Furball

Photograph of a prarie dog at London Zoo

This prarie dog was a tricky character; (s)he kept doing entirely adorable poses in parts of the enclosure that I couldn't get on camera. Outrageous!
And the keeper was most rude when I complained about it. Really, you'd think they'd train the animals to be more photogenic.

FUN FACTS ABOUT PRARIE DOGS:

1. Prarie dogs are rodents, not dogs, as I was surprised to learn aged eleven, having assumed they were America's equivalent of the dingo.*

2. According to Professor Con Slobodchikoff, prarie dogs may have the most sophisticated language of any animal, able to communicate the news of predators approaching as well as describing the colour, type of predator, and the direction it's coming from.

3. Prarie dogs are social creatures and are very affectionate, greeting one another with a prarie dog kiss.

4. Black-tailed prarie dogs live in large communities known as "towns". The largest known prarie dog town covered 25,00 square miles in Texas and was home to perhaps as many as four hundred million prarie dogs.

Who knew?
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*Without the baby eating.

Diorama of Iguana

Green Iguana at London Zoo

A photo of a Green Iguana at London Zoo. Although this one is extremely and obviously green, apparently these iguanas come in a range of colours, from multicoloured to red. These iguanas are pretty awesome; they have an extra photosensory organ on the top of their heads which is known as the parietal eye. While it's nowhere as developed as their actual eyes, it can detect movement and changes in light and dark, thus helping the iguana to detect predators coming in from above - a useful feature in a tree climbing lizard. Their actual eyes are able to see into ultraviolet wavelengths, so the iguana is easily able to ensure it gets enough UV light to produce sufficient vitamin D.

It's admittedly not an amazing photograph, but it's darn tricky getting a good picture through a scratched glass tank!

Hey Hey We're The Monkeys

Two squirrel monkeys

And we're back to photos of squirrel monkeys! This photograph was taken, as you've already worked out, at London Zoo.

The most famous squirrel monkey of them all was of course Miss Baker, one of the first two animals who were launched into space in 1959 and survived, along with the rhesus monkey Miss Able. She went on to live for twenty five years afterwards, receiving copious amounts of fanmail from children who'd heard of her exploits, and when she died of kidney failure in 1984, over 300 people attended her funeral.

Who knew!

The Miscreant

Escaped Pelican at London Zoo

In my last post, I mentioned that when I visited the Penguin Beach at London Zoo there were two naughty Eastern White Pelicans who sneaked into the penguin enclosure; here's a picture of one of them. Apparently the pond that the pelicans usually live in had frozen over, so they were moved to temporary accomodation next to the penguins, from which they promptly escaped, climbed onto the roof of a shed by the penguin beach, and proceeded to jump over and flap across to the pool.

Various keepers were on hand to herd the mischevious pelicans back to their temporary home, and they were both recaptured fairly quickly! It was highly entertaining though, I must admit.

Funny Looking Penguin

Juvenile Penguin at London Zoo

This photograph is of what I can only describe as a funny looking penguin at London Zoo's Penguin Beach. Penguin Beach contains four species; the rockhopper penguin, blackfooted penguin, humboldt penguin and macaroni penguin. I've looked up  pictures of each of these species, and this penguin looks like none of them. (On the day I visited, Penguin Beach also contained two pelicans who had escaped from their own accomodation and jumped into the penguin pool, but clearly this is not a pelican either.)

So on balance, I suspect this photograph is of a juvenile humboldt or blackfooted penguin, but who knows which! It's tricky to judge before their adult feathers come in. Alas, I obviously make a poor ornithologist. Ho hum! He was an obligingly photogenic fellow, whatever he is, unlike all his friends who were waddling and splashing and zooming around the pool with no thought for the humans vainly trying to get a good shot of them.

Squirrel Monkey

Common Squirrel Monkey

As promised, another squirrel monkey photograph, taken on my recent trip to London Zoo. Whilst I took dozens of photos of the monkeys, it was admittedly tricky to get pictures of them that weren't crazily blurry. They don't like to sit still (probably because in the wild this might result in being eaten).

The Common Squirrel Monkey comes from the Amazon Basin in South America, and lives in the middle canopy of the rainforest. At first, when I saw the monkey in this photo carefully examining and later nibbling his tail I wondered what he was doing, but apparently squirrel monkeys have a habit of smearing food onto their tails, and may smear urine all over themselves as well. A charming habit! I suspect that advertising that particular fact in the squirrel monkey enclosure would actually be more effective at persuading people not to try to touch the monkeys than all the signs warning that they bite.

An interesting fact about squirrel monkeys relates to their colour vision; in these monkeys, one gene on the X chromosome codes for colour vision, and there are three versions of this gene, each of which produces a pigment sensitive to a different wavelength of light. Because male squirrel monkeys have only one X chromosome, they are dichromatic (i.e. any colour which they can see can be created using a mixture of just two pure spectral lights - similar to what we call colour blindness in humans); however, because female squirrel monkeys have two X chromosomes, about two-thirds of them have trichromatic vision like humans (i.e. a mixture of three pure spectral lights is required to create all the colours which they are able to see). Researchers have successfully used gene therapy to give adult male squirrel monkeys trichromatic colour vision.

