Duck breakfast, Father’s Day

June 18, 2017 • 8:45 am

Here are two mallards (I believe these are males) from the brood of four ducklings I’ve been feeding. They’re taking oatmeal and a few Cheerios from my hand.  Note the rapid fluttering of the beak as they force the water out the sides of their mouths, keeping in the food; this behavior is called “motorboating”. In this sense they resemble baleen whales.

Note that as the ducks take in the oatmeal and expel the water, that water is cloudy from the oatmeal exudate.

The skinny from Ducks Unlimited:

Lamellae are another fascinating adaptation of the waterfowl bill. These small, comb-like structures along the inside of the bill act like sieves and look like teeth, even though ducks and geese don’t chew food. When ducks are searching for food, nonfood items such as mud and water can be expelled while seeds, bugs, or other food items are retained by the lamellae. The top part of the waterfowl bill is called the upper mandible, and the bottom part, the lower mandible. The upper mandible is affixed to the skull, but the lower mandible can move up and down. The upper and lower mandibles of most dabbling ducks have from 50 to 70 lamellae, but bluewings and greenwings may have 120 to 130 lamellae. Shovelers have about 220 lamellae on their lower mandible and 180 lamellae on their upper mandible.

Here are the mallardian lamellae, visible as the serrations on the edge of the beak

mallard-bill-dean-beyett

 

Bottom view of bill:

 

I’m a proud Dad!

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 18, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Divy F sent some photos from Puerto Rico; her notes are indented:

Hi! You posted some pics I submitted a few months ago, of the fauna my husband saw on his trip through the Indonesian isles. We recently visited our island home of Puerto Rico with a couple of friends who had never been. We are all reptile lovers, so this was a herping trip, with the great hopes of seeing the Puerto Rican Boa, in its native surroundings. Despite going to many caves, popular and unmanned, we had no luck. We did however, manage to take photos of endemic and introduced fauna species.

Alsophis portorricensis, Puerto Rican Racer. Endemic:

Anolis gundlachi. El Yunque (rainforest) Endemic:


Puerto Rican Tody (Todus mexicanus), also known by the locals as San Pedrito. El Yunque. Endemic:

Cuban Rock Iguana (Cyclura nubila). These guys live in a university research Island called Magueyes, in La Parguera, south of the island.

Ameiva. Not sure if they are endemic or introduced.  These guys are seen all over the island, and range in different colors. This couple was sunning in a park in Ponce.

Starfish. Parguera:

Green Iguana (Iguana iguana). Introduced. A plague, they are found all over the island, including common roadkill.

Sugarcane Toad (Rhinella marina). Introduced, also a plague, and are destroyed on site. This one was in a cave, where we were searching for the highly endangered Puerto Rican Boa (no such luck). We left him alone.

And their two cats:

Jango

and Boba ( the two cutest kitties in Florida!):

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 18, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning; it’s Sunday, June 18, 2017, and it’s Father’s Day! I hope to be celebrated by my brood of ducklings and scurry of squirrels (yes, that’s the right word for a group of those rodents). It’s also International Picnic Day. I’m not sure whether that means you should eat culturally appropriated food, dine sitting on a border between two countries, or simply celebrate that day throughout the world. Never mind, as I doubt any of us will be having picnics today; certainly not in Chicago, where rain is in the forecast. It’s also Waterloo Day, the anniversary of that battle in 1815  and a holiday observed by the British Army.

On this day in 1858, Charles Darwin got the Fated Letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, written in Indonesia,  describing ARW’s independent discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Disturbed, Darwin did the right thing and arranged for simultaneous publication of Wallace’s letter and Darwin’s own views, and then he got to work writing The Origin. Ceiling Cat knows when Darwin would have written that book had Wallace not written him.

On June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill delivered his “Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons, ending with these stirring words (note that he mentions science):

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth, last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

And on this day in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space as an astronaut on the Space Shuttle.

