I keep telling myself I’m not gonna participate in memes anymore, because I always wind up passing them along and then they come back to me from eight different directions.
But when Bora asks me to do something, I find it really hard to turn him down. He’s just like that. You know?
So here goes.
An interesting animal I had
I was working in a nursery in Rockville, Maryland, and we’d just gotten a shipment of houseplants from a wholesale nursery in Florida a couple days before, which is the only way I can figure that a Cuban tree frog found its way onto the stepladder in my garden supplies department. I caught her, put her in a coffee cup with lid, then punched out and went over to the pet store across the way and got a five-gallon aquarium for her. I had to: she’d never have lasted the winter in Maryland, and the nursery was surrounded by acres of asphalt and high-speed traffic. Julia (pronounced in the Spanish mode) was with me for five years, in six different houses, the move between two of which she rode out between Matthew’s feet in the passenger foot well of a tiny U-Haul, from Washington DC to Berkeley, which took a week.
An interesting animal I ate
I married into a Cantonese-American family, so there are plenty of options here. Think I’ll go with jellyfish, from the not-often-eaten-by-North-Americans phylum Cnidaria. Jellyfish happen to be one of my favorite foods anyway.
An interesting animal in the Museum
In 1990, in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum — a wonderful place, a museum-zoo hybrid — I watched tourists walk from one interpretive display to another, busily ignoring the HUGE chuckwalla on the rock wall near where I was sitting. It was not on the tour and had no signs, so it wasn’t really there. We sat together for a while.
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
Watched a desert sunset with an Audubon’s cottontail at Cima Dome.
An interesting animal in its natural habitat
Defining “natural habitat” as including 1) Pleistocene ranges of the animals in question and 2) reintroductions, then this: I was sitting on a chaise longue drinking a cup of coffee with Bill Broyles
And then a California condor soared slowly over us, twenty feet up, not moving a muscle, not moving a tip or quill of feather. I sipped my coffee.
Now it’s time to pass this along. Bora tagged nine people to start this meme off, so let’s accept that as canonical for the nonce. I tap
PZ (because more people need to know about his kitty Snowball)
Ron
Sherwood
Rana (because she’ll roll her eyes and groan fetchingly)
Dave
The Theriomorph (because it’s not like she has anything else to do these days)
The Immortal Soul of the Late Dr. Violet Socks
Brooklynite
and
Tigtog (because I bet she’ll have some marsupials.)
And you, dear reader, are tapped to answer any or all of these (not really phrased as) questions in comments.
The Cuban tree frog was interesting!
The year I lived in Oklahoma, I kept noticing box turtles on the roads. I would carefully steer around them, but not everybody did. I found a fair number damaged or killed by traffic, and started rescuing those that could survive, releasing them when they seemed healthy again.
At one time, we had around a dozen wandering around the rec. room.
One turtle had been hit on the head and had a large wound over one eye. After a few days, checking him over, I noticed a maggot crawling out of it. I sat down with him and tweezers and pulled out, one by one, a wiggling mass of maggots. The hole left behind must have been a half-inch deep into the flesh, and beyond the broken bone into the brain.
The turtle survived. In mid-summer, I was able to release him.
Got yer marsupials, mate.
An interesting animal I had
son’s rose tarantula, harriet. we got her with the understanding she would be a classroom pet, but for years she stayed with us over vacations. did you know that tarantulas can store semen until they feel it is the right time to breed? 9 months after we acquired harriet—after her first year of classroom duty—she spun a fabulous egg sack and web in her acquarium. my son [age 9] was busy calling all his friends to get them to adopt baby spiders. harriet apparently ate the few that hatched, dashing son’s plans. she lived 9 years, and was a very popular classroom pet, especially when she shed her exoskeleton. spiders have very small brains; you have to put a sponge in the water dish so they don’t drown.
