Potoo Bird of Brazil

The Potoo bird of Brazil is nocturnal and hunts from a wooden perch. If it believes a threat is nearby it will freeze in place to avoid detection.

Waterslide Dog!

I would have loved to have one of those in my backyard when I was a kid. The best I remember us having for cooling off in summer was a Slip 'N Slide. Well, there was that swimming pool at one of our homes (we moved a lot) and it was pretty great, but damn, that slide would have been fantastic. We never had a dog, just cats from time to time, but I don't think...wait, maybe...

No, I was right, cats don't go down waterslides, and that cat video was not only fake, it also sucked!

Amazing Time-Lapse: Bees Hatch Before Your Eyes

When Anand Varma was asked to photograph a story on honeybees for National Geographic magazine, he knew he was going to have to take a different approach to capture new views of one of the world’s most photographed insects.-For a Biologist-Turned-Photographer, a Beehive Becomes a Living Lab

Laughing Birds

Bird Laughs Like Super-Villain

Funny Laughing Bird on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show- 1976

The Evolution of Venom

The deadliest natural weapon employed in the animal kingdom, venom has independently evolved in creatures as diverse as jellyfish, insects, snakes and even mammals.-http://youtu.be/1W_N_N1ZZ5A

Sunday Animals - 2/9/2014

From the video (which is via T.C.): "Jaguar diet consists of 85 species of different animal...so anything along the rivers, and in the rivers, is a potential prey item, it's on the menu. Walking along the riverbank for a Jaguar is like us scanning a buffet line".

The question is, where are the PETA loons when it comes to protection of the victims of the Jaguar? Don't those animal have a right to life too, not just the ones humans slaughter for food? Remember, PETA's not just against animal cruelty and factory farming, they're against all eating of animals by humans. But what about animals that nature designed to be carnivores? Are they being cruel when they kill? Should they too become vegetarians? Or should they just die? The raving lunacy of vegan/vegetarian anti-meat eating hysteria is easily shown by the glaring contradictions in logic that it takes to hold such anti-human positions.

In the PETA world, isn't this what the "wild kingdom" should look like:

Black Rhino Standoff

The Gorilla King

Animals Blamed for Seducing Humans?

... the strange background of zoophiles and bestiality in America.



For Slate, Jesse Bering writes:

Now, I’ve written before about the fascinating research underway on the phenomenon of zoophilia and the reported 1 percent of the human population that feels a primary erotic attraction to other species. Yet I’d absolutely no idea about the brutal oppression that not only zoophiles faced in centuries prior, but also the animals themselves that had been involved in their sordid affairs. Today, I think, most people would feel sympathy for an animal that had been violated by a human being, but in the past, they were seen as being just as morally culpable as their sexual partners. And while today’s zoophiles continue to face, as they always have, irreparable stigma for acts of bestiality—along with perhaps some jail time and fines—the “buggers” of the past were burned alive. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this period of our history, however, is the paranoia over human-animal sex. Indeed, a panic over porking pigs grew so intense in Colonial New England that it became, for a time, the “other” witch-hunt.-Read a lot more: In early America, farm animals took the blame for zoophilic sex

Any SE readers out there want to confess?

Sunday Animals

New Sunday feature! You know you love animals (one way or another)!

Which animal is the most successful predator? Could it be, Mr. Fox? Now, I happen to like Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox the best of all foxes! He's a true anarchist socialist (or so it appears to me), and an action oriented anti-capitalist!

As for your more ordinary foxes, the red fox is the most ubiquitous, making its home everywhere in the world (continent wise) but Antarctica and South America. Foxes have always been hated by humans, but I say, you gotta love their spunk (and no, sicko, I don't mean anything nasty and disgusting)!

Dog Becomes Mother To Tiger Cubs

This could be part of Big Caturday, if the big cats weren't so small...

How Did A Spider Get To Be So Rare?

I don't think of bugs as being endangered. I mean, how does it happen? I can see it with mammals (tigers, mountain gorillas), birds (Dodos) and even fish (humans love fish so much they've treated some tasty species like they were American Buffalo, as if there were a never ending supply, no matter how many you kill), but a damn bug?

image by Maarten Bos under Creative Commons
a picture of the horrid creature (Ladybird spider)

The striking bug was on the brink of extinction in the mid 90s when a single colony of just 56 spiders was left in the UK. Since then, conservationists have striven to spread the critter further afield...(Britain’s Rarest Spider Released Back Into Wild)

WTF? Spread the ugly mini-monster "further afield"? If a bug can't make it on its own, doesn't it deserve to go extinct? Isn't human intervention in fact anti-environmental? These wackos would go back to preserve the dinosaurs if they could. What are they, a bunch of god-believers? Preserving God's precious creation? If you know that evolution is real, you also know that extinction of species is part of what it's all about. Get with the program, man, and let the spider die!

