A few nice endangered animals images I found:
CIMG2517
Image by Bakudai
CIMG2535
Image by Bakudai
Showing posts with label Nice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nice. Show all posts
Monday, February 15, 2016
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Nice Pet Animals photos
A few nice pet animals images I found:
Tikki 2-2
Image by Stephanie Booth
Tikki 1-2
Image by Stephanie Booth
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Nice Video Of Animals photos
Check out these video of animals images:
VIDEO - Tierra del Fuego National Park
Image by Jorge Lascar
Tierra del Fuego National Park is a national park on the Argentine part of the island of Tierra del Fuego, within Tierra del Fuego Province in the ecoregion of Patagonic Forest and Altos Andes, a part of the subantarctic forest. Established on October 15, 1960 under the Law 15.554 and expanded in 1966, it was the first shoreline national park to be established in Argentina.
The park has dramatic scenery, with waterfalls, forests, mountains and glaciers. Its 630 km2 (240 sq mi) include parts of the Fagnano and Roca lakes. The Senda Costera (Coastal Path), connecting Ensenada Bay to Lapataia Bay on Lago Roca, is a popular hiking trail within the park. Forests of Antarctic beech, lenga beech and coihue in the lower elevations of the park are home to many animal species. There are 20 species of terrestrial mammals, including the guanaco, Andean Fox, North American Beaver, European Rabbit and muskrat. Among the 90 species of birds are the Kelp Goose, Torrent Duck, Austral Parakeet, Andean Condor, Blackish Oystercatcher, and Magellanic Oystercatcher.
The southernmost national park in the world, it is listed as an IUCN category II park. The park stretches 60 km (37 mi) north from the Beagle Channel along the Chilean border. Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego Province, is 11 km (6.8 mi) from the park. The park can be reached by car or by train. The southern terminus of the Pan-American Highway is located within the park, as is the El Parque station of the End of the World Train [Wikipedia.org]
643 - Leather Texture
Image by Patrick Hoesly
This seamless texture was illustrated by Patrick Hoesly, a Kansas City based illustrator specializing in architectural illustrations and graphic design. This texture is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. If you like this image, please mark it as a favorite and feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!
What is a Seamless Texture / Pattern?
A seamless texture is an special image, where one side of a image exactly matches the opposite side, so that the edges blend into each other when repeated. Seamless textures are used for desktop wallpaper, webpage backgrounds, video games, Photoshop fills and in 3D rendering programs.
How did you make it?
This texture was made using software specially designed to aid in seamless texture creation. Some of the programs I’ve use are Photoshop, Illustrator, Filter Forge, Genetica, Image Synth, Alien Skin, Topaz Labs, Imagelys, and a Wacom tablet.
Want a LARGER version of the texture?
Head over to my blog for information on downloading a bigger version of this texture: Texture LINK
Wide view: Brownie and the packing tape
Image by Ninithedreamer
So you can see what it is she was trying to get past.
I built a barricade to keep Brownie out of my closet. She didn't like it much. Funny video of what was happening: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OIz5GHelnI
Friday, January 8, 2016
Nice Endangered Species Of Animals photos
A few nice endangered species of animals images I found:
Protecting our Wildlife: the Kingfisher
Image by United Nations Photo
A kingfisher in Sanares, India.
The unrestricted exploitation of wildlife has led to the disappearance of many animal species at an alarming rate, destroying earth's biological diversity and upsetting the ecological balance. The problem is particularly acute in developing countries. Scientists estimate that various animal and plant species may be disappearing at the rate of one every day, with thousands more on the verge of extinction. Widely sought for everything from medical research, medicinal supplies, and display in zoos, to satisfying the demands of high fashion, the illegal trade in wildlife is a lucrative business making it difficult to control. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is actively involved in working with Governments, scientists, private organizations and other concerned groups to preserve and protect our endangered species.