An interesting animal I ate
none. certain sushi [not eel or octopus] is my limit. lobster has been off the menu since a certain incident while i was pregnant a million years ago. lamb is pushing it.
An interesting animal in the Museum
aren’t they all interesting? when the kids were growing up, we loved the oakland museum’s exhibit on local wildlife; laurence hall of science’s biology lab [where you can pet bunnies and turtles and snakes!] and dino exhibits; and the california academy of science in golden gate park. also, the oakland zoo used to have a tanuki—a japanese animal like a racoon—which didn’t get the attention it deserved.
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
this is more a tale of cognitive dissonence. my son’s high school bio teacher kept rats, and momrat kept reproducing, and son adopted 2 of the offspring. so we had these pet lab-rats, mike and ike, and a nice suburban cage setup in the family room, nutritious rat food, etc.
one night, son’s friend was sleeping over and he woke us up at 1:00 a.m. because someone had rattled the shades in the family room, and he thought they were breaking in. so we called the police, and they were out searching the block and the hillside for intruders. we discovered the intruder the next day. it was a wild rat, who had gotten into the house and wanted a piece of the good rat life. took us quite a while to get him out. [they are on to those humane traps.]
An interesting animal in its natural habitat
the deer come around the neighborhood to graze. the local deer are pretty acclimated to humans, but they don’t come in our yard because of the dogs. we do see them on the hillside out back, though, and in the neighbor’s yard.
FINE.
*heaves sigh*
Here
(One positive side effect: it made me realize how long it’s been since I’ve gone camping or been on a hike.)
Do I get a cookie?
Is Blogwarbot supposed to do I get a cookie?
Had:
I agree with Theriomorph; they’re all interesting! But I have to admit I’m a bit ADD: the best cat is the cat that’s Right Here Right Now. Since my little street rescue Molly is curled up next to my head on the back of the couch, she gets the current vote. She’s so soft, with long black fur that goes mahogany on her belly; a bit crippled in the hips, way sweet and way smart. In a minute or two she’ll “accidentally” stretch a bit, roll too far over, and will simply have to recoup in my lap, along with the nice warm laptop. Uh-huh.
Ate:
Whale (and yes, I feel awful about it). In Norway; I thought the small dark strip of meat was lamb, until I took a bite. My hosts couldn’t really tell me what kind of whale in English, but I think it was probably minke.
I regret to report that it’s extremely tasty, rather like a very rich veal. Or possibly that was the melted cheese on top (not kidding: whale with melted cheese).
in the Museum:
Bast!
Done with or to:
The midnight deer waltz: one step forward, two back. See, I rent a cottage in a small vineyard. There’s a deer gate, which we’d keep closed if we had any sense. However, many’s the night I’ve come home late to find the gate open and two or more sets of fiery green eyes turned my way from the rows of the vines. Much pot-banging and whistling ensues, along with a Grand Chase up around the back of the yard and then down through the rows of vines again…round and round we go, usually four or five times before the deer (it’s the same ones, a mother and her two fawns) decide it’s too much of a pain and head out the gate. Which I usually remember to close, at that point.
In its natural habitat:
At Denali Park in Alaska, you can climb on a big yellow school bus for an eight-hour sightseeing trip into The Mountain (the road is or at least was not open to regular traffic). Because these slow-moving yellow buses were the only traffic on the road for thirty years, and they seemed non-threatening, the wildlife pretty much got used to them. So one could see amazing things.
Our driver stopped the bus as a mother brown bear and her three cubs waddled across the road twenty feet in front of us, the last little bear of the three just bawling his head off the whole time—amazing sound! think duck call meets elk bugle, with a bit of chainsaw mixed in. His mom finally came back and gave him a good lick-n-tumble; that’s all he wanted.
Yeah. Well.
Okay.
Well, I’ll try again. For some reason, Blogger’s link didn’t work in comment #10; I’ll try again here without the fancy HTML stuff:
http://sherwords.blogspot.com/2007/09/animeme.html