Readers’ wildlife photographs

February 20, 2016 • 7:45 am
First, we’ll finish up the photos sent by reader John Pears (the first batch was yesterday). And we have LIONS (Leo panthera)!

I recently returned from South Africa having spent four weeks touring the country and taking photographs of anything and everything! SA is a familiar county to me as I lived there for a few years; and it is a fantastic country with spectacular scenery, great people and a fantastic variety of wildlife

The first part of our trip involved visiting friends, who kindly arranged for us to spend a few days in a private game lodge in the Timbavati Game Reserve. This reserve is contiguous to and has open borders with the Kruger National Park (the largest in Africa) which, on its own, is 20,000 square km (7,500 sq miles). Timbavati is home to and renowned for its very rare white lion (Panthera leo). Our guide told us there are only 4 known to exist in the wild, two cubs having recently been killed.

Wikipedia says the following:-

‘Their white color is caused by a recessive trait derived from a less-severe mutation in the same gene that causes albinism, distinct from the gene responsible for white tigers. They vary from blonde to near-white. This coloration does not appear to disadvantage their survival.’

We were very, very lucky because on our first game drive the evening that we arrived, we found a white lion. Unfortunately it was a bit shy but you can clearly see its distinctive white colouration against the more normal variety.

1 Timbavati Lion

And “regular” lions (if there is such a thing!):

2 Timbavati Lion

3 Timbavati Lion

4 Timbavati Lion

5 Timbavati Lion

6 Timbavati Lion

We haven’t heard from reader Diana MacPherson for a while (perhaps she’s snowed in in Ontario), but here are three recent contributions:
Here are some bird pictures. Notice that the chickadee is closing his eyes as he grabs the fat. There is also snow flying off him.
Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) Closes Eyes Getting Some Fat

Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) Closes Eyes Gettin

Dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis) — I like how he’s holding his foot.

Notice the cute foot

I thought I’d throw in an aquarium picture because it turned out well. I recently fought a battle with cloudy water & fixed it with a really nice UV sterilizer. I think I had brought in a pathogen as well as I had some fish loss but the UV sterilizer fixed that too. Here is one of my Black Tetra (Gymnocorymbus ternetzi) a fish originally from the river basins of South America.

Black Tetra (Gymnocorymbus ternetzi)

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 20, 2016 • 6:30 am

I’m off tomorrow, and until March 2 I will be writing only sporadically. Grania has promised to do a few posts, so bear with us. It’s February 20 (don’t forget that it’s a leap year), and on this day in 1816, Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” premiered in Rome. In 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in Rome, in 1877 Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, and, in 1962, John Glenn became the first astronaut to orbit the Earth, an event I remember well. Births on this day included Louis Kahn (1901), Ansel Adams (1902), Robert Altman (1925), Walter Becker of Steely Dan (1950), and Cindy Crawford (1966), who turns 50 today. Those who died on this day include Frederick Douglass (1895), Hunter Thompson (2005), and Alexander Haig (2010). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is musing about prayer while sitting on Sarah’s lap:

Hili: Cats on human’s knees have different thoughts than when humans are on their own knees.
A: I suspect you’re right.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
F
In Polish:
Hili: Koty na kolanach mają inny rodzaj refleksji niż ludzie na kolanach.
Ja: Podejrzewam, że masz rację.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
And a bonus: a Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens), sent by Anne-Marie Cournoyer, whose dog turned it up (but didn’t hurt it):
p_20040926_102826_N_2

Elections, Irish style

February 19, 2016 • 3:30 pm

by Grania Spingies

I pity you Americans, I do. You’re trapped in an endless cycle of campaigning where battling politicians (and the occasional clown) slug it out day after day, week after week, month after month.

Here in Ireland, the Dáil (Irish parliament) was dissolved on the 3rd of February by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, and the election is to be held a whopping three weeks later—on February 26th.

Politicians are forced to canvass door-to-door here, as robo-calls are illegal in Ireland (so far Ireland 2, USA 0. I’m so, so sorry). But even this is not good enough for your average irritable voter, and many an office laser printer has surreptitiously spat out amateur signs bearing the legend NO CANVASSING HERE PLEASE or something a little less polite—ranging from mild expressions of discontent with The Body Politic in general, to more specific and possibly anatomically impossible exhortations. And then someone spotted this beauty:

Pronunciation Guide:

(this is more of an art form, less of a science)

  • Dáil = doyle
  • Taoiseach = tea shuck

[JAC: In America, this sign could read “Do you have a few minutes to hear the good news about ME?”]

 

Bats photographed in flight

February 19, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Our old friend Piotr Naskrecki, biologist, naturalist, and crack photographer (photo page here, website here), has an article at Cognisys about how he set up a portable studio in the field to photograph bats—and other animals—in flight.

