Category Archives: Animals

THE EARTH HAS TURNED

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 THE EARTH HAS TURNED

by

Karen Fayeth (Oh Fair New Mexico)

I suppose it’s time for me, a summer lovin’ sunshine dancin’ kind of a gal, to admit that it is, in fact, winter. Or at least very late Fall.

The weather has turned. It’s getting a bit colder.

And so I present the surest sign of winter. In the same way they yank a startled Punxsutawney Phil from his burrow, here is my own animal based divination tool:

A cat with her butt on the heater vent.

Not just any heater vent, the best vent in the house. It’s a cut out in the bathroom cabinets and the ten pound animal steals all the heat. While taking a shower on a rather cold damp morning, I might wish to enjoy the heat from that vent. That would be a no.

As soon as the heat kicks on, there she’ll be.

It starts out with a simple “oh hey, that’s not bad.” Just the back end getting toasty. It’s simple. Demure.

Once the tail region has achieved critical warmness, then a self-satisfied flop ensues.

I don’t even know what to say at this point. I’m almost offended. (and if I think about the physics of the thing….the warm air is headed straight up Broadway, right? Can that even be comfortable?)

“What?”

Grace. Class. Dignity. None of those words can be used to describe my feline.

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All photos Copyright 2011, Karen Fayeth and subject to the Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons LicensePhotos and text by Karen Fayeth licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

 Photos taken with my brand spankin’ new iPhone 4s and the Camera+ app

Gypsy (the infamous feline) blogs at The Cat’s Meow

THE LAST CARRIER PIGEON

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“This is a fundraising promo video for The Last Passenger Pigeon: Species Extinction and Survival in the 21st Century. This documentary will recount the total destruction by humans of the most abundant bird species in North America, and possibly the world.

2014 will mark the centennial of the birds’ extinction. The film will explore how this event occurred and put it in context of today’s conservation challenges and accelerated species extinctions. We are planning a multi-media event: a television documentary broadcast, the publishing of a book, River of Shadows: The Life and Times of the Passenger Pigeon, by Joel Greenberg, and a national educational outreach campaign known as Project Passenger Pigeon. The outreach component is led by Greenberg and David Blockstein, Senior Scientist at the National Council for Science and the Environment, and a diverse consortium of over 20 American and Canadian institutions, scientists, scholars and authors, with the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum/Chicago Academy of Sciences as the lead sponsoring institution.

The promo includes roughed out scenes such as a storyboard for a live action and computer animation depiction of the pigeons as experienced by John Audubon, preliminary interviews and scenes that begin to tell the story of the pigeon.

For more information contact: dmrazek@sbcglobal.net”  video and narrative courtesy of David Mrazek 

MARTHA

The Last Passenger Pigeon

“In 1857, a bill was brought forth to the Ohio State Legislature seeking protection for the Passenger Pigeon. A Select Committee of the Senate filed a report stating “The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here today and elsewhere tomorrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed from the myriads that are yearly produced.”

Fifty-seven years later, on September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known Passenger Pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo,Cincinnati, Ohio. Her body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was skinned and mounted. Currently, Martha (named after Martha Washington) is in the museum’s archived collection, and not on display.A memorial statue of Martha stands on the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoo.” Wikipedia

Photo credit ~ Public domain photograph (1914)  via Wikipedia