Gordon Grice's Blog, page 29

Van Gogh's Animals

Giant Peacock Moth





Animal paintings by Vincent Van Gogh





Crab on Its Back







Kingfisher





Wheat Field with Crows

Coyote vs. Wolf Pack

It doesn't go well for the coyote. Guest appearance by a bald eagle and some ravens. Not for the squeamish.









More cool coyote stuff:



From the Seattle area, video of Urban Coyotes, along with advice about how to handle coyote encounters.



The story of a Fatal Coyote Attack.



Footage of a wild encounter that pits Coyote vs. Cougar.



Brief extracts by Mark Twain, Richard Henry Dana, and others: Wildlife Classics: Coyotes. 

Video: Jaguar Kills Caiman

A brief National Geographic video shows the stalking technique of a jaguar. 

Garter Snake

Photography by Dee Puett

Autumnal

To Autumn

John
Keats







Season
of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring
with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the
thatch-eves run;

To
bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;


    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel
shells

  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And
still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until
they think warm days will never cease,

    For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy
cells.




Who
hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee
sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or
on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy
hook

    Spares the next swath and all its twined
flowers:

And
sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by
hours.




Where
are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While
barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then
in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;


And
full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

    And gathering swallows twitter in the
skies.






2012 Autumnal Post--A Murmuration of Birds

2011 Autumnal Post--Harvest Moon

2010 Autumnal Post--featuring Parker's photos

Wild Boar Eats Horse, Terrorizes Family

Startling porcine action in Argentina. This account comes from the news
site 26noticias.com:




A furious wild boar entered a property in the Lavalle region of Mendoza.
It ate part of a horse and kept 14 people under siege until it was finally shot
dead by policemen.




The event. . . happened at about 7 am Sunday, July 5. The Subcomisaria
de Costa de Araujo issued an emergency call because a "mountain pig"
had attacked a horse in the Renzi property in Roca street.




The animal was large and was keeping the family of twelve that lives in
the property locked inside their home due to the danger it posed.... Once the
police arrived, Anacleto Marquez, a worker in the property, told them that the animal
was in the pen area.... The policemen went there and found that it wasn´t a
normal pig, but a wild boar with dark hair and "huge tusks,” weighing
about 550 pounds.




The animal had attacked and gutted a horse which was still alive while
the wild boar ate it, according to the report. It paused to attack people who
approached, but returned to eating the horse’s entrails.




The officers realized the danger involved and tried to scare the boar
away but it was not intimidated and faced them "as if ready to attack."
The two policemen then shot the animal. Only one bullet penetrated its hide.
The wounded animal charged at the policemen, who took cover and told the family
to stay inside.




Due to the danger being greater by the minute, the policemen decided to
shoot it dead. To do so, Officer Arancibia climbed on top of a car, but the
animal repeatedly struck at the vehicle with its snout while continuing to feed
on the horse.




The family urged the police to kill the wild boar because they feared
it would attack their children. Arancibia shot the animal five times at close
range.




"The bullets bounced and didn´t have much effect,” said a local
newspaper. “The boar was shot again and wounded in a foreleg. Only then did it
collapse to the ground. It was assumed to be crippled so the policemen got down
from the car and walked towards it to kill it.




“However, suddenly the wild boar jumped up again and attacked the
policemen, who ran through a vineyard; one of them shot the animal again and only
then did it collapse and die."




My thanks to Croconut for the news tip and the translation.




*




Readers of The Red Hourglass won’t find this story too shocking. In
that book, I discussed these delightful porcine activities, among others:




-Eating livestock—including, in Argentina, domestic rams

-Disemboweling the horses of hunters

-Preying on human travelers



-Scavenging graveyards and battlefield casualties.

Man with Stick Duels Ibex

Interesting magazine article from Victorian times. The
ibexes are wild goats. This one, I presume, is an Alpine ibex or steinbock. The
locale is in Switzerland. 




