Category: d*gs

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 14, 2018 • 9:31 am

I’m BAAACK! Thanks to Grania for filling it with some great Hilis (and other posts) in my absence.

We’re returning to our regular readers’ wildlife feature, and I have a reasonable backlog to tide us over. We’ll begin with some doings on Stephen Barnard’s property in Idaho; winter is coming on and it’s migration season, most notably for MALLARDS (Anas platyrhynchos). Here is his latest batch of photos; Stephen’s notes are indented:

I’ve been trying to capture the phenomenal number of mallards migrating through, but I can’t do it justice. There are several hundred visible in the creek this morning (seen from inside my house through windows). At times there have been several thousand in my 1/2 mile stretch of the creek, or resting and feeding in the barley fields, or flying in vast flocks, in starling-like mumurations, seeming for the joy of it. There’s a lot of pair-bonding going on, with the head-bobbing ritual and aggression between pairs. The large, crowded flocks in the creek are very noisy in a squabbling kind of way. Because they’re hunted intensively, they’ll flush at first sight of a person on foot.

JAC: I especially llove the photo below. I wonder if these guys are heading towards a certain Chicago duck who’s rumored to be a great mom.

JAC: When I see photos like this, with hundreds of duck feeding on leftover grain, I have a strong temptation to go there, cover my body with barley, and lie there until I’m covered with ducks. But these ones are easily spooked, so it probably wouldn’t work.

 

Deets and Hitch playing chase. It’s just a game.

The bull elk [Cervus canadensis] is the winner in the herd that inhabits my place.


I think the rabbit is a desert cottontail (Sylvilagus audubonii). He’d better beware of Cecil, the stray cat.

And one more displaying mallard photo, which Stephen titles “Check out my speculum!” I’m pretty sure they do this to impress the hens. I think they do, but I still think James is prettier than this drake (for one thing, his bill is a brighter yellow). 

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 30, 2018 • 7:30 am

Stephen Barnard is back with some lovely photos from Idaho—including mallards! His notes are indented:

First, a couple of photos of some elk (Cervus canadensis) I found in my backyard after I came home from a weekend trip. This group is part of a larger herd of at least 100. It appears to be dominated by one bull. I find the expressions on the faces in the second photo amusing.

The next day, a couple of photos of two bull elk, part of the large herd, sparring and trashing one of my wheel lines. I had to chase them off.

x

A ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), one of two cocks romancing a hen. These are probably stocked birds (for hunting) that wandered onto my place. They don’t survive the winters in good numbers.

A rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) in the net.

MALLARDS!

Migrating mallards [Anas platyrhynchos] by the thousands, finding refuge in Loving Creek. They’re hunted intensively, so they’re very spooky and they flush when I get out and about in the morning. They fly onto neighboring properties where Elmer-Fudd-like hunters are lying in wait in their blinds. Sunday mornings are especially loud. Shouldn’t these people be in church? 🙂


In the morning (not every morning, but a few) I’ll see thousands of mallards in the sky over the barley fields, looking for a safe place to land. Quite a sight. They come in waves from Canada and Alaska. Mallards are doing well.

My dogs, Deets and Hitch, used to be gun shy, but they’re gotten used to it. Here’s a lagniappe photo of Hitch on the run.

And a lovely landscape:

 

Readers’ wildlife photograph

September 20, 2018 • 7:30 am

Posting may be light today as I have some science to do (working on my last research paper!), and we’ll have but one wildlife photo, an astronomy photo by reader Tim Anderson. But I love the astronomy shots, and this is a good one. Tim’s notes:

This is a picture of the Sculptor Galaxy, NGC 253, also known as the Silver Coin Galaxy. It was observed by Caroline Herschel in 1783. It is likely to merge with our galaxy, the Milky Way, at some time in the future.
Note that Brian Cox’s cat, the calico Herschel, is named after Caroline Herschel.
Tim also added a picture of his pet:

Herewith a picture of Angus the Big Dog (he is now the live-in mate of Paddy the Magnificent Hound, a picture of whom you have published previously). Angus likes knitting and flower arranging (aficionados of Australian movies may recognise the reference…)

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

August 8, 2018 • 7:30 am

Rick Longworth sent a lovely video of hummingbird interactions at his feeder. Dextrous little buggers!

Black Chinned hummingbirds(Archilochus alexandri) feud around the feeder. I was unable to see what was going on between the rivals, so I used several levels of slow motion and freeze frame. The feud takes place in 4 parts:

1. Staying alert for incoming – 2 O’clock high.
2. Sharing. Sort of.
3. Fancy footwork.
4. touché.

Music: NZSM Guitar Quartet Carmen Suite on Vimeo.

