Hay There

It's a photograph of a giraffe eating hay. Hurrah! The giraffes at London Zoo were a little sad when we saw them, because they weren't able to go outside as the ground was just covered in ice. I've never seen a giraffe slip over, but I imagine it's not something to be desired.

Simba...

Asian lion cub at London Zoo

One of the main reasons I wanted to go to London Zoo was to see the baby Asian lions they have at the minute. They were born in October 2011 so they're growing up fast but they are ludicrously cute. When we got to the lion house, it was late afternoon and they were snuggled up in a big pile of fur with their mum in a patch of sunshine, right up against one of the viewing windows in their enclosure.

Asian lions are super endangered. Although they used to have a range that continued as far west as Greece and Italy, these days they are only found in the wild in the Gir forest of Gujarat, India; a census of the lion population in 2011 indicated that there were about 411 Asiatic lions in the world, up from a total of 234 in 1936 when the first ever census was taken. They are threatened by habitat destruction, and are killed by electric fences and open wells.

Flutter By

Butterfly in London Zoo's Butterfly Paradise

It's a butterfly! And a very pretty one too. I like going in butterfly houses and admiring the pretties (and also, they're really warm and cosy, which is nice when there's snow on the ground outside). Admittedly I am less keen when they flap in my face, but as long as they're hanging off leaves looking pretty/eating rotten fruit, I'm happy.

While we were in the butterfly house, my boyfriend told me that some butterflies drink blood. Thinking he had gone briefly mad, I laughed and said he was confusing them with bats. But no! I was entirely wrong. It was there in black-and-white on one of the signs in the exibit. I googled it, and found this picture of butterflies drinking blood from a sock. Yes, you heard me. A sock. If you didn't know already, it turns out that butterflies are one of the sock's few natural predators. Also, here is a National Geographic article about vampire moths. Apparently in Slavic folklore, vampires were able to take the form of butterflies.

This whole discovery has rather changed the way I view these insects. I used to think they were nice decorative creatures to have around the place, sort of like nature's bunting. Now I know they are opportunistic greedy blood-sucking horrors. The butterfly house will never be the same again.

Peck

Juvenile penguin at London Zoo's Penguin Beach

Another photograph of the very fine juvenile penguin I mentioned in this previous post. I'm not sure quite what he hoped to achieve by pecking this rock, but penguins are not known for their intellectual capacity so I guess we'll just have to cut him some slack and hope he learns to distinguish rocks from fish sometime soon.

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?
_________________________________________________________
*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!

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.

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!

Jolly Jack Tar

A close-up photograph of some tar or similar crud on a telephone pole near my house. Hurrah for that!

Winter Berries

Lovely red winter berries on a sunny (yet extremely cold) day. It's enough to make you want to cook some kind of delicious red berry strudel.

Except I didn't know whether or not they were poisonous.

Metal Implant

I have no idea what this random yet very specifically shaped piece of metal was doing on the top of a wooden post near my house, but I rather liked the colours it's made as it gently rusts away. It's hard to find nice flowers to photograph in the winter, but I guess that doesn't mean there's nothing at all of interest around and about.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Another angel! This time, the silhouette of one of the angels on a cute little candle decoration we have; my mother bought it in Germany. You light the candle and the heat rising from it sends several little angels spinning around above it. No doubt further pictures will follow because it cries out for photography (at the same time as it sets something of a challenge....)

P.S. Happy New Year! Hurrah for my first post of 2012. I think this is a suitably chirpy start to the year.

The thing I like most about this charming and very very orange flower, is it's scrunched up curly-wurly petal. The thing I like least is my photography skills. WHY GOD WHY did I have to cut half the petals out of the shot? It looks very ungainly. Originally this was not going on the blog for that precise reason, but I'm so low on picture stocks right now that I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. Or possibly bouquet.

Oh well. Into each life some rain must fall.

So I've been racking my brains to think of something interesting to discuss in this post but unfortunately I have realised that I'm not very good at it. I have lots of interesting thoughts whilst wandering around the place, but few when sat at the computer. What I need is a dictaphone. Then I can be one of those people who strides around the place grasping a small black box to my face and shouting "NOTE TO SELF: TURN OVEN OFF" and "MUST BUY BINBAGS".

Ooh, binbags!

"What a dull topic!", I hear you cry. "There is nothing exciting about binbags!"

That is where you are wrong. Did you know that the binbag was invented by Herbert A. Resplendency-Potts of Wiltshire in 1894, after a careless servant dropped a lead dustbin on his foot? Of course you don't, because it's a huge lie. In fact, they were invented in the 1950s by three Canadians, who to the best of my knowledge had suffered no garbage-related trauma. But it's not such a good story.

Also exciting are the novelty Christmas pudding binbags which I recently came across in John lewis. I was extremely excited ...until I realised that I don't take out the rubbish. But one day, when I have my own house, my rubbish will out-Christmas everyone else's. Plus, even when it's not Christmas you can get these novelty goldfish binbags. Your neighbours probably won't judge you at all.

Pastel Perfect

I was surprised to see that I hadn't already blogged this picture, because I am quite fond of it! I love the colours of the hydrangea and the contrast with the little marmalade hoverfly (which looks like it's balancing on one leg in that picture).

Whilst I don't know the name of this kind of hydrangea (I would guess it's hydrangea macrophylla?), it's apparently a lacecap as opposed to a mophead - meaning that it has large, showy but sterile flowers around the outer edge of a number of much smaller fertile ones -you can see the two types in the picture. Mophead hydrangeas are the ones you immediately think of when someone leaps out from behind a wall and shouts "hydrangea!" - i.e., the ones with big round fluffy-looking flowerheads. The colour of your hydrangeas will be affected by the pH of the soil, which is rather interesting.

High Drama

A rather lovely and highly melodramatic rose, still covered in raindrops after a brief shower. I always find it tricky to get nice pictures of roses, and this took an awful lot of attempts, but I'm fairly pleased with how it came out! Worthy of a tragic romance...

Zoom

And it's back to plants. With another flower that I cannot identify but thought was rather cool. Not much else to say, really!

Some Sunny Day

Ah, summer. Please come back.

Spring Has Sprung

Close-up photo of a fern leaf, all furled up and waiting to spring out on the world!

I don't know whether it's actually true but I have heard from several sources that Sigmund Freud has pteridophobia, or a morbid fear of ferns. Seems a strange affliction, but then he was undoubtedly a strange man.

Did you know that the word "fern" applies to any of 12,000 different species of plants? Plus, they reproduce via spores.

Enough with the fern facts now, I feel.

Freaky Stuff

Close-up of the stem of a giant gunnera plant, gunnera manicata. Them's some peculiar plants, it's got to be said!

Say What?

This curious fellow is a face in a tree :D

Apparently the phenomenon of seeing faces or shapes in objects like clouds or trees is known as pareidolia. Carl Sagan theorised that seeing faces like this is common because we're hard-wired to recognise them; but precisely because we have the ability to distinguish faces at a distance and in poor lighting, we end up seeing faces when they're not there. Hence we see faces here and here and here... even though they're not there. Unsurprisingly, when faces are distinguished they're often given a religious slant, hence all the bizarre stories about jesus appearing in a bit of marmite. Or a chapati, depending on where you're from.

People who can't recognise faces correctly suffer from prosopagnosia.