Gordon Grice's Blog, page 110

Earth Day: A Guilty Green

My landlord rigged a trap for the mice in my garage. Into a five-gallon bucket, he poured a few inches of antifreeze. On a wire across the top, he threaded a 7-Up can smeared with peanut butter. Mice would go for the food, find the can spinning under them, and fall into the antifreeze. He nestled the trap in a corner, piling boxes and tools around it to discourage children and dogs.
A few times a year, I'd find a carcass floating in the green fluid. They all looked black while they were...

Deadly Kingdom on Video: Harvestman

Deadly Kingdom is now on Youtube! Our first offering is a 4-minute opus about the common but misunderstood arachnid known as daddylonglegs. This film grew out of questions here on the blog. Here's the original blog post.
Here's a follow-up post explaining the different critters that go under the name daddylonglegs.
And here, without further ado, is the video.

I hope Johnny Depp doesn't get jealous.

Octopus attack

During World War I, a teenager named John Rau was walking on the coast near Cape Otway, Victoria, Australia, along with some other boys and a clergyman. Rau recounted his experience in Frank W. Lane's Kingdom of the Octopus:

"We were proceeding along the sea edge at the base of cliffs and bluffs, a jumble of rock, some stratified and shelving. I was about six or seven paces behind the parson, who was leading, when I heard him shout and looked toward him. He was standing on a shelf of rock abou...

Mantis Battles Hummingbird

In The Red Hourglass, I mentioned the case of a mantid preying on a mouse. This video shows something almost as startling. The mantid seems to have staked out a hummingbird feeder. . .

Animal Attacks: A Pilot Whale

When we were discussing Tilikum the killer whale a while back I mentioned another famous captive whale named Bimbo. A little more about him:
Bimbo starred at Marineland of the Pacific in the 1960s. At nearly 18 feet, he was the largest pilot whale in the park. For three years, he performed his spectacular tricks. The finale of the whale show had him plunge to three-story depths, then rocket to the surface and beyond. His landing literally shook spectators in their seats.
But, like a lot of...

Reviewing the Animal Review

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In The Animal Review, a new book I got in the mail the other day, the unobtrusive clam is a working class schmuck who never gets his due; the sedentary sponge is a symptom of low admission standards in the animal kingdom; and the much-preyed-upon wildebeest is "Nature's punching bag." "Actual passport picture," says the caption under a photo of a flensed wildebeest skull.

This is hilarious stuff. I p...

If you ache to write. . .

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I'm teaching another online workshop for UCLA Extension this spring. My Intermediate Creative Nonfiction class starts April 7. Here's more info.

Time's Top Ten Animal Attacks

What does it take to make it into the top ten animal attacks? Beats me. Notoriety? Having a photo? It's the photos that made me want to share this.

The Flickr of a Snake's Tongue

In case you haven't been following my trail on Facebook, I wanted to mention that I'm posting animal images on Flickr. These aren't my work (so my old art teachers can stop cringing). Most of them are photos and illustrations I uncovered through archival research. Here, for example, is a set of gorgeous snake illustrations from the 1886 edition of the Century Dictionary, often regarded as the finest reference book ever published in English.

Video on the Alaska Wolf Attack--2 Wolves Killed

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