Notables born on this day include Roger Ebert and Paul McCartney (both 1942; Ebert died but Sir Paul is 75 today), Carol Kane (1952) and Lisa Randall (1962; 55 today). Those who died on this day include Samuel Butler (1902), Roald Amundsen (1928), Ethel Barrymore (1959) and John Cheever (1982),  Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, disporting herself among the ripening cherries, seems to be paraphrasing Arthur Conan Doyle (see below):

DARK AGES
Hili: If I see correctly, new times are coming.
A: From the East?
Hili: No, from stupidity.
In Polish:
MROKI ŚREDNIOWIECZA
Hili: Jeśli dobrze widzę idą nowe czasy.
Ja: Ze wschodu?
Hili: Nie, z głupoty.

From Wikipedia on Conan Doye’s Sherlock Holmes story, His Last Bow, in which Holmes presages the Great War:

Holmes and Watson take Von Bork and the evidence to Scotland Yard. Afterward, Holmes retires from detective work. He spends his days beekeeping in the countryside and writing his definitive work on investigation. In reference to the impending War, Holmes says, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” Watson misinterprets the meaning of the words and says, “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

But I am assured by Malgorzata that Andrzej wasn’t referring to this when he translated Hili’s meows.

Lagniappe: this video is strangely soothing; it shows Gus being petted by one of his staff (Taskin) for a minute and ten seconds. Look at that snow-white, luxuriant fur!

Reader Charleen sent a cat that looks like a cinnamon roll:

https://twitter.com/ohyeahmmmm/status/875415348195065857

This picture of a shaved Husky appears to be genuine, and is quite amazing. But it’s caused a furor on the Internet because you’re generally not supposed to shave this kind of dog. So don’t try it at home, but have a gander at this:

https://twitter.com/OmonaKami/status/872634620692582403

Kitten rescued from Tesla bumper

June 17, 2017 • 2:45 pm

Matthew Cobb assiduously scans Twitter, and of course he sends me the cat ones. Here’s the rescue of a kitten stuck in a Tesla bumper, tweeted by Elon Musk. When the kitten emerges, unhurt, you won’t believe how small an animal can make that much noise!

And from our Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll, who with his wife Jennifer Oullette recently adopted two kittens. Reading it you’d think he’s almost embarrassed to be a Big Softy about cats. It’s OKAY, Sean!

Democratic Senators ignore women testifying about violent Islamism

June 17, 2017 • 12:30 pm

If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a four hour video of Wednesday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on “the ideology behind violent extremism and potential tools the U.S. can use to counter it.”

Here are those involved, starting with the four who testified, including five Democratic Senators and two Republicans.

As an article in the Washington Post pointed out, and I’ve verified by watching much of the testimony, the women Democratic Senators largely ignored Hirsi Ali and Nomani in favor of the males, particularly Leiter.  The article gives tw**ts from some social media-ites who also noticed this. Here are a couple:

https://twitter.com/MohammadShouman/status/875056582236811268

I don’t think the behavior of those Democrats has anything to do with deference to men; rather, the they shied away from indicting religion as a cause of terrorism, and that’s precisely what Hirsi Ali and Nomani were trying to say.  The male witnesses, in contrast, avoided religion and dealt with other solutions to terrorism.  Democrats, it seems, studiously avoid mentioning religion or Islam, taking a cue from the Obama/Hillary Clinton playbook. The article supports that conclusion:

Tensions were high even before the hearing began. A Muslim man wearing a prayer cap attempted to disrupt the event by yelling at Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim and Somali-born human rights activist, a witness who was in the room said.

The contentious atmosphere carried on to the committee members themselves as Democratic committee leader, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, expressed her disagreement with the premise of the hearing, called by Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

“Anyone who twists or distorts religion to a place of evil is an exception to the rule,” she said. “We should not focus on religion.” McCaskill proceeded to lecture the panelists on “freedom of religion” in the United States.

“No evil should ever be allowed to distort these premises,” she continued. “I’m worried, honestly, that this hearing will underline that.”

. . . Hirsi Ali, who was the first witness to speak, stated clearly that her testimony and evidence was focused solely on the threat of Islamism as a social-political totalitarian ideology.