Photo ID 316578. 04/1987. Sanares, India. UN Photo/John Isaac. www.unmultimedia.org/photo/
The real Iguana appears!
Image by wallygrom
From Wikipedia -
Iguana is a genus of lizard native to tropical areas of Central and South America and the Caribbean. The genus was first described in 1768 by Austrian naturalist Josephus Nicolaus Laurenti in his book Specimen Medicum, Exhibens Synopsin Reptilium Emendatam cum Experimentis circa Venena. Two species are included in the genus Iguana: the Green Iguana, which is widespread throughout its range and a popular pet, and the Lesser Antillean Iguana, which is endemic to the Lesser Antilles and endangered due to habitat destruction.
The word "iguana" is derived from a Spanish form of the original Taino name for the species "Iwana".
The Green Iguana or Common Iguana (Iguana iguana) is a large, arboreal herbivorous species of lizard of the genus Iguana native to Central and South America. The green iguana ranges over a large geographic area, from southern Brazil and Paraguay to as far north as Mexico and the Caribbean Islands; and in the United States as feral populations in South Florida (including the Florida Keys), Hawaii, and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
A herbivore, it has adapted significantly with regard to locomotion and osmoregulation as a result of its diet. It grows to 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) in length from head to tail, although a few specimens have grown more than 2 metres (6.6 ft) with bodyweights upward of 20 pounds (9.1 kg).
The native range of the Green Iguana extends from southern Mexico to central Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia and the Caribbean; specifically Grenada, Curaçao, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Útila. They have been introduced to Grand Cayman, Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, Hawaii, and the United States Virgin Islands.
Green Iguanas are diurnal, arboreal, and are often found near water. Agile climbers, Iguana iguana can fall up to 50 feet (15 m) and land unhurt (iguanas use their hind leg claws to clasp leaves and branches to break a fall). During cold, wet weather, green iguanas prefer to stay on the ground for greater warmth. When swimming, an iguana remains submerged, letting its four legs hang limply against its side. They propel through the water with powerful tail strokes.
Because of the Green Iguana's popularity in the pet trade and as a food source in Latin America, they are listed on the CITES Appendix II, which means that while they are not an endangered species, "their trade must be controlled so as to not harm the species in the future".
Despite their name, Green Iguanas can come in different colors. In southern countries of their range, such as Peru, green iguanas appear bluish in color with bold black markings. On islands such as Bonaire, Curaçao, Aruba, and Grenada, a Green Iguana's color may range from green to lavender, black, and even pink. Green Iguanas from the western region of Costa Rica are red and animals of the northern ranges, such as Mexico, appear orange. Juvenile Green Iguanas from El Salvador are often bright blue as babies, however they lose this color as they get older.
Iguana iguana possess a row of spines along their backs and along their tails which helps to protect them from predators. Their whip-like tails can be used to deliver painful strikes and like many other lizards, when grabbed by the tail, the iguana can allow it to break, so it can escape and eventually regenerate a new one. In addition, iguanas have well developed dewlaps which helps regulate their body temperature. This dewlap is used in courtships and territorial displays.
Green Iguanas have excellent vision, enabling them to detect shapes and motions at long distances. As Green Iguanas have only a few Rod cells, they have poor vision in low-light conditions. At the same time, they have cells called “double Cone cells” that give them sharp color vision and enable them to see ultraviolet wavelengths. This ability is highly useful when basking so the animal can ensure that it absorbs enough sunlight in the forms of UVA and UVB to produce Vitamin D.
Green Iguanas have a white photosensory organ on the top of their heads called the parietal eye (also called third eye, pineal eye or pineal gland), in contrast to most other lizards, which have lost it. This "eye" does not function the same way as a normal eye does, as it has only a rudimentary retina and lens and cannot form images. It is, however, sensitive to changes in light and dark and can detect movement. This helps the iguana when being stalked by predators from above.