And some photos by Mark Richardson:

Here are some wildlife photos that I’ve collected from this summer.

The first set of 6 is a family of barn swallows (I think, readers?)  Hirundo rustica. I knew there was a nest in one of our eaves because I could hear them rustling throughout the summer. Then we heard the chicks constant clamor after they hatched and were being fed. Well, this afternoon, I saw two fledglings out on our roof being fed by their parents. Every once in a while, the fledglings would fly around the house exercising their wings, but apparently they can’t feed themselves yet.

I took this sequence on  “continuous shot” mode (3 frames per second). The action photographed here in the first 5 photos took about 2 seconds.

The first 5 photos are a feeding sequence. The 6th shot is a stand-alone action shot that I thought was cool. The last shot is what made me think they are barn swallows because of the blue back…plus the fledglings’ rust colored chins and breasts were another indicator.

Action shot:

The next grouping is of the nest of a mud dauber wasp. My wife noticed the nest and asked if I could please remove it. I would have opted to keep it, but it was right next to the front door on a window shutter. I decided the best way to remove it (I didn’t want to use poison) was just to use a flat bladed shovel. Well, with one upward scrape, I removed most of the nest; but to my surprise and shock (I jumped back instantly) all these “things” fell out of it. I thought they were tiny wasps (why I jumped), but upon closer inspection they were spiders!

The strange thing is they were all the same species of spider…small orb weavers. Their flesh was soft and cool and not desiccated, but they weren’t alive as far as I could tell. I read up on this type of wasp, and as I surmised, they fill individual tubes with paralyzed spiders and lay one egg in each tube for their larvae’s food. The larvae eat the nutritious spiders, pupate, overwinter and emerge in the spring. Hopefully this dauber will build a nest in another location (I felt bad about destroying her nest); it’s obviously a lot of work, all done by a single female. I never saw the wasp, but my wife did. After looking through some google images she identified it as the yellow and black mud dauber,  Sceliphron caementarium. 

The second photo is one I nabbed from wiki. The first photo is the nest, most of it removed. You can see the outline of individual larvae tubes inside the mud walls, plus some spiders spilling out of the top tube. The top part is the nest still intact; it was basically a rectangular mud blob.
The third shot shows three of the interior mud tubes, one of them filled with the spiders. Creepy and cool…there were hundreds of paralyzed spiders in that nest! Evolution truly is the greatest show on earth.

The last two photos were taken by a wildlife camera I bought after being inspired by a reader’s wildlife camera shots on WEIT. They are both coyotes, Canis latrans. I noticed a clearing where a family was hanging out. The proud parents had three pups. I placed the camera along what I thought was an animal trail near where the coyote family was hanging out. After a couple days, I checked the card, and these are the two best shots I got. Both looking right at the camera! I don’t know how they noticed the camera, but obviously they did. Human smell? Acute observation? The first photo is of the mom I think (skinny and smaller than the other parent), the second is one of their curious pups. Even coyotes are cute as pups!

Paper of the month: Postmodernists on “doggy bio-politics” as exemplified by Obama’s Water Dog Bo

April 13, 2018 • 2:15 pm

You know what? I don’t care if the paper below was published is a predatory journal, or an obscure journal or whatever: it still gives scholars the opportunity go cite a publication on their curriculum vitae, thereby advancing their careers.

I have no idea how Organization rates among scholars, but Wikipedia does suggest that it doesn’t rate badly, having a decent impact factor:

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Scopus, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2013 impact factor is 2.354, ranking it 36th out of 172 journals in the category “Management”.

Click on the screenshot to go to the pdf. The subject is what can be trawled, via postmodernist jouer, from Obama’s pet water dog Bo. The abstract gives you a taste of the rest:

I struggled hard with excerpts of this paper, trying to find something in it worth saying or hearing, but what i got was this (an excerpt; my emphasis):

The direct interventions on Bo, rather than on the individual citizen, exemplifies how the rules of the game for self-crafting are reconfigured with both normative framings and an opening up of a less confined space, wherein individuals are activated to engage in dog-infused ethical decision making to be channelled anew (cf. Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013). Much akin to how Skinner (2013) describes the self-ethical process of becoming a ‘good farmer’ via the construction of the ‘organic’ within a community, but in our case without as direct enterprising bents. That is, Bo is not mainly offering us to become better at economic cost benefit analyses on how to ‘invest’ in certain practices to optimise ourselves as human capital (du Gay, 1996; Weiskopf and Munro, 2012), neither is Bo teamed up with instrumental self-quantification measures to regulate our intentions to enhance biospheric vitality (Chandler in Chandler and Reid, 2016: 27–49). Rather, Bo’s presence in the White House, in the media and in political debates extends the biopolitical self-regulative agenda to what we conceptualise as ‘doggy-biopolitics’, a power exercised in relation to the optimisation of dogs en masse.

