Readers’s wildlife photos (and a video)

December 26, 2018 • 7:30 am

Reader Terry Platt sent a short movie of a big comet:

As my interests include astrophotography, I thought that you might like the attached movie of Comet Wirtanen that I took on the night of December 22nd. The comet is currently making a close pass of the Earth and, despite a full moon, it was quite easy to image. The movie shows it passing amongst the stars of Auriga and consists of 50 exposures of 200 seconds each with a Starlight Xpress SX-814 CCD camera and a Televue NP101 refractor.

As you say, the comet is essentially tailless – just a glowing ‘coma’. I’m sure that a faint gas tail would be visible under dark sky conditions, but there was just too much moonlight at the time. The comet nucleus is very small and so a bright tail is unlikely to form. This comet was the original target for the ‘Rosetta’ space mission, but launch delays forced a change to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko .

Reader Dan Morrison sent his photo of passel of mallards from Canada, asking me, “Do you know any of these ducks?” I couldn’t say “yes”. The data: “Rithet’s Bog, Victoria, BC.  Xmas eve afternoon.” Apparently that place is always loaded with mallards. No, this isn’t PhotoShopped. 

Reader Will Savage from England sent two photos; his words are indented:

I found this ladybird (ladybug for you in the US) trying to hibernate in the flowers of a wild hellebore (Helleborus foetidus). I think it’s Coccinella septempunctata, the seven-spot ladybird, which is the commonest species here in England. For an idea of scale, the adults are between 7 mm and 10 mm long. This was photographed yesterday morning [Dec. 22], when it had been raining for some time and, as you can see, the poor creature was very wet!

I’m not sure if this second photo comes within your definition of wildlife photos, though what’s here is certainly both alive and wild. These are lichens,   composite organisms formed by algae or cyanobacteria living with filaments of multiple fungi in a symbiotic relationship. I don’t know the species (there are several in this photo), but you can see some of the different shapes and forms they assume. Lichens grow extremely slowly, maybe only one or two millimetres per year, and can live for many decades, even centuries. These were found yesterday, growing on the branches of an old apple tree a few miles from here. For an idea of scale, the area covered by the photo is about 1.5 inches across.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

December 26, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Wednesday: December 26, 2018, and the second day of The Six Days of Coynezaa. I hope everyone got some good presents and nice noms. It’s National Candy Cane Day in the U.S. and St. Stephen’s Day—a public holiday in Alsace, Austria, Catalonia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland. In the UK it’s Boxing Day, and I still don’t know how it got that name. It’s also a Bank Holiday, which also is a bit mysterious. Are banks government institutions in the UK? Those are Big Questions, and so I’ll leave them to Templeton. But Boxing Day is of importance to one special group:

Not much happened in history today. On Boxing Day of 1860, the first “inter-club English association football match” took place, with Hallam playing Sheffield in Sheffield. Curiously, the Association Football page of Wikipedia doesn’t mention this.  Exactly two years later, the biggest mass execution in U.S. history took place in Manakoto, Minnesota, where 38 Native Americans of the Dakota tribe were hung. Wikipedia reports, “The mass execution was performed publicly on a single scaffold platform. After regimental surgeons pronounced the prisoners dead, they were buried en masse in a trench in the sand of the riverbank. Before they were buried, an unknown person nicknamed “Dr. Sheardown” possibly removed some of the prisoners’ skin. Small boxes purportedly containing the skin later were sold in Mankato.”

On this day in 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced the isolation of radium.  Both won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this and related work in 1903.  Marie Curie is the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice, and one of only two people to have won it twice in different fields (hers was physics and chemistry). Can you name the other two-field winner? On this day in 1919, Babe Ruth, playing for the Boston Red sox, was sold to the New York Yankees; this produced the “Curse of the Bambino” legend, which supposedly blames this ill-advised trade on the fact that the Red Sox did not win a World Series until 2004.

Here’s Marie Curie in her lab. She was born in Poland but moved to France at age 24. The element “polonium,” which she discovered, is named after her native country.

On December 26, 1963, the two Beatles songs “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” were released in the U.S.; it was the beginning of the worldwide frenzy of Beatlemania, vestiges of which still remain in folks like me. Finally, on this day in 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union dissolved the Soviet Union, bringing an end to the Cold War (it seems to have revived a bit).

Notables born on this day include Mary Somerville (1780), Charles Babbage (1791), Henry Miller (1891), Mao Zedong (1893), Steve Allen (1921), Abdul “Duke Fakir of the Four Tops (1935), Phil Spector (1939, in a prison hospital for murder, and in very bad health) and David Sedaris (1956).

Those who died on this day include Frederic Remington (1909), Gorgeous George (1963), Harry S. Truman (1972), Jack Benny (1996), and JonBenét Ramsey (1996, murdered at age 6; crime still unsolved).

Here’s one of Remington’s paintings of the Old West: “The Scout: Friends or Enemies”:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I’m told that “Hili just wants to talk and she doesn’t know what about. She doesn’t want to admit to it, either, so she is subtly throwing the ball to Cyrus.”

Hili: All this has to be discussed.
Cyrus: What?
Hili: Everything.
In Polish:
Hili: Trzeba to wszystko przedyskutować.
Cyrus: Co?
Hili: Wszystko.

