Beautiful Animals

"I don't wanna go to bed.I wanna play"....


Bed time ! ....




G'night....

osso, Loving that dawg on the cycle. Go, Ace. So I gotta move to Texas and sign up for an old folks' home to get to meet a wallaby? I'm thinking about it.

Thanks, vonny for both videos. It seems to me that the dog is playing ball and the deer is playing dog. Love it. I've seen many of these animal friends. Love them too.

Barry, I'm beside myself with these pachyderm pics, and both of me are plotzing and thudding. Green with envy. Wonderful. Further wonderfulness with the feline mothers and kids. Love that leopard. If my mother had a tail, that might have been me.

HH, SPECtacular. Breathtaking. Amazing starfish photos Thanks, mucho. And recovering nicely from the snow leopard cub thud. OMG.

Love the very sleek look of the fossa.

Vonny, look here. I'm pretty the owl and the pussycat in that video was taken from this one that Roberta post some pages. For a genuine laugh, this is a must see.

http://able2know.org/topic/89445-724#post-5197440

Wolf:

cat channeling its inner Mohammed Ali:



He's really got a great left hook

MJ, OMG. Laughing out loud.

And in this corner, weighing in at 210 pounds, the former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson.

And in this corner, weighing in at ten solid pounds of muscle and fur, Fuzzy, take no prisoners, Feline.

Thanks, MJ, I needed that.

Thanks - it does seem to be the source of the clip I posted. Lovely to see the whole video. Must catch up with all the past posts - some wonderful videos and photos on this thread.

A horse gallops through the snow in Auburn, N.H.

PHOTO BY CHARLES KRUPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS/via sfgate

Beautiful, osso. Thanks mucho.

Andean condor:

A wonderful short video of a snow leopard in China:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/08/rare-footage-snow-leopard-video

and - on the same page of the guardian, some other animal videos to check out.

Loved the snow leopard. Some excellent video clips of animals. I especially liked the one of the dog with the 'wonky' legs - bless it, amazing recovery in such a short period of time.

These photos are from the Guardian's This Week in Wildlife series.

A red kite, Wales. The birds of prey were saved from national extinction by one of the world's longest running protection programmes, and have now been successfully reintroduced to England and Scotland.
Photograph: Drew Buckley/Rex Features




Red deer on Pfänder mountain near Bregenz, Austria
Photograph: Felix Kaestle/EPA




Play-fighting stoats were among the winning images from the Mammal Society photographer of the year competition.
Photograph: Joel Walley/Mammal Society Photographer of the Year 2013




A heron builds a nest in Sujiayingzi, in north-east China's Liaoning province. There are more than 600 heron nests in the village.
Photograph: Bai Tiejun/Corbis




A female humpback whale swims with her calf off the coast of Vava'u Islands, Tonga.
Photograph: Jon Cornforth/Barcroft Media




A Corsac fox in north-west China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region
Photograph: Shen Qiao/Corbis




A male southern elephant seal revels in the wave wash at Gold Harbour, South Georgia, Antarctica.
Photograph: Justin Hofman/Barcroft Media




Migrant birds fly over the Poyang Lake in east China's Jiangxi provincePhotograph: Fu Jianbin/Corbis




Two wild Sumatran elephants eat palm oil leaves in a private palm oil plantation in East Aceh, Indonesia. Critically endangered, less than 3,000 Sumatran elephants remain in the wild. The race to protect the world's rhino, elephant and shark populations from the bloody trade in animal body parts have been at the heart of Cites endangered species talks in Bangkok. Photograph: S. ADITYA/AFP/Getty Images

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/3/8/1362752215765/In-this-photograph-taken--010.jpg


A giant manta ray, photographed 13 miles south of Mirissa, Sri Lanka. With a wingspan of nearly 5 metres, this ray could fetch up to $800 on the black market for its gills alone. At least 3,500 manta ray kills are recorded each year, according the wildlife trade group Traffic, but the real total is likely to be nearer 5,000.
Photograph: Andrew Sutton/WDC




A web-footed gecko in the dry Namib desert of Namibia uses its long tongue to drink the moisture from its own eyes.
Photograph: Martin Harvey/Barcroft Media




Oriental pied hornbills at the Jurong bird park's breeding and research centre in Singapore.
Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP

great pictures, osso, here's a red-tailed hawk for comparison with your red-tailed kite. When Henry David Thoreau was living close to nature in the cabin he built at Walden Pond in the 1840s, there was a railroad running by, it must have been, the west end of the pond, and there were red-tailed hawks living in the trees smack against the railbed. They loved it because they had a clear view of the small animals, mice, voles, and such, skittering across the tracks to get to the woods on the other side, and they'd swoop. I used to work in Concord and rode the commuter rail on the same track line, and the great-great-great-many-times-great grandkids of those hawks are still there, a hundred and fifty years later, still looking for voles, as the train thundered past.

The Tuskegee Airmen, the pioneering African-American army aviators of WWII were called "Red Tails" because they painted the tails of their fighters red for identification, and I suspect because of the association with the hawks, the most common hawks in North America. They flew bomber escort in North Africa, up through Italy, and into Germany, and like the hawks they were supreme fighters. they never lost a single bomber they escorted.

I went to see Sharon Shannon, the superb Irish accordion player tonight at the Somerville Theater, and she was talking about the music video she just made, with her accordion, her dogs, and the beach. Her dogs are all rescue dogs. She says that, if a video goes viral, youtube starts paying royalties to the producers of the video, and any royalties she makes on it are going to go directly and entirely to animal rescue organizations, so if you click on this you get a great soundtrack and a whole lot of cute very happy dogs, and do something worthwhile at the same time. What's not to like?



(you may get a rather strange ad before it--I did--by the doctor who invented the human tonguebrush, to get rid of the 90% of human bad breath due, he says, to bad bacteria on the tongue, who has now invented a prototype of a doggy tonguebrush, to get rid of puppy breath, with a fully-human-edible-too, tonguepaste which dogs love too, which tastes like gravy)

osso, love the hornbills too.

edgar, Lovin' little Killer. Thanks.

osso, Snow leopards are spectacular. Thanks for the chance to see one. And thanks for all the other pics. You're a champ.

MJ, Thanks for the pic and the info. I haven't seen many hawks in the flesh. Nut I like to think about them. An additional large thanks for the music and the dogs. That one had me smiling.

Old English sheepdog:

What's not to love about this one! Wonderfully happy dogs. I'm passing the link on to everyone I can think of, and hope they'll do the same. Great to get some funds for animal rescue.

I see I screwed up showing one of those photos twice (stoats are not whales) and not putting img tags on one. Eleven photos at once tries my uninfinite patience - next time if there are ten or more photos that catch my eye in that series, I'll break them up into two posts and have a cup of coffee in between.