Green Iguanas have very sharp teeth that are capable of shredding leaves and even human skin. These teeth are shaped like a leaf, broad and flat, with serrations on the edge. The similarity of these teeth to those of one of the first dinosaurs discovered led to the dinosaur being named Iguanodon, meaning "iguana-tooth", and the incorrect assumption that it had resembled a gigantic iguana. The teeth are situated on the inner sides of the jawbones which is why they are hard to see in smaller specimens.
Primarily herbivorous, Green Iguanas are presented with a special problem for osmoregulation; plant matter contains more potassium and as it has less nutritional content per gram, more must be eaten to meet metabolic needs. As Green Iguanas are not capable of creating liquid urine more concentrated than their bodily fluids, like birds they excrete nitrogenous wastes as urate salts through a salt gland. As a result, Green iguanas have developed a lateral nasal gland to supplement renal salt secretion by expelling excess potassium and sodium chloride.
Green Iguanas from Guatemala and southern Mexico predominantly have small horns on their snouts between their eyes and their nostrils, whereas others do not. Naturalists once classified these iguanas as a separate subspecies (Iguana iguana rhinolopha); however, this classification has been found to be invalid based on mitochondrial DNA and iguanas with similar nose projections appear randomly in other populations and interbreed freely with those that do not share this trait.
The Green Iguana is a large lizard, typically growing to 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) in length from head to tail. Some specimens have been measured upwards of 2 metres (6.6 ft) with bodyweights greater than 20 pounds (9.1 kg).
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Nice Photos Of Animals photos
Check out these photos of animals images:
Feathered death
Image by tychay
Blogged in The Woodwork: Faking long exposure
Feathered Death
Baker Beach, San Francisco, California
Nikon D3, Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G
Aperture 2.0 (raw fine tuning, spot & patch, straighten, white balance, dodge & burn) nik Color Efex Pro (contrast color range, bi-color user defined, bleach bypass, glamour glow) Photoshop (heal)
1/60sec @ f/18, iso200, 14mm (14mm)
____________________________________________________
Visiting Baker Beach.
While returning to the car, I passed near a seagull looked at me guiltily and then flew away. I was curious what it was looking at and noticed that it was a dead bird whose legs had been caught in some cloth flotsam and had been washed ashore.
This photo was taken handheld in aperture mode which was adjusted to have as much depth of field possible and still be well above the shake limit. The 14mm has no trouble focusing close but the dust on the lens left a lot of blemishes that appeared easily after post processing. I’m going to have to look into a good portable cleaning solution as the surface would take forever to clean with a LensPen. I remembered to bring my GPS with me (with batteries) so the location data is accurate (though I forgot to adjust my camera for daylight savings time so I had to shift things over 3600 seconds).
I used dodge and burn to try to reclaim some dynamic range in the overexposed background (burn) while getting some feather detail in shadow (dodge). The spot & patch algorithm was very poor for dust spots in the sand so I had to heal that (as well as lens dust) in Photoshop.
I used contrast color to get better separation between sand and sea, a bi-color to magnify that effect even more and “postcard” the image without messing with the saturation, and then bleach bypass and glow to create the otherworldly look around the dead bird. Most of these filters were not applied to the bird itself using a negative u-point.
I tested the new dodge and burn tool in Aperture 2.0.1 update. It worked very well, but I’m disappointed that it has to generate a TIFF file in order to work. It’d be nice if it used the RAW file and just stored sidecar files that had the masks. The weird thing is if you edit using an external editor and then edit in Photoshop, it loses the version with your dodge and burn edits. In fact, 2.0.1 and 2.0 before it has introduced many, many bugs involving preview generation and versioning. For instance, if you replace the PSD file or edit a PSD file that you’ve already commented, it will reimport the EXIF and IPTC information and smash all your edits in Aperture. Besides the fact that you can no longer use the PSD-replacement trick (to preserve metadata from external creation tools like PTMac and DxO Optics Pro via PSD generation), it destroys all your IPTC work you might have done before round tripping with Photoshop. That is stupid. Another example is preview generation on expanded canvases with a alpha channel that has been colored in are rendered transparent no matter what in the original and then exported as black. So effectively those parts of the image become unusable! (Workaround: save a copy as PSD with alpha unchecked and than overwrite the current PSD) WTF? I mean this stuff worked in Aperture 1.0. Apple has taken the common-sense way of handling versioning and trashed it in order to make room for the API which isn’t really ready yet. They could have done much better if they asked the service to generate previews and gave it the ability to store sidecars. This would be far more versatile than the current stuff which is no better than Photoshop at this point (though the RAW rendering support will be change that for us DxO Optics Pro users). There is no need to actually save the rendered TIFFs—and why TIFF anyway? Those files are huge. Why not store losslessly compressed JPEG2000s are 1/2 the size of TIFFs for photos).