Piotr has apparently been spending most of his time at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, and I’ve featured a lot of his photos from there. This time, a fellow biologist asked him to help photograph bats in flight. Piotr gives a huge amount of information about how he set up his portable studio, but I’ll let the photo buffs go see that for themselves, and I’ll reproduce only one paragraph in favor of the stunning bat and insect photos:

The biologist documenting Gorongosa bats, Jen Guyton of Princeton University, required images that were not only technically good but also taxonomically diagnostic. This means that they needed to show all the details of the bats’ bodies that allow for positive identification of the species. This requirement made me decide to photograph them in a studio setup, rather than attempting to shoot them in caves or at roosting sites. Since Jen was catching bats in a mist net almost every night to take measurements and DNA samples I knew that I would have no shortage of subjects. The difficulty was that the bat documentation was taking place in multiple, often very remote locations in Gorongosa, and thus I had to be able to photograph the animals in the field, far from access to electricity and other amenities of civilization. I had to build a photo studio portable enough to be able to take with me wherever the biologists were working, yet capable of capturing images of the highest quality.

The studio:

portable-stopshot-studio

The bats (these are all copyrighted, but I have permission from Piotr to use his photos):

egyptian-slit-faced-bat
Egyptian Slit-faced bat (Nycteris thebaica)

 

landers-horseshoe-bat
A brown form of Lander’s Horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus landeri)
fruit-bat
Wahlberg’s epauletted fruit bat (Epomophorus wahlbergi)

 

red-landers-horseshoe-bat
A red form of Lander’s Horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus landeri)

And one insect:

leaf-katydid
Leaf katydid (Eurycorypha lesnei)

The species above has the common name of Lesne’s Oblong-eyed Katydid. I have to say that the animals in this post have cool names!

Krauss: Fill Scalia’s Supreme Court vacancy with an atheist

February 19, 2016 • 1:30 pm

Given the New Yorker’s softness on faith, I’m heartened—and very surprised—to see that the magazine has published Lawrence Krauss’s has third godless column, “Put an atheist on the Supreme Court.” (Krauss was surprised too, emailing that “Maybe there is a god.” Note to religionists: he was joking!). At any rate, go look at it; I’ll give a short excerpt.

First, though, Krauss notes that 3% of Americans declare themselves atheists, and another 4% agnostic. In effect, nonbelievers make up 7% of all Americans, while, according to Wikipedia, between 1.7% and 2.6% of Americans are Jews. Yet there have been eight Jewish Supreme Court justices (let me name them, since Americans will recognize most of them: Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, and, still serving, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan). I’m unaware of a single overtly atheist Supreme Court justice.

We thus have a gross underrepresentation of atheists on the Court, but of course there’s good reason for that. Imagine an atheist justice being confirmed by today’s Senate! Antonin Scalia claimed before he died that there was a gross underrepresentation of evangelical Christians and Protestants on today’s court (i.e., none), but Krauss says that we’re also missing nonbelievers.

So Krauss, while offering great arguments for an atheist justice, also recognizes what he’s up against. His suggestion will of course be ignored, but what’s good is that he’s able to even offer it in one of the country’s most respectable magazines.

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries. Scalia himself often got sidetracked in this way: he framed his objections to laws protecting L.G.B.T. rights in a moral, rather than a legal-rights, framework. In his dissent, in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas—a case that challenged a Texas law criminalizing gay sex—Scalia wrote that those who wanted to limit the rights of gay people to be teachers or scoutmasters were merely “protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle they believe to be immoral and destructive.” To him, religion-based moral objections seemed to deserve more weight than either factual considerations (homosexuality is not destructive) or rights-based concerns (gay people’s rights must be protected). Indeed, Scalia’s meditation on the Court’s lack of religious diversity was part of a larger argument that the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage did not reflect prevailing religious and moral values. An atheist Justice, by contrast, would have different intellectual habits. I suspect that he or she would be more likely to focus on reason and empirical evidence.

In addition, the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy. Such an appointment would also help counter the perceived connection between atheism and lawlessness and immorality.

There’s more, including a ringing peroration, but I’ll let you read that for yourself.

May I suggest Richard Posner for the vacancy? He’s more or less a centrist, is the most cited legal scholar in America, and, as far as I know, has no belief in gods. And he has a cat, too. There are others more liberal that I’d like, but their chance of confirmation is zero.

Harper Lee dies at 89

February 19, 2016 • 12:00 pm

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), passed away this morning at age 89, apparently dying in her sleep. She’d not been well for a while, with some even claiming that she wasn’t compos mentis enough to approve the recent publication of Go Set A Watchman, the first draft of Mockingbird, which appeared last year to lukewarm reviews.