*




I send you an account of an attack by an ibex on a
gentleman, which is so opposed to the generally shy habits of the animal that I
think it will be interesting to the readers of your paper. A gentleman from
Schaffhausen, who had been visiting his wife and child, started to go over the
Strelapass to Chur, and was accompanied for a part of the way by his wife and
child. Between the Schatzalp and the Strelapass a large ibex suddenly joined
the party and went with them some distance to the top of the pass. At last it
became bold and came within one or two paces of them. The gentleman attempted
to make friends with it by offering it a piece of bread on the point of his
stick. The ibex, however, took this for a challenge, reared on its hind legs
and attacked its opponent so violently with its horns that he was thrown to the
ground. After a long struggle the animal took to flight, but on the gentleman
throwing stones after it it turned again. The wife ran as fast as possible to
the Schatzalp for help, but meanwhile the battle recommenced, and lasted, with
short intervals, for more than an hour. At last a shepherd came to the
assistance of the wearied gentleman, who was also slightly injured, and giving
the ibex some blows with his knife, put it finally to flight. Shortly
afterwards several persons from Davos Platz, whom a message from the Schatzalp
had called to help, came up and tried to catch the ibex. They succeeded in
frightening it on to a rock, from which, as they supposed, it would not be able
to descend. The next day they again attempted the capture. The ibex was quietly
grazing on the slopes near the pass, but all efforts to secure it were in vain.
Now small and large parties go to the Strelapass every day to see the ibex.
Sometimes they have the pleasure of coming rather near to it, but no one seems
quite to like the look of it, nor would any one care to meet it alone. We shall
have to petition some sportsman to come and shoot it, as it is certainly master
of the situation at present. No doubt it has lost its mate, and is at war with
the rest of the world.




--from Littell's Living Age magazine, 1881




Thanks to Croconut for sharing this. 

Wildlife Classic: John Mortonson's Funeral

by Ambrose Bierce




John Mortonson was dead: his lines in “the tragedy ‘Man’” had all been
spoken and he had left the stage.




The body rested in a fine mahogany coffin fitted with a plate of glass.
All arrangements for the funeral had been so well attended to that had the
deceased known he would doubtless have approved. The face, as it showed under
the glass, was not disagreeable to look upon: it bore a faint smile, and as the
death had been painless, had not been distorted beyond the repairing power of
the undertaker. At two o’clock of the afternoon the friends were to assemble to
pay their last tribute of respect to one who had no further need of friends and
respect. The surviving members of the family came severally every few minutes
to the casket and wept above the placid features beneath the glass. This did
them no good; it did no good to John Mortonson; but in the presence of death
reason and philosophy are silent.




As the hour of two approached the friends began to arrive and after
offering such consolation to the stricken relatives as the proprieties of the
occasion required, solemnly seated themselves about the room with an augmented
consciousness of their importance in the scheme funereal. Then the minister
came, and in that overshadowing presence the lesser lights went into eclipse.
His entrance was followed by that of the widow, whose lamentations filled the
room. She approached the casket and after leaning her face against the cold
glass for a moment was gently led to a seat near her daughter. Mournfully and
low the man of God began his eulogy of the dead, and his doleful voice, mingled
with the sobbing which it was its purpose to stimulate and sustain, rose and
fell, seemed to come and go, like the sound of a sullen sea. The gloomy day
grew darker as he spoke; a curtain of cloud underspread the sky and a few drops
of rain fell audibly. It seemed as if all nature were weeping for John
Mortonson.




When the minister had finished his eulogy with prayer a hymn was sung
and the pall-bearers took their places beside the bier. As the last notes of
the hymn died away the widow ran to the coffin, cast herself upon it and sobbed
hysterically. Gradually, however, she yielded to dissuasion, becoming more
composed; and as the minister was in the act of leading her away her eyes
sought the face of the dead beneath the glass. She threw up her arms and with a
shriek fell backward insensible.




The mourners sprang forward to the coffin, the friends followed, and as
the clock on the mantel solemnly struck three all were staring down upon the
face of John Mortonson, deceased.