By the way Aperture 2.0 lost support of JPEG2000. (It was buggy in Aperture 1.0). That’s bad because I save my scanner output as high quality JPEG2000’s since they have 48bit dynamic range and yet are about 1/20 the size of a TIFF with almost no noticeable loss in quality. Support all Quicktime-compatible image formats for import! This is why I buy expensive computers, Apple. (Thumbnails should still be JFIF (JPEG) simply because the algorithm for working with JPEG2000’s seems a bit slow even on a fast computer.)
When I do a lot of Photoshop and Aperture 2.0 work, the hard drive starts swapping in a bad way and won’t stop. Very frustrating. What should have been a 15 minute postprocessing ended up wasting 3 hours because of bugs in Aperture and swap.
Finally, I decided not to provide the full resolution versions of the images and added a border around the image (but no watermark). This should still be good enough, if not better, for use under the Creative Commons in websites and blogs, but if you need a print-quality (larger than postcard size) version of the photo, this way you’ll have to contact me for the image. The border design and information is a rip-off of various parts from my favorite photographers: Kevin Kubota, Tony Sweet, Russ Morris, Ryan Brenizer, Jim Goldstein, and Andrei Zmievski.
Click for original photograph (If you cannot view this, add me to your contacts and I’ll add you to my friends. If you are already a contact of mine then just jet me a message and I'll fix your status.)
My World
Image by EJP Photo
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Nice Animals That Are Extinct photos
Check out these animals that are extinct images:
Waiting for giant sloths on 17th St.
Image by rockcreek
An Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) on the SE corner of Seventeenth and Monroe Streets, NW, 9/1/08. Its fruit probably evolved to be eaten by animals that are now extinct.
Botanic Gardens - Resident Grey Squirrel
Image by infomatique
There are two types of squirrels in Ireland, the red squirrel and the grey squirrel. The red squirrel is native to Ireland while the grey squirrel is native to North America.
The red squirrel (Sciurus Vulgaris) belongs to a large group of mammals called rodents (Rodentia), which includes rats and mice. They can vary hugely in all shades of red and brown to almost black, and their bushy tail at 20cm is nearly as long as their body. This tail helps them to balance as they climb and jump through trees.
A red squirrel is only half the size of a grey squirrel, and the long ear tufts are found only in red squirrels.
Their home (called a drey) is like a large bird’s nest lined with moss and twigs. Baby squirrels (kits) are born between February and August. There may be two litters in a year, with up to six kits in a litter. Few squirrels live beyond six years, due to starvation, disease, predation, or human interference with their habitat.
They do not hibernate, but rely in winter on buried nuts and small seeds.
The grey squirrel is also a rodent. Rodents are one of the most successful groups of mammals, with 1700 species. Most rodents are small, and all have strong sharp front teeth (incisors) which grow throughout the animal’s life. So rodents have to gnaw constantly at their food, which helps keep their teeth at the right length.
The grey squirrel is a good bit larger than a red squirrel. Measuring up to 48cm from nose to tip of tail, and about half a kilogram in weight, there is little difference between males & females. The thick coat is greyish-brown, with a slight reddish tinge in summer. The tail is grey, very long and bushy. The ear tufts are also much less visible than on the red squirrel.