Bo is an especially powerful instrument of doggy-biopolitics as he can fulfil the role of a humanlike person with a close personal relationship with the members of the First Family, whereas he can also be biologised when characteristics traditionally associated with dogs are needed: liveliness, loyalty and honesty. In contrast to previous First Dogs, Bo is not merely invoked as a rhetorical resource used to meet arguments in a conflict, but is construed as a person with a voice and feelings of his own, invoked by alternative voices to shape and scrutinise presidential subjectivity. As dogs are generally thought to be honest by nature, Bo can be said to be the perfect litmus test for truth.

All I can glean from this is that Bo alternated between the roles of “dog” and “anthropomorphized pet”, and that’s about it. The rest of the paper, which goes along similar lines, is at your disposal—and I suggest that literally.

When I read this, the thought came to mind, “Why, this obscurantist nonsense is just like religion!” And then I realized that that was indeed true: postmodernism is a sort of religion. It has its gods (Foucault, Derrida) whose behavior and scriptures are sacred;it cares not a whit for what is true, but rather is concerned with a twisted form of tribal bonding; it takes up space and wastes people’s time; it makes decent careers for people who are unsuited to do anything meaningful (viz., theologians), and it engages in arrant obscurantism, using a special and tortuous jargon to confound regular people. Indeed, its purpose is not to be understood by us regular Joes and Jills, but to speak to others in the faith, and, by saying the right things, join the tribe and “construct” a career.

Those of you who have the stomach to read the whole paper, and find its nugget of truth—if there is one—by all means weigh in below. But my quick reading convinces me that this is just like Feminist Glaciologyor racist white Pilates.

Well, at least the paper’s figures have pictures of Bo, so you can see a dog if you like canids. Here’s Figure 5:

h/t: Maarten, who wrote of the journal: “My dog could get published in there, and I don’t even have one!”

He added, in his cover email:

So when Bo Obama was fetching a football, the canine was in fact complicit in an evil plot to entrench the Foucauldian hegemony of the neo-liberal order. Or something to that effect.
Have fun!

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

April 10, 2018 • 7:30 am

Stephen Barnard is back with some nice pictures from Idaho—and a video.  His captions and descriptions are indented:

Cinnamon Teal, Spatula cyanoptera:

Hairy Woodpecker, Leuconotopicus villosus:

Sandhill Crane, Antigone canadensis:

Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus), king of the roost, and about as yellow as nature gets:

Finally, a HUGE bumblebee that landed on the stripping skirt of my boat while I was fishing. Species unknown. (It was really big.):

 

A pair of American kestrels (Falco sparverius) are about to adopt a nestbox Stephen built for them. First, a video he took of one of them:

This is the male. He’s calling back and forth with the beckoning female, becoming increasingly aroused until flying off to mate.

At least one reader asked how the kestrel nesting box looked.

This is on the back of the garage. The nest box is east-facing, which is ideal for morning photography. They perch in a bare, dead tree. It’s perfect. I have a feeling that the female is in the box. It will take more observation to be sure.

They seem to be getting more tolerant of me.

Deets and Hitch: “The chasing game”:

A Calvinist d*g

March 4, 2018 • 2:30 pm

From the Babylon Bee (click on screenshot), which appears to be an underappreciated Onion-like site:

The text:

SEATTLE, WA—Responding to his owner Matt affectionately calling him a “good boy” for fetching a stick, local Calvinist canine Rupert reportedly reminded him that “according to the Scriptures, nobody is a good boy.”

“We’ve been over this, Matt. We’re all corrupted—every one of us,” Rupert reportedly said to his owner after stopping mid-stride to address the glaring theological error. “How can you call me a good boy when we have all been marred by the effects of sin?”

According to witnesses, the dog went on to lecture his owner for several minutes, stressing how easy it is to forget who we really are in light of God’s blinding holiness and our desperately fallen nature.

“Do not call me a good boy—I am a depraved wretch,” he added before picking up his stick and continuing to play.

Two other chuckles with links (there are many pieces at the site, with quite a few satirizing religion):

h/t: Stephen