Welcome to the Jungle

Squirrel monkey at London Zoo

It's a monkey!

This weekend I went to ZSL London Zoo with my boyfriend. We had been meaning to go for about a year, because last year for his birthday present I adopted a squirrel monkey for him from the zoo,* but obviously we had to wait until the coldest weekend in the year. Being a naturally chilly person (both in temperature and personality), I wore eight layers of clothing to ensure I wouldn't get too cold. I was so bundled up I couldn't lift my arms above shoulder-height. But it was worth it!

But anyway, we had an awesome day! It was the first day of half-term, so I had expected it would be pretty busy, but in fact it was fairly quiet - I think the cold kept people at home. It was really nice being able to walk around the zoo without being buffeted by hordes of people. We went to visit my boyfriend's adopted squirrel monkey, Bounty, who lives with his monkey clan in an awesome exhibit which you can walk through. It's highly entertaining to watch them all bouncing around the place, and consequently I have a whole lot of monkey photos which will probably take over this blog for some time! Prepare to learn more than you ever needed to know about squirrel monkeys...

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*Because I kept asking what he wanted for his birthday and he kept giving me silly answers like "a monkey". I am nothing if not literal :D

Snowy Gates

Not as wonky as my previous offering, happily! If you look closely you can see the nubbins of snowmen that appeared to have been decapitated by the time I got there.

Wonky Architecture in the Snow

There's a reason why I hardly ever post pictures of architecture or buildings or even landscapes on this blogs, and it's because I struggle like a small child to take pictures that are even vaguely level. The even sadder thing is that my camera actually does have a "grid" function that you can turn on, superimposing a grid onto the screen, and then you can line up the picture with the lines on the screen and not take photos that look like they've been captured by a seasick photographer on the high seas. Alas, I have only ever turned the grid function on by mistake, and I have no idea how to do it on purpose. Consequently I fear that my photographs will continue to be as ludicrously wonky as this one.

Another snowy architecture photo. I do like the colours in the photo, especially the weirdly green trees, covered in lichen. If only my hands weren't so ludicrously wobbly!

Dark Archway

If only it had been really sunny I think this could have been a good photo. We've had copious amounts of snow here for the past week, and as I missed the first day of snow, when it's all pristine as nice, due to being a hundred and fifty miles away, I was determined to catch up with the photographic opportunities as soon as possible. I went on a mad rampage of snowy photography on a very overcast day, and then today, when it is still snowy but also very sunny… I forgot to take my camera as I left the house. Facepalm! It's even more inexcusable because I got some nice pictures of snowy rooftops from my window this morning, after last night deposited another inch or so of fresh snow across the landscape. Ho hum!

I am going to the zoo at the weekend, so look out for some blurry pictures of exotic animals coming your way very soon...

Tangled Up In Blue

The latest controversy to strike the office at my place of work is the vexed issue of tea scum. One half of the office insists it's caused by leaving the teabag in too long; the other half have an unshakeable belief that scum will occur if you put the milk in last.

 I once had the formation of tea scum explained to me by a scientist friend, so when the debate got heated for the second time and my opinion was canvassed, I couldn't stop myself from pointing out that although I couldn't remember the scientific explanation, I knew that neither camp was right and that the scum could be reduced by introducing acidity to the tea in the form of a drop or two of lemon juice.

This was met with a stony silence and then my colleagues resumed the debate. But my curiosity was piqued again and so I had to Google it. Turns out that tea scum was unexplained by science until the 1990s when research was conducted into the question that concluded that the calcium carbonate found in hard water is what allows scum to form in tea through oxidation at the tea's surface, and that scum can be eliminated either by using soft water or by introducing acid to the mix, for example with a drop or two of lemon juice.

Who knew?

Wax & Wane

A photograph of a candle, in case you had difficulty working that out. Wikipedia, my trusty guide, tells me that while modern candles are usually made of paraffin, back in the day they could be made from beeswax, tallow, or even spermaceti extracted from the head of a sperm whale. Poor sperm whales. I was amused to note that their scientific name is physeter macrocephalus. I confess don't know what "physeter" means, but "macrocephalus" translates as "bloody big head".

I was also intrigued to discover that sperm whales have the largest mammalian brain both in proportion to its body size and mass, and is the only living creature that has a gullet large enough to swallow a human whole. The most famous sperm whale is obviously Moby Dick, but I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of the book. The only aspects of it that I really enjoyed were the ones in which Herman Melville got into the scientific aspects of whaling. There's nothing like the smug feeling of reading an author whose book you're not enjoying strenuously denying the existence of the blue whales we now know really do exist. Okay, so Melville was a Victorian living in the pre-Attenborough age, but that's not the point.

On the Hedge Of Glory

Regular service is resumed! I apologise profusely for the break, I hadn't realised it was almost a week since my last post. That is most disgraceful of me. I need to head outside in the sunshine again and get snapping some new wintery pictures! Although the only real hint that this photo of a hedge was taken in the depths of January is the profusion of brown twiglet leaves (this is a technical botanical term).

Hedges do not normally strike me as something particularly photo-worthy, I have to admit, but sometimes you just have to strike out in a fresh direction and risk looking like a hedge-obsessed madwoman. For the sake of art!