Posts Tagged ‘animals’
pick up a pigeon
Posted 20 Aug 2008 — by Jonathan
Category Uncategorized
Category Uncategorized
I love getting nice things through the post. This bundle just arrived from Debbie, who writes the lovely Kept In A Jar blog, and of whose artistic talents I am most envious.
Wonderful! You can buy your own pigeon in Debbie’s shop on Etsy.
when bags attack
High jinks, my flat, Brighton, today.
life in cold blood
Posted 05 Feb 2008 — by Jonathan
Category Uncategorized
Category Uncategorized
Richard Attenborough’s ‘Life In Cold Blood’ started on BBC1 last night; exquisitely filmed and presented with extraordinary deftness, it was typically lovely.
Happily, it was Nancy Banks Smith’s turn to do the TV write up in the paper today; her writing was typically lovely too.
“The most touching moment was at the very end when, after half a century in the job, Attenborough saw his first pygmy leaf chameleon. As the young presenter of Zoo Quest, shinning up trees like a schoolboy bird-nesting, he had filmed Madagascan chameleons before – entertainingly in black and white – but the pygmy leaf had always eluded him. Being elusive is the chameleon’s speciality. It has medals for elusiveness (which it never wears as they make it feel conspicuous).”
All is well in the world.
winter in cambridgeshire
Posted 20 Dec 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos
Category Observations, Photos
It’s incredibly cold at my parents’ house in Cambridgeshire; we seem to be one step short of snowfall, where everything has taken on a kind of faint white hue, as if seen through a filter – a long fog has been hovering all morning. Only the cat can handle the cold, and is sat determinedly by the river outside, preferring solitude to company and warmth. She has a temperament midway between romantic, it seems, and bleak. I’m with her on one thing, however – it’s beautiful outside.
cats and men live in endless bliss
Oh, this is just too cute/daft/hilarious for words. From today’s Guardian:
“The last time I saw Zelda was in the summer of 2001. We had taken her on holiday and she was staring at me from a woodpile in front of a barn – but her eyes betrayed no sign of recognition. I meant nothing to her any more, even though, for the past 12 years, she had been a big part of my life, and my partner’s. Her illness, which caused epileptic fits, was eroding her eyesight and destroying her brain.
Kay and I never saw Zelda again. We searched the neighbourhood, asking farmers if they had seen a plump, skittish, epileptic but adorable tabby. They hadn’t. We consoled ourselves with the thought that she had disappeared to die alone, as pets do. I still think about her. Then I heard about www.songforsomeone.com, a new website offering bespoke songs for “your loved one”, with prices starting at £19.99. I thought it was time to give Zelda the memorial she deserved. Or to get Jim Littlewood, the musician who runs the service, to do so on my behalf.”
Excellent stuff from Stuart Jeffries, although I don’t suppose he can take credit for the final lyrics:
“The first verse went: “Though the world keeps turning/ One thing stays the same/ I think of a love so asymmetric/ When I hear Zelda’s name.” And the chorus: “There’s a rose that has lost all its petals/ And a lark that has forgotten his song/ In a world of change and imperfection/ Zelda’s sweet smile will linger on.” The second verse was a little less lyrical: “When my partner’s sister Debbie/ Brought her home from the Blue Cross I knew/ We would stay forever/ In a heaven made for two.”
I must say I had some misgivings. Cats can’t smile, can they? What would Kay think about me spending eternity in a heaven made for two, not with her, but with a cat? What was all that stuff about larks and roses? And anyway, did I believe in a transcendental realm away from this “world of change and imperfection” where cats and men live in endless bliss? To be honest, not really.”
Click here to read the whole article.
cats and shops, cats and pop
Assistant Blog frequently tries to come off all enthused by and informed on subjects like politics, pop music and poetry, as you’ll have noticed, but really my interests and ambitions in life begin and end with the goal of cat-ownership. I think cats are the best. So here, more for my own amusement than anything else, is a picture of a cat. Aaah. It comes from my new favourite blog, Working Class Cats, which collects photos of cats who live in shops. Amazing.
Continuing the cat theme, I’m not the only blogger who is easily diverted. Poor old Carrie Brownstein, late of the utterly magnificent Sleater-Kinney, only gets through a few paragraphs of the first entry on her new blog, Monitormix, before getting sidetracked.