A cat cartoon from reader Laurie:

And a d*g cartoon (sort of) from Diana MacPherson:

Tweets from Matthew:

This is stupendous! Ah, technology!

Adam Calhoun has posted tweets showing that animals have emotions and weird cognitive abilities. Here are two:

This dude was nearly lunch! Notice how the orca follows as he’s being towed—like a fish following bait!

DO NOT DO THIS! The guy is a jerk.

Tweets from Grania. How can you not smile at this one!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1076498230089838592

If I showed this one before, well, here it is again:

Another one to make you grin (though I hear koalas can bite):

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1075553609159462913

Orchestra mishap!

Blue penguin rehab:

https://twitter.com/invisibleman_17/status/1074946797003517952

NBC News propagates the Jesus myth

December 25, 2018 • 5:51 pm

Just a note about how the news treats religious superstition. My regular evening newscast on NBC was reporting the Christmas festivities around the world (celebrations in Israel, the Queen’s Jesus message, and the Pope’s annual homily), when it described the festivities in Bethlehem as being “in the birthplace of Jesus.”

Not the “traditional birthplace of Jesus”, not “the place where Christians believe Jesus was born,” not “the birthplace of a person on whom, according to Christianity, the Jesus story is based.” Nope: NBC bought the whole story, hook, line, and stinker.

This is the way that religious mythology gets normalized—by being broadcast as fact by the national news.

Merry Xmas (where “X” stands for a person whose existence is contested).

Website stuff

December 25, 2018 • 12:00 pm

Even Professor Ceiling Cat must take a break sometimes, and so I’m celebrating the first day of Coynezaa by taking most of the day off.  I’ll put up a few stats on the website as I may not be posting on December 31 or January 1, the traditional time to review the data. I will note that January 14 will be the tenth anniversary of the site; it was on that day in 2009 that I made a lame post saying something like “Buy my book.”

Below: posts and comments (average: about 5.2 posts per day and 50.11 comments per post). I once resolved to shut down the site if the comments ever dropped below 50 per post, but I don’t think I’ll stick to that.  I calculate that, if traffic stays about the same, we should hit one million comments in about five months, and maybe there will be a big contest for that millionth comment.

There are over 1300 draft posts, most of which will never see the light although I intended to put them up. Road to hell and all. . .

More subscribers than I ever dreamed of! (BTW, it’s not a “blog”!)

Other matters: I’ll be gone for three weeks starting on the fourth day of Coynezaa, and will be celebrating its culmination, my birthday, in Hawaii. If you have wildlife pictures to send, please hold onto them until January 20.  There’s lots to see in Hawaii (I’ll be on Oahu), and tons of good food, so expect some travel + nom posts.

Trips in the offing for 2019: Belgium, perhaps England, and ANTARCTICA! There will be other destinations not yet decided.

Happy holidays, and don’t forget to send in your entry to the Beautiful Bird Contest.

Christmas kitties

December 25, 2018 • 10:30 am

Merry Christmas! Here are a few felids to brighten your day, though you should be ignoring this site and celebrating, eating, giving presents, and the like.

The best way to cross-country ski:

Andy Warhol’s rendition of a Christmas cat:

A festive Festivus tree:

 

Buzzfeed has “19 cats in Christmas trees whose prey is exclusively ornaments and string lights“. Here are a few photos:

 

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Here’s a heartwarming story from LoveMeow. It’s about a 4½ year old boy named Tyson, whose family home burned down during the recent wildfires around Paradise, California. Their two beloved cats, Optimus (a black cat) and Bumblebee (a tabby), went missing after the fire.

Tyson wrote a letter to Santa asking for a leash and collar in case his beloved cats were found, so that they could stray no longer.

A feline rescue center picked up the slack, and, after more than a month, trapped both of the cats near the burned home. They were returned to their staff, and once again Tyson can cuddle his beloved moggies.

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Finally, here’s the story of Jólakötturinn, The Icelandic Yule Cat. I didn’t know about this monstrous felid, but Wikipedia and National Geographic give details. From Wikipedia:

The Yule Cat (Icelandic: Jólakötturinn) is a monster from Icelandic folklore, a huge and vicious cat said to lurk about the snowy countryside during Christmas time and eat people who have not received any new clothes to wear before Christmas Eve. The Yule Cat has become associated with other figures from Icelandic folklore as the house pet of the giantess Grýla and her sons, the Yule Lads.

The threat of being eaten by the Yule Cat was used by farmers as an incentive for their workers to finish processing the autumn wool before Christmas. The ones who took part in the work would be rewarded with new clothes, but those who did not would get nothing and thus would be preyed upon by the monstrous cat. The cat has alternatively been interpreted as merely eating away the food of ones without new clothes during Christmas feasts.  The perception of the Yule Cat as a man-eating beast was partly popularized by the poet Jóhannes úr Kötlum in his poem Jólakötturinn.

There is a short cartoon about the Yule Cat, created by Justin East with music by Danny Elfman

And here’s that cartoon:

You can see a bunch of pictures of Jólakötturinn here.

h/t: Tom, Jane