Tom McIntyre’s Ophidian Abecedarium (story below with “Gun Alphabet”). Pix, anecdotes, suggestions all encouraged. Right click photo to enlarge… SNAKE ALPHABET–A to Z AspBoomslangCottonmouthDeath AdderEastern Diamondback RattlerFlying SnakeGarter SnakeHognose SnakeIndigo SnakeJapanese Striped SnakeKing SnakeLyre SnakeMamba (Jonathan Hanson’s friend Neels with pet)Night SnakeOlive Sea SnakePythonQueen SnakeRat SnakeSidewinderTaipanUrutuVine SnakeWater MoccasinX (Equis in Spanish, another name for the …
Month: March 2012
Hot Links
A looter has been convicted for stealing Civil War artifacts from the Petersburg battlefield in Virginia. The picture shows cans of minie balls he collected. Reanalysis of a Pleistocene ground sloth bone from a museum in Ohio determined that it showed butcher marks. I believe this is the first evidence for ground sloth butchering in …
Findings
Harper’s Magazine isn’t on my regular reading list, but I ran across this and enjoyed it. Findings By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi Entomologists re-created the chirping of the Jurassic bush cricket, and Russian soil cryologists cultivated a 31,800-year-old plant from a fossilized squirrel burrow in Siberia. It was determined that ancient Egyptians fed snails to dead ibises, …
Gun and Snake Alphabets Project
Tom McIntyre writes: “Here’s a school project, if you’re game (might even work into a blog post). “Enter my great-nephew, age 7. On a recent visit, unbidden, he asked me to create a “Snake Alphabet” (why an alphabet, I’m not sure) for him. So I did, as best as I, a non-herpetologist, could… His task …
Swimming Eagle of Baton Rouge
Everyone needs to see this YouTube video.
Chimney Rock
Prior to picking up the puppies last week, I drove down to Durango, Colorado for the annual meeting of the Colorado Council of Professional Archaeologists where I was presenting a paper. On the way down I took this picture of Chimney Rock, in Archuleta County. There is an important prehistoric Puebloan site on top of …
Two Puppies and a Baby
Puppy pick-up was last Sunday, when we met Curt and Susan Boyd in a shopping mall parking lot in Albuquerque. We couldn’t get over how much they had grown. They did fine in a crate behind the front seat of the Explorer. They slept most of the way back to Denver. We have decided on …
Wyoming
Every spring I try to take one person who has never been to a grouse lek out to see the sage grouse strut. This morning I took Haley out to a lek not far from home. We were driving in about 20 minutes before sunrise, rolling through the lek (which is adjacent to a gravel …
Legal cock fighting
I’ve spent several sunrises this week on local sage grouse leks. It would be a shame to live in such great grouse habitat without going out to witness the activities taking place on these traditional grouse leks (breeding grounds) at this time of year. It’s early in the breeding season, and the cocks are doing …
Ronald Stevens
This is not Bertie Wooster with a Gyr, but the great, innovative English falconer, naturalist, and writer Ronald Stevens, who lived for many years on an estate in Ireland and was the first falconer to understand Gyrs since the death of Colonel Thornton in the 1820’s.With then- young John Morris (my generation) he also bred …