Beautiful Animals

Incredible! Thank you so much for posting this. I've sent it to all of my friends in England - they'll be as delighted as I was when they see it. Wonderful footage of beautiful animals.

What is this guy? or girl, as the case may be?

Over the course of the past week I've taken a hiatus from navel contemplation to observe the activities of two Cicada Killer Wasps who have excavated a nest next to my backyard footpath. Their construction site is located just below my outdoor garage light, so I have been able to watch them just before dawn and again around 11 o'clock at night. They're big suckers.

Here's a news article about the seventeen year return of the cidadas. Can you imagine the racket from a trillion cicadas?!!

http://www.wcnc.com/news/local/With-the-return-of-the-cicadas-comes-the-cicada-killer-wasp-206786301.html

And here is a news clipping from 1996, the previous seventeen year event. I think is offers some interesting perspective. I assume it appeared in an upstate NY paper, the only Saugherties I've ever been to is there, near to Woodstock.



Finally, here's an informative article from the Smithsonian on the killer wasp.

http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/buginfo/cickillr%20wasp.htm

This afternoon I saw both wasps dead outside the entrance to the burrow. So after a short memorial service tomorrow morning, I'll be back to navel gazing, I suppose.

Well, google images says it's a young lemur - but I thought it was a possum (Australian style) like:

I took the challenge!

Images from Thomas' NatGeo post



You really need a 1280 screen to do em justice

I'm not sure - no description with the photograph. Sorry!

Thanks to everybody for their recent posts. Glad to see Thomas here even if his link froze my computer.

Gibbons, the lesser ape--and amazing athletes:

That makes sense (the australian possum). The animal looked familiar but I couldn't quite nail it.

Found a dead moth. Will try to identify it tomorrow:

It looks Mrs Jensen from number 23.

It's kind of weird - a google image search lets you put in the images link it analyses it to find similar, or the same, image.

This is the search I did
https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=lemur&tbm=isch&tbs=simg:CAQSVxpVCxCo1NgEGgIIBAwLELCMpwgaLgosCAESBiAXGxoYGRogqMhZRgc5NjeKd5D6UrY-h-ibq3l2mL9XmbtpevecNAQMCxCOrv4IGgoKCAgBEgQY3_1jiDA&sa=X&ei=h7wJUvffIMapkQW9u4HgCA&ved=0CCcQwg4oAA&biw=1745&bih=865

Ordinarily you get a couple of copies and some similar and not so similar images (these are some times a lot of fun - it looks like the image analysis relies on the balance of colours and maybe some shape matching - so often the images are in the same tone but have nothing else in common).

Anyway for this image you get thousands of exactly the same image in different sizes, it looks like every russian screen saver site in the world is sharing the image - and whoever they stole it from in the first place called it a lemur, so they all do. I still think it's a possum.

Me too.

We had a US possom hang out on our liquidambar tree.. not quite the same, but I picked up on the possomness.

Boy do I have a great caption for this - might submit it to icanhazcheezburger

Here we go!