“The other day I was driving home and saw a boy in his early twenties walking along the sidewalk. He was wearing a gray trench coat, combat boots, and a backpack, and he had a medium-haired black cat on his shoulder. It always worries me when people carry their cats around in public. It’s not as bad as the woman in North Portland who brings a mini pony with her to the coffee shop, but it still makes me uneasy; it’s attention-seeking, and I am forced to spend the next few hours wondering how someone trains a cat to do that. But what kind of music does a young man who is a human scratching post listen to? I might guess Peter Murphy or Tool or My Chemical Romance, but I have no idea. These are some of the questions I want to answer. I want to find out why people are drawn to certain songs, genres, voices, or instruments.
Let’s start with this question: If you carry a cat around on your shoulder when you go out, or a bird, or a lizard, what music do you listen to?”
Sadly, I’ve never been able to convince an animal to travel around with me in this way, but if you have you might want to pop over to Carrie’s blog to give her some feedback…
i hate wasps
Posted 04 Sep 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Daft, Observations, Travel
Category Daft, Observations, Travel
I have done a deal with the wasps of Croatia. When I eat, I pull out one morsel of food, a slice of tomato, perhaps, and lay it at the furthest end of the table. Upon this the wasp may feed to its heart content, as long as it leaves me alone. The wasp with whom I struck this deal was fair and just and kept his side of the bargain. Good.
Later wasps are either unaware of this pact, or paying no heed. Little fuckers.
more millie
Posted 27 Aug 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Daft, Observations, Photos
Category Daft, Observations, Photos
As is always the case when I go to visit my parents, my time has been fairly evenly split between drinking their beer reserves dry and watching their anxious cat, Millie, frolic by the river bank. Ordinarily, locating the elusive moggy is not too much of a problem, as she likes to be near my mum, even if that means ten or twenty feet away.
Mum and Dad have been away this weekend, however, and as cat-sitter and primary care-giver, I’ve been more preoccupied than ever with the cat and still more unable to catch up with the little blighter. It’s only when I climb to the third floor of the house and peer out of the window that I can normally catch a glimpse of her.
Usually, she is in the small patch of grass beyond the final garden in the block. She takes up a completely stationary position, focussing her unwavering attention on a small patch of grass, or perhaps a shrub. It is in this shrub, I believe, that she has decided that a shrew or wandering moorhen has taken up residence. So she stands stock-still, waiting for it to emerge. Never mind that the shrub is near see-through and contains no shrew, nor that she has waited an hour. She will keep waiting regardless, ever attentive, never surrendering hope. Sometimes, after a good while, she will swivel on her axis (she is a cat with a low centre of gravity) and examine a plot of land inches to the left. This will, naturally, be subject to the same inscrutable attention, indefinitely.
I wonder, actually, if she is conducting a survey – some grand project, where she will map the country in minute detail. The kind of project that man is too flighty and contemptible to complete. Only when she has committed every leaf, every blade of grass to her memory, will she set about the widescale act of removing wildlife from the vacinity. Sometimes she really does spot a creature – normally just an insect – and when she does she performs a series of careful, weighty two footed hops. She rarely catches her prey.
Only if I do approach, wanting to understand her peculiarly patient mind, do I discover that she can move fast, after all.
cat-taming
My parents are going away for five days over the bank holiday weekend, so – rather than have them put their nervous cat in a cattery – I am on pet-sitting duty. By the end of the weekend I vow to tame the flighty but remarkable Millie Shipley.
single minded Millie
Posted 05 Aug 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Photos
Category Observations, Photos
It’s always furiously difficult getting up close to my mum’s cat when I go home – she is both single minded and illusive. Here she is, looking exactly that.
Every day, however, she gives up her policy of caution and distance and accompanies my parents on a ten minute walk. To my knowledge, this is fairly unusual behaviour for a cat, much less one who is ordinarily rather unfriendly. At six thirty every evening she sits outside the meadow behind my parents’ house. They walk to meet her and set off along one side of it, while she gingerly pursues them, careful to never allow herself to come within ten yards. Once they reach the top of the field my parents will stop and Millie will take the opportunity to come nearer, perhaps allowing them to reach down and stroke the nape of her neck.
Then, after a moment’s pause, she takes control of the second leg of the adventure. Suddenly she will leap to her feat and dart onto the outdoor table, and wait for my parents to go and give her a cuddle. This is the only time of the day, generally, when she makes herself available for a proper stroking. Having pranced about between them for a moment or two, she leaps off the table and runs at full pelt to the other side of the meadow. It is my parents’ job to follow, and now the dynamic of the first half of the walk is reversed. Millie leads and my parents follow. Half way back is a flowerbed with two distinct paths through it. At the point where the path splits, Millie thinks hard and takes one route or the other. Once my parents have followed her back to the gate she either lingers while they stroll back to the house, or gallops off, back to pretending that they don’t exist.
oscar knows
Here’s one of those periodic cat stories which turn up in the papers and always end up charming me; this time it’s Oscar the rescue cat, who has a sixth sense that is pretty amazing, by the sounds of things. Here’s the report from the Guardian:
Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, morbid talent – predicting when patients will die.
