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This shortlisted snap of a puffin getting ready to feed its chicks was taken by Jason Davies in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park
I have three parrots in a large aviary, two Cockatiels and one Indian Ringneck. We had a bit of an 'animal antics' moment the other day. A large python tried to get one of the birds and got herself well and truly stuck in the wire. Luckily for the birds, it happened on the way in, not on the way out with a full belly. :) Surprisingly they were rather unperturbed by the whole thing. Ho-hum seemed to be the order of the day as far as they were concerned.
She's very lucky we are the kind of people we are, we rescued her and released her in a nearby nature reserve.
It was tricky, she was caught in two places. I managed to get her tail end free but the other place where she was caught was really tight. My partner had to snip the wire, which was a bit of a worry, but he managed it without doing her any substantial damage. I held onto her body and slowly pulled her back towards me and he grabbed her behind the head as her head came free. He held her up and I unwrapped her from my arm, dropped her tail into an old pillowcase, he let go of her head and voila, into the pillowcase, and a knot tied. Then up to the reserve to be set free to hunt another day.
It was like she knew we were trying to help her, she never even attempted to bite either of us and when I tipped her out of the pillowcase she just sort of sat there for a while looking at us and flicking her blue tongue out like she was saying 'thank you'. Then she slowly slid away and climbed the nearest tree.
I'm sure it was a 'she' because she was wearing a diamond pattern and you know what they say about diamonds being a girl's best friend. :) And she was beautiful, bright yellow underneath and those lovely diamond-shaped markings on top.
Check it out.
David Attenborough.
David who began his career at the advent of global air travel, said he couldn't imagine his life being any other way than travelling everywhere. Pictured: David with a bull elephant seal in 1990's The Trials Of Life
David claims the richness he saw in Africa in the 50s will not come back because humans have over-run the world. Pictured: The Serengeti
One woman, from the UK, shared an image of her cat hiding in a cupboard and added she is taking the self isolating thing very seriously
Bayley Mooney arrived at her home in Boston, Massachusetts to a scene of devastation, with ripped up toilet paper and kitchen roll - presumably bought in bulk ahead of advice to self-isolate due to coronavirus - scattered across the floor
ouch!!
The images appear to prove true the popular English panagram: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'
This reminds me of our late brown standard poodle! She used to blend in too!
From the kitten snoozing in the sunshine on the windowsill to the dog basket that has pride of place in the kitchen, most pet owners would say their pooch or pussycat is what makes their house a home. Now, it seems that some of them have gone even further and are matching their home 'fur-nishings' to their pets. So while being careful not to tread on Fido or Tiddles, can you find the well-disguised dogs (top: left, middle, right and bottom: left and right) and camouflaged cats (bottom middle) hiding in the 'car-pets' that have more than a hint of animal magic?
The 17-year-old Pomeranian, whose owner contracted COVID-19 last month, had been quarantined at a government facility but returned home over the weekend.
A wonder chicken?
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I thought you would be interested in this story I found on MSN:
[full story click below]
http://a.msn.com/01/en-au/BB11nwRd?ocid=se2
© National Geographic This ‘wonderchicken’ walked the Earth with dinosaurs
Twenty years ago, near the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, an amateur fossil hunter named Maarten van Dinther picked up a featureless block of rock the size of a pack of cards. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the little slab contained a tiny and perfect skull from the oldest direct relative of modern birds ever discovered, a fowl that walked the Earth with dinosaurs.
The animal, affectionately dubbed the ‘wonderchicken’ by the international team of scientists that analyzed the fossil, lived 66.7 million years ago, just 700,000 years before the asteroid impact that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs. Named Asteriornis in a paper published today in Nature, the species—known from fossils of its hind limbs in addition to its skull—has features similar to both ducks and chickens, suggesting it was related to the shared ancestor of both groups.
“This is an extraordinary and exciting find, which reveals new insights in a very poorly known chapter of avian evolution,” says Gerald Mayr, an ornithologist and expert on bird evolution at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, who was not part of the new study.
Asteriornis was a long-legged shorebird that could probably fly and likely combed the beaches of late Cretaceous Europe, which then had strings of islands in warm and shallow seas and a climate similar to the present-day Bahamas.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200318-the-worlds-largest-nature-reserve
Future of our Planet.
Scientists and conservationists are proposing that up to half of Earth’s land and oceans be protected for nature. Is it a necessary step or a pipe dream?