The Grey Squirrel, introduced into Ireland , from North America remains the greatest single threat to current red squirrel populations. Competition from the grey squirrels generally result in the displacement of red squirrels from broadleaved habitat within 15 years.
In Ireland, the current population originates from a few individuals that were introduced into Castleforbes Estate, Co Longford in 1911.
Fortunately, dispersal of grey squirrels in Ireland has been slower than that experienced in England and Wales. This may be attributed to the existence of much smaller areas of broadleaved habitat, and fewer mature hedgerows which act as corridors along which the grey squirrels can travel. Both squirrels compete largely for the same food in a broadleaved woodland. Grey squirrels hold an advantage where food is limited, due to their ability to consume unripe food such as hazelnuts in October. The red squirrel, however, can only ingest ripened nuts, and therefore it is more likely to suffer from food shortages over the winter months. Red squirrel densities tend to be lower than greys, particularly where food shortages exist. This may be a direct result of lower breeding rates when the prevailing conditions are unfavourable. Where food supplies are plentiful, red squirrels appear to breed at similar densities to greys.
Red squirrels are one of the oldest native Irish species, in that they pre-date human history and were common at the end of the ice age when forests covered most of the landscape. However, it is widely believed that the red squirrel became extinct in Ireland in the early 1700's. Tree cover in this period had dwindled from 80% of the land area which occurred after the last ice age 10,000 years ago, to below 2% of the land area. Fragmentation of the remaining broadleaved habitat was probably one of the main reasons for the red squirrel's disappearance. The red squirrel was re-established at ten sites throughout Ireland, between 1815 and 1856, and these were derived from squirrel populations in England. They did very well and became common again in woodlands. However, in recent years, competition from the grey squirrel has pushed them once more down the road towards extinction.
There are 250,000-300,000 grey squirrels in Ireland, but only 50,000-100,000 red squirrels: the red squirrel is disappearing by 1% every year.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Nice Extinct Animals photos
Some cool extinct animals images:
Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis) DDZ_0031
Image by NDomer73
On 8 June 2008, three groups of adult Bighorn rams totaling 18-20 animals were observed grazing along Interstate 84 in the Columbia River Gorge near the John Day dam. This pair preferred isolated green shrubs over ubiquitous dry grass.
Two hundred years ago, Bighorn Sheep were widespread throughout the western United States, Canada, and Northern Mexico. Some estimates placed their population at higher than 2 million. However, by around 1900, hunting, competition from domesticated sheep, and diseases had decreased the population to only several thousand. A program of reintroductions, natural parks, and reduced hunting, together with a decrease in domesticated sheep near the end of World War II, allowed the Bighorn Sheep to make a comeback, though not before Ovis canadensis auduboni, a sub-species that lived on the Black Hills, went extinct.
Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis) DDZ_0088
Image by NDomer73
On 8 June 2008, three groups of adult Bighorn rams totaling 18-20 animals were observed grazing along Interstate 84 in the Columbia River Gorge near the John Day dam. This pair was aware but unfazed from a distance of less than 100 meters.
Two hundred years ago, Bighorn Sheep were widespread throughout the western United States, Canada, and Northern Mexico. Some estimates placed their population at higher than 2 million. However, by around 1900, hunting, competition from domesticated sheep, and diseases had decreased the population to only several thousand. A program of reintroductions, natural parks, and reduced hunting, together with a decrease in domesticated sheep near the end of World War II, allowed the Bighorn Sheep to make a comeback, though not before Ovis canadensis auduboni, a sub-species that lived on the Black Hills, went extinct.
Bighorn Sheep (Ovis canadensis) DDZ_0054
Image by NDomer73
On 8 June 2008, three groups of adult Bighorn rams totaling 18-20 animals were observed grazing along Interstate 84 in the Columbia River Gorge near the John Day dam. These two were aware but unfazed at a range of less than 100 meters.