When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours.Such is Oscar’s apparent accuracy – 25 consecutive cases so far – that nurses at the US home now warn family members to rush to a patient’s beside as soon as the cat takes up residence there.
“He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” said Dr. David Dosa, an expert in geriatric care who described the phenomenon in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one,” Dr Dosa added.
According to staff at the nursing home, Oscar began patrolling the wards around six months after he was adopted as a kitten, observing and sniffing at residents before occasionally choosing someone to sit by.
Oscar appeared to take the task seriously and was otherwise quite aloof, Dr Dosa said: “This is not a cat that’s friendly to people.”
The Steere home is a dementia centre which cares for people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other ailments.
Another doctor who works at the centre, Joan Teno of Brown University, based in Providence, said she became convinced of Oscar’s talent after he appeared to make a mistake.
Observing one patient, Dr Teno said she saw the woman was not eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.
However, Oscar would not stay inside the woman’s room and Dr Teno thought this meant his correct streak had been broken. Instead, it turned out her prediction was about 10 hours too early, and during the patient’s final two hours Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.
Scientists remain uncertain whether there is any predictive basis for Oscar’s talent, or if there are other factors at work, for example, an attraction to the warm blankets often placed on seriously ill residents.
Ace.
tiger triplets
This is amazing. The other night me and my friends, being high-brow intellectuals, spent a couple of hours in a Brighton restaurant arguing over who would win a fight between a tiger and a lion. We did not, however, discuss what would happen if a tiger met a dog, thinking it fairly unlikely that such an event would merit debate. But the Guardian today shows just what would happen if such a meeting occurred.
To quote the paper:
A Chinese dog has become the surrogate mother of tiger triplets born at a zoo in the country’s eastern Shandong province.
The mongrel bitch called Huani is suckling the tiger cubs, imaginatively named One, Two and Three by staff at Jinan Paomaling Wild Animal World, because their mother rejected them.
The zoo manager, Chen Yucai, said: “The family is getting along well and seems to enjoy each other.”
sea-lions video
Apologies for the lack of decent updates since I’ve been back in Brighton; still clearing out a few photos and videos at the moment, and suffering from a bit of post-trip blogger’s block. Should be some decent stuff up soon. In the meantime, here’s my last post about sea lions for the forseeable future. Like the other video I updated to youtube, it goes all grey at the beginning, which I don’t understand, but it gets its act together subsequently.
fascinated by the sealions
I mentioned how, provoked by the drama of the sea lions’ noise-making, a little dog decided that he wanted to join the party down on Pier 39 in San Francisco last week. It’s a shame that while a photo can just about capture the animal’s rapt attention and fascination, it can’t do justice to his furiously wagging tail, trembling body. or frantic, eager barks. Anyway – here he is. Good lad.
salty sea-dogs
Posted 10 May 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Observations, Travel
Category Observations, Travel
One of the most charming sights in San Francisco is the colony of sea lions which gather by Pier 39 down at the front of North Beach. I knew in advance that the animals could often be spotted between the pier and Alcatraz, and so when I walked down to the seafront on my first evening in the city, I skirted round the right hand side of the pier, looking out for any rocks where they might be perched. Alas, I didn’t see anything and just took a couple of rather grudging shots of the prison before my camera battery ran out.
When it did, I turned to my left and began to walk around the other side of the pier, and within moments heard a curious, discordant symphony of barks and grunts. Turning the corner, I saw the following, delightful spectacle.
I had no idea there would be so many! They don’t congregate like that all year, by any means, so apart from the remarkable weather it seems I’d timed my trip particularly well. The sea lions themselves can’t be done justice by photo, or even video – they were charming, fat and silly, most electing to stretch out in the sun and soak up the warmth, while a feisty few amused themselves by jumping up on the docks and ejecting others from their positions. Others merely contented themselves with honking loudly and repeatedly, often falling into time with each other.
My favourite was an enormous animal stretched out on top of several other dozing sea lions. He was easily the biggest fellow there, and set about wriggling and stretching until he had pressed all his fellow sunbathers out to the edges of his dock. Only when he had achieved a truly central position and stretched out as far as he could possibly could, did he settle.