But Mockingbird was a true classic, and even if Lee was a one-book author, that book will live for generations. How many of you haven’t read it? I doubt there are many, at least among Americans. The 1962 movie, too, was a classic. I also know her because she was Truman Capote’s bestie, accompanying him to Kansas for the arduous job of researching Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966; another classic work you should read).

Lee became pretty much of a hermit after the movie came out, living modestly in Alabama and trying to avoid publicity. But she continues to garner praise and honors for her book. In 2007 she received the National Medal of Freedom from W (below).

Harper_Lee_Medal

Lee and Capote:

10LEECAPOTE-master315

Lee with Gregory Peck, who of course played Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, nabbing an Oscar for Best Actor. The film won two other Oscars, though not Best Picture.

006A573900000258-0-image-m-92_1423185600788

And here’s Mary Badham (born 1952), who played Scout—then and now. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (but didn’t win) at the age of ten:

mary_badham12

Mary+Badham+AMPAS+50th+Anniversary+Screening+g7veGE5QQzZl

Chino Valley town council vows to continue prayer

February 19, 2016 • 10:45 am

Two days ago I reported that Mayor Chris Marley, mayor of Chino Valley, Arizona (and a “part-time Baptist minister”, whatever that is), has repeatedly begun the town council meetings with a Christian prayer. After promising that he’d stop the process pending a discussion of the prayer issue, Marley reneged on his promise (i.e. lied) and again praised Jesus at a meeting on February 9. A rabbi in attendance, Adele Plotkin, objected vociferously, whereupon Plotkin had her heaved out of the meeting (the link includes a video).

A little bird told me that both the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have warned Mayor Marley that they have to stop this unconstitutional practice now. That was confirmed by the local paper. Do you think the council will listen?

Hell, no! It’s Arizona, Jake. As the Chino Valley Review notes, they’re standing firm:

Chino Valley has been ending its invocation with “praying in Jesus’ name” for years. The controversy began on Dec. 8 when a Chino Valley resident, Sherry Brown, objected to the practice.

Marley said he’s drawing a line in the sand and the rest of the Town Council backed him up, saying they have no intention to change their invocation.

After the Mayor chucked out Rabbi Plotkin, the council voted to stick with Jesus. The mayor said this (my emphasis):

“Unfortunately, the content of the invocations offered here in Chino Valley has become the subject of some contention, so we – your Town Council – will deal with it,” Marley said in an opening statement. “Our Bill of Rights protects us against the establishment of religion by the state, and yet it would appear that secular humanism with its mantra of political correctness has become just that, the state established religion which the First Amendment was supposed to protect us against.

“Our oath of office requires that we defend the Constitution, and yet we are being asked to give up our right to freely worship according to the dictates of conscience. As a nation, we have already lost a number of our freedoms: The right to peacefully assemble and our protection against unreasonable search and seizure are already gone, and a number of others are being stripped away as we speak.

“I can’t speak for the rest of the Council, but I believe it is time to draw a line in the sand, at least for me it is.”

After discussing eight different options on how to handle the invocation at future Town Council meetings, the council voted that they would make no changes to the current tradition, which is a member of council gives the invocation without any guidance if they wish to be in the rotation to do so.

“I believe that we as a council have every right to continue to offer the invocations,” Marley said.

I’m always amazed how state imposition of religion, as the town council is doing, is justified as adhering to the First Amendment. The founding fathers, who voted against opening the Constitutional Convention with a prayer, would surely disagree. Note too that Mareley argues that by opposing public Christian prayer, his detractors are trying to make secular humanism the state established religion! It’s hard to avoid calling people names when I hear crazy arguments like that. That is, “no religion” is characterized as a religion!

And the “right to freely worship” means, chowderheads, anywhere but at governmental functions! Why can’t Preacher Marley restrict his prayers to his house or to his Baptist Church? For some reason, these people feel that their “right” to pray means a “right” to impose their religious beliefs on others in a formal government setting. Would he sit quietly if a Muslim offered up a prayer to Allah? Or if a Satanist proffered a prayer? I doubt it.

What will happen? The die is cast:

“I want the citizens to be aware, us standing our ground, if this is challenged, it could cost the town money to defend it,” Council member Corey Mendoza said. “Personally, I’m willing to do that. But we are representatives of the town, so speak up when you get a chance and we’ll unite around this.”

Yes, it will cost them considerable money if there’s a lawsuit, and if they don’t give in, I suspect there will be. Although such suits require someone with “standing” to initiate them, and there’s a certain peeved rabbi who, I think, does have that standing.

h/t: Dennis D.