Two hundred years ago, Bighorn Sheep were widespread throughout the western United States, Canada, and Northern Mexico. Some estimates placed their population at higher than 2 million. However, by around 1900, hunting, competition from domesticated sheep, and diseases had decreased the population to only several thousand. A program of reintroductions, natural parks, and reduced hunting, together with a decrease in domesticated sheep near the end of World War II, allowed the Bighorn Sheep to make a comeback, though not before Ovis canadensis auduboni, a sub-species that lived on the Black Hills, went extinct.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Nice Names For Animals photos
A few nice names for animals images I found:
In Hiding
Image by Ian Sane
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY_2LI1p7bU
Changing things up a bit with this one. My cool and totally awesome niece has worked for the Oregon Zoo since 2004. She was gracious enough to give me a private tour of the area she works which is the Trillium Creek Family Farm located towards the north end of the zoo. After my tour ended I wandered around for a while. It was cold and raining so I was surprised to see a lot of the animals out and in view.
The zoo owns five Caracals: mom, dad, and three babies. Here is dad. His name is Cricket. Not quite as sociable as the rest of the animals Mr. Cricket thought he was well hidden in the very back behind some tall grass and a large rock. Luckily there was an even bigger rock on the outside that I could stand on. I had only one small opening through which I could reach him. Utilizing my 100-400 zoom I waited until he looked at me.
Ain’t he gorgeous?
Crocodile_2
Image by Vassilis Online
www.atticapark.com/zoo-details/5NQO/Nile-crocodile?lang=en
Scientific Name:
Crocodylus niloticus
Comes From:
Most of Africa, West Madagascar.
Food Habits:
They eat more or less anything that moves that is frogs, insects, fish, birds, turtles, small and large mammals.
Info:
This very ferocious crocodile is responsible for more deaths in Africa than venomous snakes. It reaches a size of up to 4,80m.
The female will lay 40 to 70 eggs, and when the young begin to hatch, they chirp to signal the female to dig them out of the nest.
Friday, November 6, 2015
Nice Toy Animals photos
Check out these toy animals images:
Comfy with Toy
Image by Scott Kinmartin
My dog "Kaia" is a 'Huskimo' (Siberian Husky/American Eskimo hybrid---one of a kind!)
Animals!
Image by nateOne
Santa filled Dottie's stocking at Papa and G.G.'s house - so they brought it to her Chirstmas night.
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Nice Animals For Free photos
A few nice animals for free images I found:
Gato
Image by ThiagoMartins
OBRIGADO PELA VISITA!
Por favor, comente a foto. E se gostou, adicione aos seus favoritos no Flickr. (Inscreva-se gratuitamente no Flickr para poder comentar.)
THANKS FOR THE VISIT!
Please, comment the photo. And if you like it, add to your Flickr favorites. (You need to sign up for free to comment.)
Gato
Image by ThiagoMartins
OBRIGADO PELA VISITA!
Por favor, comente a foto. E se gostou, adicione aos seus favoritos no Flickr. (Inscreva-se gratuitamente no Flickr para poder comentar.)
THANKS FOR THE VISIT!
Please, comment the photo. And if you like it, add to your Flickr favorites. (You need to sign up for free to comment.)
Friday, September 25, 2015
Nice Free Animals photos
Some cool free animals images:
Breaking Free
Image by MonsterVinVin
I have no idea what's going on with the dog after 6 seconds it came back to its normal state hehe
Rana libre / Free frog
Image by jlduron
Momento en que dejaba libre la rana que mi esposa encontró en el estudio.
Tuve que utilizar la papelera para transportarla. En el proceso segregó un líquido transparente... eso causa temor xD
Monday, August 24, 2015
Nice Names For Animals photos
Some cool names for animals images:
Wendy, 19
Image by pni
This is one image of six from a series about identities online and in real life, exhibited in 2003 under the name Personatus together with Minna Grönstrand at two locations in Helsinki companied by a website (not available anymore).