Annoyed that my camera was down, and fearful that this was a one-off event (on this scale, at least), I returned the next evening to find the wharf almost as busy, and the sea lions possibly even louder than the night before. I noticed a lot of Americans call them sea-dogs, and they do look rather doggy, but I suspect the reference refers as much to their bark-like honk as anything – at one point a fellow animal-watcher lifted his pet dog up so that he could get a better look. Cue much barking, wriggling, and sniffing, as the animal clearly recognised a common, dog-like bond.
food in the land of chavez
Posted 28 Feb 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Uncategorized
Category Uncategorized
I’m a really big fan of BBC4′s excellent Cooking In The Danger Zone, which is perhaps the best programme on TV at the moment. I really like Stefan Gates’ passion for food, eagerly devouring rotten uncooked walrus and poached testicles. I like the way he occasionally gets carried away with his descriptions, although I was a bit disturbed just now when he pointed to a large hog-sized rodent in Venezuela, exclaiming; “unfortunately we’re not allowed to eat them, because they’re very rare – but apparently they taste very good. Sort of a like a big guinea-pig”.
He’s eaten guinea-pigs?
Suddenly I feel a bit sad.
buckets of fresh blood
Posted 01 Feb 2007 — by Jonathan
Category Uncategorized
Category Uncategorized
As I was explaining to Dan the other day, prior coverage of piranhas on this blog briefly made me a popular haunt for aficionados of the toothy fish – so I always feel duty bound to report on any developments in the field. Although truthfully, on the subject of piranhas (and dinosaurs, incidentally), I still feel the same way I did as a child, in other words I find it increasingly hard to not follow the word with a mental exclamation mark. Piranhas!! Dinosaurs!!
The Guardian news blog carries an interesting story today. A 52 year old Slovenian, Martin Strel, has previously “swum the 1,867-mile length of the Danube before building up to the Mississippi two years later and then, in 2004, the 2,488 miles of the Yangtze”. Now he’s turning to the frankly terrifying and spiky-fish infested waters of the Amazon.
He’s not too worried about the pain:
“As a young boy, I was beaten a lot by my parents and schoolmasters. This no doubt contributed greatly to my ability to ignore pain, and [to] endure.”
…but he’s taking a few precautions regardless:
“My escort boats will carry all the time buckets of fresh blood to pour in the water in case the piranhas or other fish attack me.”
Yikes. I hope that’ll be enough – all good piranha fans remember Obidos 1981:
“it is thought a shoal of the fish devoured up to 300 people when their boat capsized and sank near Obidos in Brazil in September 1981.”
Oh yeah, and he’s “swimming for peace, friendship and clean waters”.
dog blogging
Posted 17 Jul 2006 — by Jonathan
Category Observations
Category Observations
Me and Nat took a canine friend of ours, Gatsby, out for a walk at one in the morning the other night. It was the first time I have ever walked a dog, I think, unless you count holding on to a dog’s lead – his name was Jack – for a few minutes during a holiday in Wales when I was a child. Gatsby is a pretty big dog, too, and I am a notorious weakling, so I was satisfied to discover that I was capable of administering a decent grip on the hound at all times, even when he became animated at the distant sight of a black shape crawling across the black grass up ahead. I held firm and led Gatsby into St. Anne’s Well Gardens, where we held our position while Natalia went to investigate. Having pulled rank, I walked Gatsby back over to a safe distance and found that the object of his attention was a small hedgehog. And looking up I saw another retreating into the distance.
a hedgehog, yesterday.
Soon we were joined by one of those groups of teenage boys who perpetually hang around parks at one o’clock in the morning, and in the light from someone’s mobile phone we examined the critter, who, neglecting to roll into a ball, was clearly a pretty tough character and not too intimidated. Well, I hope not. While we, gregarious from drink – we’d spent the evening in the pub – chatted to the kids (all cooed over the dog and one took his wallet from his pocket to show me a photo of his own), Natalia bent over and lifted the hedgehog’s two front feet, gently, as if he were a wheelbarrow. I stroked his needles and thought of the stiff twigs and bristles on an outdoor broom. It would be in keeping with the bucolic nature of the scene if I could then report that he ambled gingerly off, but in fact the animal reached a pretty good pace as he scuttled away, leaving us wondering why we were all there standing in a big circle, our conversation finished.
Dogs – and hedgehogs – are excellent spurs for random conversations. And blog posts.
