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Hello everyone! I am back from the family farm and ready to get to work blogging. I am sorry that Ferrebeekeeper has lain fallow for the last week (and seen scarce cultivation in the weeks before that) but maybe I can channel vacation energy into some thrilling new posts (and answer some long-neglected comments) before the daily grind reduces me back into an empty husk. Also, although I did not find anyone to take over writing while I was gone, I found some authors who expressed excitement over the idea of some iconoclastic and thought-provoking guest posts…so prepare yourself for that treat!
Speaking of treats, today features a topic which I haven’t written about for a long time: turkeys! When I was a child, I had a special fondness for the great birds, and the noble fowl still delight me (even if I have said almost everything that I can think to say about them). Fortunately when I stepped out of the study and out into the farmyard, I encountered the material for a new turkey post–in the form of new turkeys!
My parents keep a lovely flock of pilgrim geese (along with the remarkable tame wild goose named LG, who just showed up one day). Despite some run-ins with predators and the multitudinous snares of the world, the geese have been flourishing to such a great extent that my mother has been selling goslings to other hobby farmers and poultry enthusiasts. One such enthusiast had his own flock of hand-raised birds, and rather than paying for goslings with the coin of the realm, he obtained his geese through the most ancient custom of barter. Here is what he traded for his goslings: three adorable turkey poults–already grown to graceful near adulthood by the time I made it to the farm.
These turkeys are much smaller than any I have seen so far and are currently about the same size as a large chicken–an extreme contrast with the huge double breasted bronze turkeys which my parents raised five years ago which puffed up to seem like mastiffs or cassowaries (although maybe the surly disposition if the bronzes called such comparisons to mind). I could not ascertain a breed for these little turkeys per se, though my mother thought the farmer mentioned a heritage of red bourbon turkeys in their lineage. Whatever the case they were sweet and affectionate and evinced a particular fondness for my dad, whom they followed around like puppies when he was near.
To my eyes they seemed too pale and too small to be red bourbon turkeys. It is hard to tell in my pictures but they are pale orange buff on top of a French vanilla color. I think of them as the orange creamsicle turkeys, although perhaps they would not appreciate being affiliated with such tasty imagery (it is also possible that they are “buff turkeys” a reconstituted breed meant to approximate a vanished lineage). I am sorry that I obtained limited photos of the three birds, but I promise to follow up with adulthood photos of them later in the year (maybe for November when the internet and society reward turkey-themed content). In the meantime I wish the little birds well and I hope that they survive the foxes and great-horned owls so that we can see what a little creamsicle tom looks like when he puffs up and fans out his feathers. Speaking of which, hopefully one of the turkeys is a tom! it is hard to tell turkey gender until they reach full maturity. It would be sad if they are all hens (although turkeys do have an elegant but shocking cell bio solution for such a contingency).
For our special annual Halloween theme, Ferrebeekeeper usually features a subject which is scary or disquieting. However, since this year has featured an unprecedented amount of scary and disquieting content on its own, we are instead featuring a heartwarming subject which many people tragically misidentify as scary. I am talking about bats, one of my very favorite mammalian orders (and that is really saying something, considering that mammals are a class which includes all-time great orders like Proboscidea and Cetacea).
In subsequent posts we will talk about what bats are (they are near relatives of primates but their close taxonomical relationship to humans is obscured by their alien appearance and by the fact that cladists keep changing their understanding of the precise way we share ancestors). We will also talk about why people are scared of bats and about why bats are wonderful and useful. Additionally, due to this year’s tragic events we will highlight how bats need to be be treated with respect and carefully safeguarded (unless you would like a future with even MORE coronaviruses).
For right now though, let’s start out with a gallery of bat mascots (batscots?). Unfortunately, the fact that bats are a taboo animal to Christians means that, in the west, Batman and Bacardi are practically the only entities that chose the bat as a logo (well, them and the Louisville Bats, a minor league baseball team with a penchant for wordplay).
However there are a whole flock of lesser known (or completely unknown) bat mascots just waiting in the wings 9as it were). Check them out below
Good heavens! now that I look at all the wings and cartoon fangs, I wonder if I should have written about chiropteran biology before venturing out into popular culture. But whatever. There are some pretty endearing bats in all of that (particularly considering our culture’s unhappy relationship with bats as symbols). We will take the bat mascot as a starting point and explore the wonderful world of these amazing and precious animals in subsequent posts. Even if we can’t flit around the neighborhood we will make this a good Halloween… and hopefully we can save some bats too.