“The part [of Islam] that is a political doctrine consists of a worldview, a system of laws, and a moral code that is totally incompatible with our constitution, our laws, and our way of life,” she testified.

Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Women in the World contributor, echoed Hirsi Ali. “The ideology of Islamism contradicts the constitutional values of this country,” she said. “The elements of Islamism are very clear.”

However, Michael Leiter, the former director of the U.S. Counterterrorism Center, rejected the core of Hirsi Ali and Nomani’s testimonies. “Muslims honoring of sharia is not inherently in tangent with living in constitutional democracies anymore than it would be for Christians or Jews who also seek to honor their religious traditions while still complying with civil authority,” he said.

Here’s some more Ostrich Leftism by Democrats:

At one point, when Nomani shared examples of violent preachings on “women beating” she had received through Amazon, McCaskill turned the conversation to book banning.

. . . Democratic Senator Gary Peters later criticized the “anti-Islamic sentiment” in some of the written testimonies.

“I became concerned about a recurrent theme of anti-Islamic sentiment,” Peters stated. “The perpetuation of anti-Islamic attitudes undermine our collective values and it contributes to the undercurrent of xenophobia.”

I have but one beef. Andy Ngo, the article’s writer, said this:

It was the first time a Senate hearing was devoted to discussing the ideas motivating both violent and nonviolent Islamist movements around the world, but, through a strategy of deflection and demonization, the Democratic senators — mostly women — ignored the scholarly and lived expertise of Hirsi Ali and Nomani.

Oy! The “lived expertise” trope! But Hirsi Ali and Nomani didn’t dwell on their “lived expertise”; the former talked about the moderation of Islam she proposed in her latest book, and Nomani is a reporter, and described some of the national and religious sources of terrorism she derived not from her “lived experience,” but from her reporting. Yes, “lived expertise” was there, but it’s far too close to the “lived experience” trope of Regressives for my taste. This, however, is just a quibble.

What it all shows is that the Left is still avoiding the “r” word (or the “I” word) when discussing terrorism. I think most of us know, however, that to deal properly with terrorism one simply has to come to grips with the ideology that promotes and motivates it.

HuffPo blogger is gleeful that a privileged white man was severely punished in North Korea

June 17, 2017 • 10:45 am

I’m sure you’ve heard the story: American college student Otto Warmbier,  then 21, was taking a five-day tour of North Korea at the end of 2015, and apparently removed a propaganda poster from the wall of his Pyongyang hotel as a souvenir. (There’s a video, but he’s not identifiable.) When leaving the country, Warmbier was arrested for “hostile acts against the state”, imprisoned, supposedly confessed (remember, this is the DPRK), and in March was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.

After the U.S. interceded, Warmbier was released five days ago, but government officials learned only a week before Warmbier’s release that he was in a coma, which the North Koreans attributed to his getting botulism and then having taken a sleeping pill. He was flown home on a stretcher, where doctors determined that, contrary to the North Korean statement, he had extensive brain injuries. He is now in a “persistent vegetative state” with extensive loss of brain tissue, and the prognosis is not good. Most likely he will either die or remain comatose for a very long time. It’s not clear what happened, but the North Korean story is certainly bogus as there were no signs of botulism.

This is a sad tale, but of course it comports with the dreadful ways North Korea treats its own prisoners, often incarcerated for petty crimes—or no crimes at all. (Family members are taken to the camps along with the “convicted.”) How horrible—but how typical—that a self-styled Social Justice Warrior writing on HuffPo uses his sentence to gloat over how “white privilege” isn’t respected in North Korea. (To be fair, the author,  La Sha, who is black, updated the story in late March, before Warmbier’s medical condition was known.) But even ignorance of that can’t excuse her piece, which is simply gloating and reprehensible Schadenfreude:

After Sha describes her mother’s happiness when 18-year-old American Michael Fay was caned in Singapore (not hard, and not a dreadful punishment), she says she’s just as happy as was her mom. Why? Because Wamblier got what he deserved for being white and assuming his pigmentation gave him license to steal from the Koreans of Color. And of course it’s all due to American racism. Have a gander at this:

. . . and now, my mother’s callous reaction to Micahel Fay’s sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.