Independence Day? No, Puppy Day!

see more dog and puppy pictures

For the Birds

A gaggle of geese float down the Colorado River and onto a giant, man-made wave! Are they surfing or just trying to survive (or maybe a little bit of both)?

Surfing Geese Explained





The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute doubles as a center for troubled cranes, and researchers hope their breeding efforts could help the massive birds avoid extinction.

Rare Cranes Get Second Chance

The Sunday Question: Is It Ethical To Eat Meat?

I ask this question with a plate of sausage (damn you T.C.!) in front of me as I write. Do videos like this have any influence on you, the meat eater? Make you feel guilty? Make you want to give up meat eating? To me, human health should be the number one consideration, and I am not persuaded by the vegan propagandists that human health can be adequately maintained without using animal products for food.

Look, nature was extremely cruel to millions of animal species long before humans came on the scene. Of course, we should treat animals as humanely as we can, but they don't have "rights" in the sense that humans do. Some of the arguments in this video are really directed at factory farming or particular, possibly inhumane practices, but don't really address fundamental issues regarding the ethics of eating animals in general.

Would the vegans eat meat if they were starving and there was nothing else to do except kill a chicken?

Rat Poison Killing Wildlife

Outside Palm Desert, a young bobcat dies mysteriously at a nature preserve. South of Nevada City, a farmer finds an owl dead near his decoy shed. In San Rafael, a red-shouldered hawk bleeds heavily from its mouth and nose before succumbing at an animal care center.

Each of those incidents shares a link to a widely used toxin that is turning up at dangerous levels in wildlife across California: rat poison.


Potent new rat poisons killing California wildlife


But, it's not just California!

The same is true all over. Seventy percent of owls sampled in western Canada had rat poison in their livers. In New York, half of 265 birds of prey tested were positive for poison. In Great Britain, one of every two barn owls tested was contaminated.

"The truth is, it's not just across the state but across the country and across the world," said Seth Riley, a wildlife ecologist with the National Park Service whose research has linked exposure to rat poison to a rare, often fatal form of mange in bobcats in Southern California.

Running Out of Siberian Tigers?

image by Sebastian Niedlich (Grabthar) used under Creative Commons


The Amur tiger, or Siberian tiger as it is also known, once lived across a large portion of northern China, the Korean peninsula, and the southernmost regions of eastern Russia.

During the early 20th Century, the Amur tiger was almost driven to extinction, as expanding human settlements, habitat loss and poaching wiped out this biggest of cats from over 90% of its range.

By the 1940s, just 20 to 30 individuals survived in the wild. The new study has identified that this recent "genetic bottleneck" - when the breeding population of tigers was so critically low - has decimated the Amur tiger gene pool.-Tigers in population crisis

Diving Ducks

Every once in a while, you've got to clear away the toxic waste by posting something, anything.



My favorite comment on this video was this: "I'd dive too if I was being recorded for no reason."


It reminds me, though, of my childhood. Our (that is, my sister and I) parents always tried to do little things to keep us entertained when we were young. One was going out to eat somewhere where the experience was about more than just stuffing our little faces (though I remember enjoying that, too), and we had regular restaurants we would go to. One was a seafood place, with its own little artificial lake (I say lake, because they advertise it as such, it's really more like a giant pond) out back. The pond/lake was occupied by a whole lot of ducks, and a few geese. They had vending machines with duck food, but you could also bring your own bread or whatever. So, sometimes before, but usually after, our meal, we'd head behind the restaurant to feed the ducks. That was our big thrill of the night. If you threw some popcorn (what those vending machines had at first, later switching to some kind of pellets) into the water, the ducks would go diving for it, often several of them at once. This video just reminded of that and brought some of those fond memories back.



What did one duck say to the other when the first one said how nice it was of people to throw them bread? "Yeah, but it's always stale!"


I don't know why feeding ducks seemed to be such a big thing back then. One time we went to visit my aunt and her husband and my two cousins. They lived a ways north of us, so when we got there, when it was time to "do something" and leave their apartment, my aunt grabbed a huge plastic bag full of old bread she'd been saving and off we went in their station wagon to the local lake to "feed the ducks".

Didn't take much to entertain kids in those days.

Animals Can Be Spies Too!

I've always suspected the neighbor's cat was up to no good.

Are You Bear Aware?

I'm gonna throw in a bear fight video too, to make your day really special:





Okay, that was actually less a fight than some kind of a bear frolic in the snow.