The animal figures used in this series are something I originally designed when I was a children's camp counsellor, in the mid 1990's, for the kids to print on t-shirts. The figures became popular also among grown-ups and I just republished them on Redbubble: ANIMAL t-shirts.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Nice Free Animals photos
Check out these free animals images:
Free Cat Pet Catalogue from Japan
Image by sillypucci
Lounging kangaroos
Image by ellenm1
The one in the middle is in a very human pose. The kangaroos are free to move anywhere within their large enclosure. The humans have to keep to the path in the middle.
Baaah Baaaah II
Image by jumpinjimmyjava
Slightly different version.
I used my FREE "My Tent Canvas" texture to create this photo.
What version do you prefer, if indeed any !
www.flickr.com/photos/jimmybrown/3913635792/in/set-721576...
Monday, July 27, 2015
Nice Endangered Species Of Animals photos
Some cool endangered species of animals images:
#5 Short stride: Possible Juvenile Canid Tracks-06/24/08
Image by St.VincentVolunteers
Tracks photographed in the beachfront sand on St. Vincent NWR on 6/24/08. This may be the best visual evidence yet of a fourth consecutive red wolf puppy litter on SVNWR. Photo by USFWS volunteer, Robin Vroegop.
#6 Possible Juvenile Canid Prints-06/24/08
Image by St.VincentVolunteers
Tracks photographed in the beachfront sand on St. Vincent NWR on 6/24/08. May be the best visual evidence yet of a fourth consecutive red wolf puppy litter on SVNWR. Photo by USFWS volunteer, Robin Vroegop.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Nice Endangered Animals photos
Some cool endangered animals images:
Cheetah at Hoedspruit Endangered Species Centre
Image by féileacán
The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is a large-sized feline (family Felidae) inhabiting most of Africa and parts of the Middle East. The cheetah is the only extant member of the genus Acinonyx, most notable for modifications in the species' paws. As such, it is the only felid with non-retractable claws and pads that, by their scope, disallow gripping (therefore cheetah cannot climb vertical trees, although they are generally capable of reaching easily accessible branches). The cheetah, however, achieves by far the fastest land speed of any living animal—between 112 and 120 km/h (70 and 75 mph) in short bursts covering distances up to 500 m (1,600 ft), and has the ability to accelerate from 0 to over 100 km/h (62 mph) in three seconds.
www.hesc.co.za/
Rhino -- an endangered species. Drowned in a dip tank after the farmer was exicted from his farm
Image by Sokwanele - Zimbabwe
Monday, July 13, 2015
Nice Endangered Species Animals photos
A few nice endangered species animals images I found:
Picture 2
Image by ellenm1
See my photo diary of the cub:
Panda Diary 2009
______________
And a photo diary of Zhen Zhen:
Growing up Panda
Picture 35
Image by ellenm1
See my photo diary of the cub:
Panda Diary 2009
______________
And a photo diary of Zhen Zhen:
Growing up Panda
Nice Extinct Animals photos
A few nice extinct animals images I found:
nude hippy nymphs
Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>
“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.
“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.
“No?”
“No – in Japan, many hippie!”
“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.
“That right.”
Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.
“But not in Japan.”
“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”
Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.
“No – about the same size, but different.”
“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.
“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.
“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”
“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”
Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”
“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.
“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”
“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.
“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.
“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.
“Ah!”
“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.
“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”
“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.
“What that animal?” Zen enquired.
“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”
“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.
“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.
“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”
“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.
“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”
“You not see it before?”
“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”
“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.
Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”
“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.
“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”
“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”
“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”
“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.
Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”
The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”
“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.
“What they call ‘global warming’.”
“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”
“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”
“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”
“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”
“Don’t worry. I will.”
The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”
“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”
“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”
“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.
“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”
“A koll?” Zen asked.
“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”
“Like koala?”
“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”
“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”
“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”
“You see one of them but black?”