A short pictorial post today…but a good one. Behold: baby skunks!
The world seems to little appreciate skunks and gleeful stories of them being crushed or poisoned were common when I was growing up. It strikes me as terribly sad, since skunks are mild-mannered, non-confrontational, and eat all sorts of pests. Also look at them! They are as adorable as kittens, and that is really saying something.
Anyway, this isn’t really supposed to be a public service announcement (although I do hope you will be kind to skunks (although, like all of us placental mammals they can catch rabies, so avoid any that show up in daytime behaving strangely). In the mean time, have a good week and stay healthy!
The giant murder hornet story is fading from the public conscience and maybe that is for the best. I was saddened to hear all sorts of stories of people going berserk and wiping out hives of honeybees and suchlike overreactions (although if anyone attacked any yellowjackets, I maybe wouldn’t shed too many tears over such an outcome–not that yellowjackets are apt to be phased by anyone coming after them with anything less than a flamethrower anyway). But the bigger point here is that bees are our lovable friends and we need to cherish them!
To underline this, here is an annex story to go with all of the little watercolor pictures I painted in the flower garden during quarantine. This is a carpenter bee, one of 500 difficult-to-tell-apart species in the genus Xylocopa. Carpenter bees are gentle bees: Male bees have no stinger and female bees rarely sting anyone unless they are severely provoked. They are called carpenter bees because they like to raise their families within little chambers inside bamboo or timber (which means you may want to watch poorly stored stacks of lumber to keep these guys from boring perfectly round holes in the boards).
Anyway, as I was painting there was a sad buzz and a little thud. A furry black bee fell out of the sky and was lying on one of the bricks in my garden! He lay there dazed for a bit and then tried to take off, but only emitted an arrhythmic hum before keeling over on his side like The Dying Gaul (albeit with far more appendages and eyes). I don’t know how to resuscitate bees, but they are famously needy of energy (and strongly affiliated with a certain sugary natural source of metabolic energy) so I went inside and put some honey on a little stick and put it next to him. The bee weakly crawled over to the honey and eagerly lapped at the sweet amber like an addict, but then after a few more timorous buzzes he just sat there in the sunshine.
I sort of expected to see a brown creeper fly down and eat the tired carpenter bee like a socialite gobbling up a fig wrapped in bacon, however it seems like my scheme worked: an hour later there was a more substantial buzz from the brick and then moments later I saw a pair of carpenter bees slaloming off into the crabapple blossoms overhead! Of course the bee didn’t really do anything for me in this story (aside from pollinating my crops, holding up the ecosystem, and not stinging me) yet the whole incident gave me a sort of happy glow. Here is a blurry picture I took of the little guy. I hope he is ok out there in Brooklyn these days. Maybe I need to get one of those little carpenter bee houses.
My neighbor, the carpenter bee
What with all of the excitement over nine sided Venetian citadel-cities and neutron stars, we have been ignoring a big fuzzy lovable (and carefully-orchestrated) component of contemporary life: mascots. Fortunately, the planners of the upcoming Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics have made no such oversight and today (or yesterday in China?) they unveiled the Olympics mascot for 2022–a roly poly panda named Bing Dwen Dwen (pictured above).
Of course a professional ursologist (which is hopefully someone who studies bears and not just some sort of hissing urologist) might be perplexed by Bing Dwen Dwen’s oblong shape and strangely albescent color. This is not because he is a mutant bear or incorrectly rendered: Bing Dwen Dwen is encased in a full-body carapace of hardened ice (presumably to represent how cold and hard winter sports are). Likewise, the blood-colored heart on his paw is not to remind you that even the most adorable panda can be dangerous (which is true, by the way), but rather to represent the hospitality and bighearted generosity of the People’s Republic of China. Awww! Bing’s face is wreathed in fine lines of pure color which represent racers whipping around a track and advanced digital technology. To quote the official Olympics website, “The newly launched Olympic mascot resembles an astronaut, embracing new technologies for a future with infinite possibilities.”
Oh my goodness, how can it be SO cute?
The Olympics website also generalizes that pandas are deeply loved by people from all over the world…which is surprisingly true, actually. I think China made a good choice by selecting a supremely popular animal which is the exemplary archetype of all things Chinese. Leave the alien metal blobs for confused and divided nations. Let’s give an enthusiastic round of applause to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Jilin University of the Arts, which chose Bing from a vast pantheon of 5800 aspirant mascots. These Olympic mascot contenders were submitted by designers from around the world who hoped to participate in the Winter Olympics without sliding face first down an ice mountain. I wish I had known about the mascot contest: what could be more representative of winter sport than an armless flounder? But I guess I will save that idea for when the winter games are held in Antarctica (which may soon be the only place cold enough for winter sports).
Paraloricaria (image from Paul Louis Oudart – Voyage dans l’Amérique méridionale)
Do you remember all of the catfish which used to be on Ferrebeekeeper? There were underground catfish, coral reef catfish, and giant catfish. We even featured Ancient Egyptian catfish and nightmare vampire catfish that crawl inside people! Sigh…happy times. That obsession with catfish was one of the factors which launched this blog. It is extraordinary how many different species of catfish there are and how wildly diverse this one order of lifeforms is. Catfish have extraordinary senses which humans lack entirely. They can be tender and solicitous parents and they are capable of building structures. Ranging in size from nearly microscopic to enormous, the siluriformes are everywhere except for the deep ocean and Antarctica (and, uh, the sky). Yet, due to human myopia, the first thing I get about catfish on Google is some weird internet mumbo-jumbo about pretending to be somebody else online? What???
Anyway, I am trying to freshen up Ferrebeekeeper, and I am going to fold the “catfish” category into a larger “fish” category (if catfish are so inexhaustibly diverse, just imagine how diverse the larger category of fish is!).
For old times sake, though, we are going to feature a few more posts celebrating the diversity of this enormous vertebrate order (1 out of every twenty species of vertebrates is a catfish!). Today we feature a little gallery of the whip slender armored catfish of the Loricariinae subfamily (aka the “whip catfish”). These small armored catfish live throughout Central America and South America East of the Andes and feed on small invertebrates of the substrate.
Rineloricaria sp. (from bluegrassaquatics.com)
Loricaria cataphracta (Compte rendu de l’expédition de Francis de Castelnau en Amérique du sud)
Apistoloricaria condei (by Hippocampus-Bildarchiv)
Aposturisoma myriodon (Image from PlanetCatfish)
Just look at all of these beauties! It is like wandering through an art show and being continuously surprised at how many stunning variations there are on a single theme.
It is International Cat Day! I should probably feature my beloved pets Sepia & Sumi, but, although I love them with all of my heart and never tire of their astonishing antics and loving personalities, I am not very good at photographing them (in real life, Sumi is the cutest person in the world, but in photos she always just looks like a squiggling black blob with scary needle teeth).
Scary?
So, until I master cat photography, cat bios of my two little friends will have to wait, and today’s post whisks us off instead to the great inclement steppelands of Mongolia and Central Asia. Here in the endless desolation is the habitat of nature’s grumpiest-looking cat, the irascible yet magnificent Pallas’ cat (Otocolobus manul). Pallas’ cats are almost the same size as housecats, however because they are lower to the ground and have incredibly long two-layer coats, they look like comically puffed-up owlcats. The cats live in steppes, deserts, mountains, and scrub forest from Afghanistan through the Hindu Kush and Pakistan up into Russia, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia (China). They are solitary predators living on whatever birds, invertebrates, lizards, rodents, and other small mammals they can catch in their range. Pallas’ cats give birth to litters of 2-6 kittens and they live up to eleven years in captivity.
Like all cats, Pallas’ cats are astonishingly adept predators, but the barrenness of their range, climate change, and habitat loss makes life chancy for even the most gifted hunters. Additionally, humankind has long overexploited the cats for their astonishingly warm fur. The outer fur and the dense inner fur form an airtight insulation around the cats which keep the tiny creatures toasty even in the godforsaken peaks of the Hindu Kush or in Gobi desert winters. Portions of the cats are also used by worthless dumbasses for ineffectual traditional medicine. As you might gather, the species are not exactly doing great, but their range is so large and SO inhospitable that humans haven’t pushed them to the edge of extinction yet.
For a long time, the Prospect Park Zoo had a pair of Pallas’ cats named Nicholas and Alexandra. Nicholas looked pretty sweet–like a big furry gray marshmallow, but Alexandra looked like she ate the devil-cat from “Pet Semetary” for breakfast. She liked to sit in her rocky enclosure and stare through the thick glass at the tamarin enclosure across the corridor. If zoogoers got in her sightline, she would put her ears back (and they were tiny ears to begin with), and hurl herself at the glass hissing and clawing. The effect was sort of like being attacked by Yul Brenner’s demonic disembodied head (if it were fat and covered with fur). I once saw her clambering on the high granite boulders in her habitat and poor Nicholas jumped up to see what she was doing. She hurled him off the 10 foot tall rocks (onto some other sharper, lower rocks) with nary a qualm, like a kid tossing his schoolbag on the floor. Her casual ease with ultra-violence was chilling. For a while there was a video online which featured a solemn cat-loving child asking a Brooklyn zookeeper if Pallas’ cats could be kept as pets and the young zookeeper got a scared look and said “That, um, would be a really bad idea.”
Apparently Pallas’ cats have trouble reproducing in captivity for some reason, but I have always hoped that Alexandra clawed a hole in causality and had kittens. Also, on International Cat Day I like to hold Sepia in my lap as she purrs happily (in my 98 degree bedroom) and imagine the wild Pallas’ cats leaping magestically through the high mountain peaks of the jagged mountains of Central Asia. May it ever be so and may cats of all sorts ever flourish.
The 2018 World Cup continues. We have come, at last, to the semi-final matches and one burning question is on everybody’s mind: “does this thing even have a mascot?” The answer, as it turns out is a resounding “yes”. Exercising uncommon self-restraint, the Russians managed to find a mascot who is not a bear! They didn’t sugarcoat the formidable nature of their vast cold, forested realm though– the mascot of the 2018 Russian Worldcup is a ravening wolf—a wolf wearing special goggles to keep the blood out of his eyes.
The wolf’s name is Zabivaka which means “He who scores goals” or possible “He who accomplishes goals [by means of cunning social media manipulation].” The wolf was the apparently legitimate winner of an apparently legitimate election, and since we are all busy ascertaining what exactly has gone wrong in real elections around the world, we will accept that as a fact (although this wolf beat out a cat and cosmonaut tiger, which hardly seems like the result one would expect from an internet competition).
Clearly, I am poking some fun at Zabivaka (and, um, also at the fact that our national leaders are so pusillanimous and power-hungry that they are happy to let Russia call the shots here in America for less money than Larry Ellison spends on a single dessert), but he really is a cute little wolf. I especially like his gleeful eyes and the wild disheveled (yet naturalistic) look of the fur near his paws. I hope we have some more wolf-mascots soon: he has the fearsome appearance one would expect from a Siberian wolf, yet he is genuinely likable and cuddly too.
Astute observers will note that this post contains almost nothing about actual World Cup soccer (or “football” as it is known in the rest of the world). This is as it should be, since Americans know almost nothing of the sport other than that it takes place with a spherical ball and a great deal of running about. A friend of mine speculates that soccer is slow hockey, but, when we tried to watch a match our attention wondered off before we found out whether this is true (although it snapped back for the thrilling zero-zero finale). Despite this handicap in understanding the game: my predictions from the last post did quite well. Of the 4 teams in the quarterfinals with red uniforms, 3 made it to the semi-finals. Since one of the 4 matches involved two teams with red uniforms pitted against each other, the “reds” had to lose one (likewise there was a match with no red uniforms, which explains how the French “bleus” got the semi-final). I guess I will go on record as saying the winner will wind up being Belgium, since a Belgian friend helped me program my magical online oracle. If this doesn’t sound right to you, you can go to the magical omniscient fish we made and ask it yourself. One of these days we have to see if anybody else has a flounder mascot.
Long time readers know that Ferrebeekeeper has a keen (albeit understated) interest in mascots. They are the heraldic beasts of our corporate times…and, like the present, they represent a peculiar synthesis of what is endearing, banal, zany, and oppressive all wrapped up together. The royalty of the mascot world are Olympics mascots, although admittedly they come from hardscrabble roots and they don’t reign for long (I am sorry I was only two years old when Schneeman came and went at Innsbruck—but maybe we can get in the wayback machine and visit that goofy goofy snowman one of these days). A couple of years ago we blogged about Soohorang the overly-simplified white tiger of Korea, and it was a pleasure to see this bland beast spring into action. What with all of the excitement back in February though, I failed to show you a peak at the future.
As you have probably guessed, this is a long-winded way of introducing the 2020 Olympics mascots. The 2020 summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo, Japan, the epicenter of the land of mascots. Japan has learned a thing or two since they brought us Sento-kun, Nara’s disquieting deer-child of magic and ridicule. For 2020 the designers looked deep into the web and brought us some of the things the internet loves best: cats and nerdy futuristic technology.
Here are the mascots of 2020. They are so new they do not yet have names, but I really like them. The blue tomcat in the suit from that Tom Petty video is the Olympics mascot, and the pink kitty with the retro-future cape and the red eyes is the Paralympics mascot (by the way, congratulations to all of the proud strong athletes of the 2018 Paralympics).
I really like these Tokyo mascots: they are just the right amount of futuristic. Thank goodness we are not replaying the whole Wenlock and Mandeville fiasco. Just looking at these spacecats makes happy eighties synthesizer noises go off inside my head. The cats look really friendly and they have clean bold lines (without being too scaled back like poor Soohoorang, who barely exists because of the unholy collaboration of digital designers and management committees). In fact, these guys look like somebody with some pencils might have sketched them out before reaching for Illustrator. I also like the white, navy, and magenta color combination. It seems like they came from a clean contest instead of one that Vladimir Putin tampered with. Speaking of which, that post was from 2014: how come we didn’t learn anything then?
But back to the future mascots… With their hover suits and feline arrogance, there is an element of the Great Gazoo in both these cats (for young people, the Gazoo was a patronizing gnome from space or the future or something who was always tormenting Fred and Barney during the final post shark-jump seasons of the Flintstones). Additionally, there is a lot of Pokemon and Neopets in these cats. Here are the finalists from which the two winners were selected.
It seems like the Japanese really love cats, and I am right there on the same page with them. White cats wearing spacesuits are particular favorites since we had a family of white cats when I was growing up (although I don’t remember if they wore spacesuits or not). My grandparents had a white cat named Pharaoh who was one of the real characters of my youth. Pharaoh’s sister Lily was one of my favorite cats too and she would sleep on my feet sometimes and purr in my arms when I was 9, although she died far too young, killed by a cruel and indifferent motorist (as will happen to all of us unless they hurry up with robot cars). Oh…I made myself sad. Fortunately these mascot cats will not be let outside before 2020 (plus they are deathless cartoons) and I am excited to learn their crazy names and backstory. Most of all I am excited to see them in Olympics action: 2020 can NOT come soon enough (if you know what I mean). We can put all sorts of disreputable stuffed head branding dummies in the past.
It’s the day before the deadline for filing taxes here in America—an ordeal which only grows more complicated (thanks, Intuit, for lobbying to keep the code as complex as possible). From sea to sea, Americans are staring in baffled confusion at heaps of forms and receipts and rules. Well, probably the organized ones are happily enjoying their calm evenings and successful lives, having filed months ago…but that certainly doesn’t include everyone! Anyway, in an ill-conceived effort to make this deadline more palatable, here are some pictures of adorable baby tapirs!
Tapirs are actually perissodactyls. Their closest relatives are the horses and rhinoceroses. Perissodactyls were once the dominant quadruped grazers of the grasslands and forests of the Miocene and the Oligocene, but in more recent geological periods the odd-toed ungulates have been fading away. We can still catch glimpses of these glory years with pictures of adorable tapirs though.
Ferrebeekeeper has mentioned tapirs before—in connection with the baku, a mysterious and compelling mythological creature said to feast on dreams. I promise to come back and talk about tapirs properly and at length—they are exceedingly interesting survivors or a great age, however today we are focused only on their adorable properties. Look at how cute these dappled babies are (the little tapirs lose their protective dots as they grow into adulthood). Good luck with your own red tapir, er, I mean red tape. We will return to regularly scheduled posts tomorrow…just as soon as I drop some documents in the virtual post-office box.
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