As shocked as I am by the sentence handed down to Warmbier, I am even more shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described a “college-style prank.” That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country. Every economic, academic, legal and social system in this country has for more than three centuries functioned with the implicit purpose of ensuring that white men are the primary benefactors of all privilege. The kind of arrogance bred by that kind of conditioning is pathogenic, causing its host to develop a subconscious yet no less obnoxious perception that the rules do not apply to him, or at least that their application is negotiable.

. . . Yeah, I’m willing to bet my last dollar that he was aware of the political climate in that country, but privilege is a hell of a drug. The high of privilege told him that North Korea’s history of making examples out of American citizens who dare challenge their rigid legal system in any way was no match for his alabaster American privilege.

No, I think that Warmbier just wanted a cool souvenir. Can anyone not poisoned by their own toxic racism think that his “alabaster American privilege” even went through his mind when he took down a poster? After all, it was only a poster, and yes, it was illegal, but he got fifteen years of hard labor and now will probably die. Even given that Sha was ignorant of Warmbier’s illness, she has no excuse for celebrating the guy’s brutal incarceration. But it’s okay because, after all,  he is white.

Sha is even callous about his parents’ desperate attempt to get him released. One feels that she is even happy that it didn’t succeed, for, after all, Warmbier is white:

And while I don’t blame his parents for pressuring the State Department to negotiate his release, I wonder where they were when their son was planning a trip to the DPRK. Didn’t they impress upon him the hostile climate that awaited him? Didn’t they rear him to respect law and order? Did they not teach him the importance of obeying authority?

What a mind-blowing moment it must be to realize after 21 years of being pedestaled by the world simply because your DNA coding produced the favorable phenotype that such favor is not absolute. What a bummer to realize that even the State Department with all its influence and power cannot assure your pardon. What a wake-up call it is to realize that your tears are met with indifference.

How nice of her not to “blame his parents” to try to get him freed! In the end, Sha reveals her real motivation: she is black and oppressed, and in fact is just as oppressed in America as Warmbier was in a North Korean prison. (Seriously?) This article is not about Warmbier at all; it is about Sha’s perceived oppression and how people should pay attention to her plight. Me! Me! Me!  After all, Sha’s at least as bad off as Warmbier!

Here we have the Oppression Olympics stated about as baldly and callously as one can:

As I’ve said, living 15 years performing manual labor in North Korea is unimaginable, but so is going to a place I know I’m unwelcome and violating their laws. I’m a black woman though. The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.

h/t: Orli

Caturday felid quadfecta: Malaysian tiger cubs play with d*g; reverse Pavlov’s cats; artist puts cat into famous masterpieces; cat vs. toilet paper

June 17, 2017 • 9:00 am

From the Cincinnati Zoo we have an adorable video of tiger cubs playing with their nanny d*g (a good job for a canid!). The YouTube notes:

7-week-old Malayan tigers learning social lessons through play. Experienced canine nanny, Blakely, serves as “the adult in the room.” This tiger species is critically endangered, with fewer than 500 left in the world.
The 3 Malayan Tiger cubs in the zoo nursery are becoming a lot more active. This requires more patience from nursery dog Blakely, the Australian Shepard that is filling in for mom.

Some day I will hold a baby tiger in my arms. So far my strenuous efforts to accomplish this vital item on my bucket list have come to nought.

*********

This video was sent to me by reader Allan J. with the note “best cat video ever”. Be sure to turn the sound on. I’ve shown one video like this before, which shows the 180° difference between Pavlov’s D*gs and Pavlov’s Cats.

*********

Finally, from Top 13 we have an ailurophilic artist, Svetlana Petrova, who has insert her ginger cat Zarasthustra into famous works of art. The results are salubrious:

This is my favorite:A Dali:

There’s also a book:

*********

And a classic trope: the epic battle of Cat versus Bogroll:

 

h/t: jsp, Nicole Reggia, Diana MacPherson