Beautiful Animals

Your cat photos are the best!!!

Outch!! Ohhhhhhh!!! That hurts!!!!!!!!

G'night.

Bigfoot Lives! Look at the size of that paw. And look at that cute little baby. Thanks, Barry, and g'night to you.

Purple striped jellyfish:

You have truly outdone yourself in the cuteness department with this picture.

He almost looks like a hot air balloon! Gorgeous.

Great white shark breaching:

Black mamba showing how it got its name:

Good morning Roberta.



By singing opera??

By hiding under green bushes.....

I can't account for the mamba part, but the black part doesn't come from the color of the snake (it ain't black) but from the color of the inside of its mouth--coal black.

The fastest animal on the planet--peregrine falcon:

Cheetah (my great uncle Louie on my mother's side)--the fastest land animal:

When my cat died, a friend adopted a wolf for me through a wildlife organization. This is my adopted son Marty, a gray wolf. He never calls; he never writes. Kids!

Technically the Peregrine is the fastest falling living object

The fastest bird in flapping (self powered) flight is the White-Throated Needle-Tailed Swift at 107 MPH.

Not so. Falcons have unbelievable levelling-off into horizontal-flight capability from vertical descent and can re-arrange their physical configuration (muscles, feathers, everything) to reach speeds of well over 250kph. Flapping wings may look more elegant but aren't aerodynamically efficient for propulsion - unless done at extremely high speeds, eg in bumblebees, or some helicopters and VToL aircraft. Look:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/80633432/
Starting from the other end of the sequence - why did you think falcons always get a hot meal, but swifts and swallows have to eat worms?!

Just because a falcon can come out of a stoop into level flight and briefly flap its wings doesn't mean it's powering itself along at that speed. In level flight without access to stoop velocity as a starting point, the swift is the fastest.

That's like saying athletes going for a high jump must be standing right next to the bars and aren't allowed to get a running start - and your post made no mention of disallowing prior (self-propelled) acceleration. Falcons have been clocked at over 90mph in continuous horizontal flight; nobody knows their upper limit. There's a falconer showing off her trainees this weekend at the Staten Island Zoo (near Manhattan):

I'm just reporting the facts. If a Peregrine decided to chase a swift for lunch, but it wasn't allowed to stoop on it and had to chase it from behind, the Peregrine would be going home hungry (even if both birds were forced into straight line flight).