“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”
“That big?”
“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”
“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.
“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”
“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.
“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”
“Ahh.”
“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.
“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”
“Why not?”
“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.
“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.
“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”
“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”
“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.
“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”
“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.
“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.
“So this quoll not extinct?”
“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”
“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.
“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”
“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.
“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”
“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.
“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”
“Pelt?”
“Skins,” Cameron translated.
“…and the pelts were all female.”
“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”
“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”
“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.
“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”
“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.
A true story
By R. Ayana
Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!
ochre woman 2012
Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>
“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.
“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.
“No?”
“No – in Japan, many hippie!”
“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.
“That right.”
Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.
“But not in Japan.”
“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”
Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.
“No – about the same size, but different.”
“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.
“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.
“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”
“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”
Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”
“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.
“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”
“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.
“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.
“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.
“Ah!”
“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.
“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”
“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.
“What that animal?” Zen enquired.
“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”
“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.
“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.
“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”
“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.
“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”
“You not see it before?”
“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”
“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.
Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”
“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.
“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”
“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”
“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”
“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.
Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”
The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”
“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.
“What they call ‘global warming’.”
“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”
“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”
“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”
“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”
“Don’t worry. I will.”
The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”
“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”
“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”
“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.
“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”
“A koll?” Zen asked.
“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”
“Like koala?”
“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”
“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”
“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”
“You see one of them but black?”
“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”
“That big?”
“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”
“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.
“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”
“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.
“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”
“Ahh.”
“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.
“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”
“Why not?”
“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.
“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.
“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”
“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”
“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.
“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”
“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.
“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.
“So this quoll not extinct?”
“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”
“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.
“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”
“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.
“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”
“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.
“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”
“Pelt?”
“Skins,” Cameron translated.
“…and the pelts were all female.”
“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”
“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”
“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.
“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”
“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.
A true story
By R. Ayana
Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!
entheogenic veterans 2012
Image by mardi grass 2011
Endangered Species: Psychedelic Water 26>
“Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.
“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.
“No?”
“No – in Japan, many hippie!”
“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan there’s a hippie revolution right now,” Ram interrupted.
“That right.”
Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia. In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.
“But not in Japan.”
“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan many young people. Many hippie.”
Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.
“No – about the same size, but different.”
“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.
“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.
“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”
“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”
Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”
“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.
“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”
“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.
“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.
“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.
“Ah!”
“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.
“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”
“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.
“What that animal?” Zen enquired.
“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”
“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.
“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.
“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”
“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.
“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”
“You not see it before?”
“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”
“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.
Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”
“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.
“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”
“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”
“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”
“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.
Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”
The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”
“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.
“What they call ‘global warming’.”
“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”
“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”
“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”
“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”
“Don’t worry. I will.”
The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”
“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”
“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”
“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.
“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”
“A koll?” Zen asked.
“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”
“Like koala?”
“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”
“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”
“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”
“You see one of them but black?”
“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”
“That big?”
“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”
“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.
“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”
“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.
“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”
“Ahh.”
“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.
“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”
“Why not?”
“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.
“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.
“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”
“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”
“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.
“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”
“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.
“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.
“So this quoll not extinct?”
“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”
“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.
“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”
“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.
“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”
“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.
“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City sent a surveyor out to find some. He came back with over sixty pelts…”
“Pelt?”
“Skins,” Cameron translated.
“…and the pelts were all female.”
“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”
“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”
“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.
“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”
“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.
A true story
By R. Ayana
Continues @ centraxis.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/endangered-species-psyc... BE AWARE - THIS LINK LEADS TO IMPLICATE & XPLICIT CONCEPTS & IMAGES!
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Nice Animals Photos photos
Check out these animals photos images:
Not Leaving Anytime Soon
Image by trazomfreak
Behind Blue Eyes
Image by 450Davide
Press 'L' :)
Fresh frogs
Image by Alesa Dam
Coming out of the water for the first time.