They turned away, sick and faint. One man, trying in his terror to
escape the awful sight, stumbled against the coffin so heavily as to knock away
one of its frail supports. The coffin fell to the floor, the glass was
shattered to bits by the concussion.




From the opening crawled John Mortonson’s cat, which lazily leapt to
the floor, sat up, tranquilly wiped its crimson muzzle with a forepaw, then
walked with dignity from the room.










Gordon's Postscript:

Pets consuming the bodies of their owners is a frequent, though rarely mentioned, occurrence. A recent case comes to us from an Argentine newspaper (translation by Hodari Nundu): "A man was found lifeless in a wooden shack in Ushuaia, surrounded by more than a dozen cats that had fed on his body. The local police identified him as Lautaro Torres, 75, who apparently lived alone and died of natural causes, for there were no signs of violence. The police entered the place and found, along with Torres's body, over a dozen cats that had apparently eaten part of their owner." 

Bumblebee

"My father was deathly allergic to this one bee. He had been stung hundreds of time as a farmer, but he was sharpening the chain on a chainsaw on our front porch one afternoon and a bumble bee stung him. Within ten minutes of being stung, his arm and face were swollen and he was having trouble breathing. . . . Dad had to carry an epi pen with him from then on. He was stung by several other bees after that; he never had a reaction to their stings like he did that Bumble Bee." 

--Dee Puett, photographer

Rock Squirrel

By guest writer Hodari Nundu




It
all began when my sister (back then we were both in junior high) found three
baby rock squirrels (Spermophilus variegatus), with their eyes still closed,
and lying seemingly "abandoned" in the school's grounds (which were
near an uninhabited ravine and so were crawling with animals of all sorts,
including armadillos, skunks, frogs, caecilians, small snakes, a huge diversity
of moths and very large beetles).




If
I had been there when she found them, I would have told her that mother rock
squirrels often move their babies from one burrow to another and that it was
probably going to return for them, but I wasn’t, so the squirrels ended up in
our house, where my sister and my father tried to bottle fed them (they had successfully
bottle fed a newborn kitten at about the same time so I guess they were feeling
confident) but unfortunately two of the squirrels died, and only one survived,
a female.




And
so the horror began.




Rock
squirrels are very aggressive. Colomos Park in Guadalajara is home to both
Mexican gray squirrels, which live in trees, and rock squirrels, and when
people feed peanuts to the squirrels, the rock squirrels are always dominant
and chase the gray squirrels away, hogging all the attention (and the peanuts)
and biting fingers in the process. In this same park I have seen fierce battles
between the rock squirrels themselves and many of them are covered with scars,
or have missing ears or chewed up tails from past battles. Anyway, the squirrel
at home started out playful—chasing and fighting the cats and just being
hyperactive as one would expect a squirrel to be—but then it started charging
at everyone in the house, tail all puffed up and making a sound like a rattle
which was its battle cry.




It
got to the point where the lady who helped us with the chores would climb up
chairs in fear whenever she saw the squirrel (or "el ardillo" as she
called it), and there wasn’t one person in the house who didn’t get bitten in
the toes or ankles by the squirrel. It became so bad-tempered that it had to be
kept in a wire cage, where I (a kid after all) would torment it by blowing air
in its face, which it hated, but it seemed fair to me because it had bitten me
many times already.




Eventually
the squirrel was moved to a larger cage built for it in the yard, but it then
started gnawing at the wires trying to escape, until its mouth and teeth were
all bloody and the decision was made to release it into the wild.




We
took it to the grounds of a seminary, where we had seen plenty of rock
squirrels as well as other animals such as skunks. We knew that the squirrel
would probably have a shorter life now, but thought that at least it would get
to live like it was intended to instead of going crazy(er) in a cage. As soon
as the animal carrier was opened the squirrel leaped into the grass and disappeared.
We never knew what became of it. If rock squirrels are anything like rats or
other rodents I suppose the local squirrels may have killed the intruder but
then again, it was a vicious little beast so, who knows?



Photo courtesy of Hodari Nundu