committee had vetted it?!
:D
Not that I give a damn, but sure, if I had been a crazy bird-watcher, I suppose Djurgården would be my next call!
A small town in the Bay State is besieged by a very special kind of pilgrims...
Ibland missförstår AI mina promptar på det mest häpnadsväckande sätt. Ni kan aldrig gissa vad prompten var som föranledde AI att generera ovanstående illustration!
Okej, det var "azurmes i vinterskog". En azurmes (azur-mes) är alltså en liten fågel. Dock verkar färgerna stämma. Azurmesar är faktiskt vita och blå...
- 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...
The bird above is a Coal Tit (although the wrong subspecies). The one we have around here presumably looks more like a dimunitive Great Tit (pun unintended). I say "presumably", since until the last week or so, I didn´t even know these birds existed! Then, I read in some newspaper that there is currently "an invasion of Russian Coal Tits in Stockholm", with the miniature birds crashing into buildings and stuff?!
When I visited Stockholm recently (still looking for the Gubbängen monster, obviously), I noticed a flock of small birds which confused me. "Damn, the Great Tits are very small this season", I thought to myself. At least I think I did. Or did I just dream the whole thing?
If so, it must be some kind of weird synchronicity that I read in the newspaper about the unknown bird I dreamed of a few days earlier. I hope the "Russian invasion" thing is just a figure of speech! I mean, it´s not like Russian birds crashing into buildings is an omen of a foreign drone-attack on Sweden or anything.
Right?
Maybe I should just hide in the forest together with that monster...
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I sometimes read extreme nerd articles like this one. I touched upon the extreme "splitting" activity of certain biologists before, when pseudo-reviewing a book about bovines and expressing the suspicion that the scientists just want more UN funding (apparently allocated on a species-by-species basis).
So it was interesting to read a defense of the "splitters" and their morpho-genetic antics from a guy with a real degree in paleontology.
The Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy was just the beginning it seems! Note the bashing of our very own national hero Carolus Linnaeus at the end...
En rubinnäktergal har siktats vid Vinga, eller rättare sagt på Vargön någonstans i Västergötland. Förstår inte riktigt uppståndelsen kring fyndet, eftersom den jäkla tättingen är väldigt vanlig i Sibirien och Östasien. Så varför kallas den "den heliga graalen" av "vallfärdande" fågelskådare? Det hela känns så 1820-talet. Numera kan man ta flyget till Japan, eller se videoklipp av "näktergalen" (egentligen en flugsnappare) på nätet. Snälla, det finns bönder som tar hit fucking strutsar, som ibland sliter sig och springer ut på Nynäsvägen. Om en struthiomimus skulle dyka upp på västgötaslätten så kan vi snacka om graaler ock så vajter...
This writer has an obvious G K Chesterton complex - every half-sentence must contain a stunning witticism - but she *is* quite funny. Ironically, I even think some modern pagans might secretely agree with her! The only problem is her sex obsession. Freudian, much?
Best sentence: "Torturing Christians to death and then accusing them of seeking martyrdom – you’d have to give the Romans marks for chutzpah if they hadn’t been so keen on crucifying Jews, too." The full title of the piece is also priceless: "Spare me this pagan revival. Pagans are generally perverts, and not even sexy ones".
And yes, she mentions the poor little wrens.
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
