Category: Nature

Categories
Nature

Top ten animals – #2, Snow Leopard

What actually got me started thinking about this top ten animals list was a documentary about the Snow Leopard, Uncia uncia. Two film-makers had spent three years in Kashmir and managed to get about two minutes of what of the kind of action footage you’d normally expect from a wildlife programme – the cats hunting, courting, and at their prey. Apart from a few shots of snow leopards walking through rocks, and film of the film makers not finding leopards, most of the rest of the hour-long documentary was filled out with footage taken by automatic cameras set up to be triggered by motion sensors. But the only places they could rely on the cats being were the sites where they marked their territories, so it was basically a whole hour of snow leopards pissing. Which they do surprisingly elegantly.

People just don’t see these animals. They live in incredibly inaccessible areas, they can have territories stretching hundreds of square miles, and even if you do happen to pass within a few hundred feet of one, they’re so well camouflaged for rocky terrain that you’ll probably not notice it.

Here’s a snow leopard in Mongolia:

Photo by Fritz Polking. Courtesy of Snow Leopard Trust, where you can also see some video of snow leopards.

I think that they’re also the most beautiful of the big cats. Look at the colouring! Look at the tail!

Categories
Nature

Top ten animals – #3, Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, is a bird which any birder would be keen to see just because it’s big and spectacular-looking.

(Audubon painting of some ivorybills, from Wikipedia)

But, of course, that wouldn’t be enough to get it onto my list above other even more spectacular species like the Satyr Tragopan or the Victoria Crowned Pigeon.

No, it’s because it came back from the dead last year. For me, that was the happiest news story of 2005. Every time a species is rediscovered that was thought to be extinct, it raises a flicker of hope that all those others will turn up somewhere – a colony of Great Auks on an obscure island off Finland, perhaps. For a big, dramatic species to go unseen for decades in one of the most-birded countries on earth makes anything seem possible.

The ivorybill is known as the ‘Lord God bird’ – because of people’s reaction on seeing them, rather than in reference to Christ’s habit of banging his head against trees.

Categories
Nature

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2006

If you’re in the UK, there’s still time to do the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2006 this weekend. Just watch your garden or local park for an hour, record all the bird species and what the maximum number you saw at one time was, and submit the results to the RSPB.

This year I saw:

blue tit – 6
great tit – 3
coal tit – 1

siskin – 3
chaffinch – 7
greenfinch – 5
goldfinch – 2

nuthatch – 1
wren – 1
dunnock – 1
goldcrest – 1
robin – 1

jay – 1
magpie – 1
carrion crow – 2

great spotted woodpecker – 2
ring-necked parakeet – 2
feral pigeon – 8

song thrush – 1
blackbird – 3

which isn’t bad. Marginally better than last year, though I’m interested to see I had three starlings last year, because there aren’t any around at the moment. Still no house sparrows, sadly. I’ve seen one about 5 minutes walk away, so perhaps in a year or two they’ll be back here.

Categories
Nature

Top ten animals – #4, Wandering Albatross

Having already had the world’s largest turtle and the world’s longest fish, I’m in danger of coming across as a complete size queen, because now we have the Wandering Albatross, Diomedea exulans, which has the longest wingspan of any bird – one was measured at 11′ 10″. This photo is from 70 South:

Actually, though, it’s not just about the size – though that’s certainly a part of the appeal. There are just certain birds that catch your imagination. When I went birding in South America, the one thing I most wanted to see, and was most excited when I did see, was a toucan. Somehow they seemed like the absolute embodiment of the exotic, and to see them wild instead of in a cage was magical. Presumably someone else might have the same feeling about macaws, or quetzals, or scarlet ibis, but for me it was toucans.

Albatrosses have a similar appeal for me; breeding on little rocky islands in the southern oceans and spending most of their lives at sea, they are the epitome of wildness. I’d be happy to see any of them, but if I’m going to pick one, it has to be Wandering Albatross, the most albatrossy of all.

And they have that whole Coleridge thing going for them as well, of course.

Categories
Culture Nature

Hypergraphia for Poetry in an Epileptic Patient

I got this link from somewhere – Bookslut, maybe? – but anyway, it’s a letter to The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.

An epileptic patient “complained of being driven to write poetry. For 5 years, he experienced words as ‘continuously rhyming in his head’ and felt the need to write them down and show his writings to others. He did not talk in rhyme, write excessively in nonrhyme, or read poetry. The patient had not had a preoccupation with poetry until age 53 when he had the subacute onset of behavioral changes with irritability and anger.”

The brain really is peculiar. The fact that someone with brain damage would experience words rhyming in his head is remarkable but, given the extensive brain area devoted to language recognition and formation, makes some sense. The need to write it down and show it to people is what strikes me as most interesting. It suggests that the brain isn’t just exhibiting some kind of linguistic tic, but that the stimulus is somehow acting on his whole concept of poetry, including the associated ideas that you write it down and show it people.

Categories
Nature

Top ten animals – #5, Oarfish

So, what’s the world’s biggest fish? That’s easy – it’s the Whale Shark. But what about the world’s longest fish? Well, that’s probably the Whale Shark too, to be honest – the trouble is, it’s a category that tends to attract a lot of over-excited and completely unconfirmable reports. But the other fish that has a claim to be the longest is a species of Oarfish, Regalecus glesne, sometimes called ‘King of Herrings’:

It’s certainly the longest bony fish in the world; i.e. it’s not a shark. As an evolutionary footnote, you are more closely related to the Oarfish than the Oarfish is related to the sharks. If you think about it, that has to be true, because all mammals and bony fish are descended from some first ancestral bony fish, whereas sharks (which have cartilaginous skeletons) are not. The heaviest bony fish is the Sunfish, Mola mola. All giant fish species – the big sharks, the sunfish, and others like the Manta Ray – would be great to see. But the Oarfish really caught my imagination when I learnt about them as a kid, and I’d still love to see one – preferably a big one. How big? Well, they’ve been reliably measured to about 12m (40′), apparently, but reported up to lengths of 17m – 56′. That’s the height of a 5 storey building. Height is the right word here because, as you can see above, they have a very peculiar posture when feeding. Here’s some Navy Seals with a 24′ specimen: