a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Behold the latest addition to my collection of Schleich animals: a reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). In North America, we call them caribou.
Some arctic regions still have huge migrating herds of reindeer. The Taimyr herd of migrating Siberian tundra reindeer (R. t. sibiricus) in Russia is the largest wild reindeer herd in the world, varying between 400,000 and 1,000,000 [from Wikipedia].
It’s National Cat Day. Yes, I know: these are not your garden variety house cats!
BeArizona, a popular wildlife park near the Grand Canyon, adopted these two jaguars in October 2018.
Nacho is the black one (melanistic) and Libre is the spotted one (rosette). They are brothers and will turn six years old on Tuesday, Nov. 3. Fancy that, the same day the presidency of the United States will be clawed back from The Orange Imposter.
Oh, look! A dromedary had landed in my Amazon order of last week (for light bulbs, and a hub ethernet switch).
OK, I confess: I picked the camel and added it to my order. I needed to brighten up the shipment’s mundane content.
It’s Fat Bear week in Katmai National Park in Alaska, and the winner has been announced: Bear 747, nicknamed ‘Jumbo Jet’. Rangers post pictures of the bears online (just a handful of the more than 2,000 in the park), and fans get to cast a vote for Fattest Bear.
These last few weeks bears could gorge themselves one last time before winter sets in, on the salmon swimming upstream to spawn in the Brooks River, in Katmai National Park. Bears can lose up to 40% of their weight while hibernating through winter.
It was a beautiful fall day here with clear blue skies (72 °F/ 22 °C).
This Stellar’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) was in my laurel fence, and hopped onto my garage roof for just long enough, so that I could take a picture of it.
It’s the last day of summer here in the North.
Summer will swing by again next year, of course .. but for now we need the rain and cooler temperatures, so that the fires that still char up the West coast can be put out.
These flowers are from my walk yesterday.
From top to bottom: garden cosmos, English marigold, African daisy and dahlia.
There was rain this morning, and more tonight, and the weather system that swept in from the Pacific, brought in fresh air as well.
Man! it’s great to be able to go outside and breathe clean air.
Here’s a beautiful bird’s eye* view of the canola fields just outside Durbanville, South Africa. Look for Table Mountain and Lion’s Head to its right, in the distance.
*Picture was taken with a DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone.
[Photo from ‘Die Burger’ newspaper, submitted by Dirkie Heydenrych]
‘Oh look! another month’
– Tweeted by @Twitter
Mr Squirrel was sitting on my fence this morning, nibbling on a chunk of fruit from my neighbour’s tree.
There was a little welcome rain this morning, with mild highs later on (70 °F/ 21 °C).
There was nary a cloud in the blue sky today, and at Seattle-Tacoma Airport a high of 94°F (34.5 °C) was recorded.
It’s going to be warm (for Seattle, that is) this week — 87 °F (30.5 °C) on Monday, and slightly cooler on Tuesday.
I went out after sunset tonight to find a spot here in my neighborhood that would enable me to look over the trees for Comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise*).
I found it with the help of my binoculars, and got a somewhat decent look at it. The sky is definitely not an inky black here in the city!
*Neowise stands for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the space telescope from NASA that had discovered it in March.
The comet is on its way back to 715 astronomical units, or AU, from the Sun. (For comparison, Earth orbits at 1 AU, Jupiter at 5 AU, and Neptune at 30 AU.) The comet takes about 6,800 years to make one lap around its long, stretched-out orbit .. so it won’t visit our inner solar system again for many thousands of years.
I walked down 19th Ave after dinner.
A few people were lined up, socially distant, for ice cream at Hello Robin.
Zeeks Pizza had a smattering of diners inside, as did Monsoon, the Vietnamese restaurant.
No Friday night music and dance at the Russian Community Center; its doors were shut.
The No 12 bus rolled by. Its scrolling letters now say ‘Masks Required’— an upgrade from ‘Essential Trips Only’, I guess.
We have had a mild, average summer so far, with temperatures in the high 60s or 70s (18 to 24 °C). The sun still sets after 9 pm .. so even after dinner, there is still lots of time to go for a walk or to water the garden.
In the South and Southwest of the United States a phenomenon called a ‘heat dome*‘ has developed, which will lead to historic high temperatures the next few weeks. It is possible for Phoenix, AZ, to see 120 °F (48 °C).
*A heat dome occurs when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions trap hot ocean air like a lid or cap.
I had to scroll through hundreds of Botswana bird photos to identify this white-crested helmetshrike, that I took a picture of long ago. (Googling ‘White bird with orange-ringed eye’ and several other similar attempts, did not do it).
We call a shrike laksman (say ‘la- ks-mon’) in Afrikaans: literally, executioner. The crimson-breasted shrikes in our garden in South Africa would find frogs or big insects, and impale them on the thorns of a bush before devouring them!
White-crested helmetshrike (Prionops plumatus), Tuli Block, Botswana, Jul. 1988.
A lot more flowers are blooming on my hydrangea this year, compared to last year. They are as always a deep pink (which means that I have neutral or slightly alkaline soil).
A neighbor right around the corner has beautiful blue ones (acidic soil).
I cleaned up some pictures from my old 35 mm negative scan archives.
These were all taken in the nineties in Botswana’s Tuli block — the eastern tip of the country wedged between Zimbabwe in the north and South Africa in the south.
I saw this old news clip from 2016 on Twitter. A 99-year old woman in Miami woke up with a strange animal sleeping on her chest: a kinkajou (Potos flavus).
Luckily, says the veterinarian that took care of the kinkajou, it was a ‘domesticated’ animal. (They did track the owners down. Kinkajous cannot really be domesticated, but the animal was obviously used to humans).
