Found Objects

These last few days the universe has been serving me birds, not cats. Pictures behind the cut.

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Note the photographer’s reflection in the one on the right. One in the town centre, one in a shopping street just outside it.

As before, there are cupcakes for these cats’ humans: all it needs isa mail message with your street address.

Another installment of Town Centre Cat Blogging. The one on the right is the image of Hendrik, except younger and thinner.

As before, if you happen to be one of these cats’ human, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes of your choice.

If you happen to be the human belonging to either of these cats, please send me a message with your street address and I’ll bake you a dozen cupcakes.

The little white cat in the window we saw today, looking down on the antique market and generally being very cute. Here’s a closer view:

If I hadn’t seen them do it, I wouldn’t have known what had caused this.

This is part of the gate of our old house, where wasps have pared some of the weathered top layer of the wood away to make their paper nest. It makes an intriguing small scratchy noise when you actually happen to be there while they’re doing it.

Here’s a detail at full resolution:

It’s interesting that they do it only vertically; the rest of the fence is of the same wood, equally weathered, but with horizontal slats, and it doesn’t show any evidence of wasp-paring at all.

The birds all came looking when I leant over the rail of the bridge with my camera, thinking I had food. When that wasn’t forthcoming they swam away. There were three grey cygnets and an off-white one, but I didn’t manage to get all of them in the viewer together.

Midsummer 2008, about 10 pm, looking west from our roof terrace. After a while the gold went away and it became spectacular greyscale, but I don’t think the poor little Praktica could have caught that and I didn’t think of borrowing Boudewijn’s much better camera.

The bats that live in our roof must hate June: it stays light so long that they can’t go outside until the swifts have eaten all the insects.

This is the sky over our roof terrace around 17:30 today. It’s now almost 22:00 and still not thundering, though it’s been getting steadily more oppressive since mid-day.

And the bag reads “biologische winterpeen” (organic winter carrot)…

I pass this bit of park several times a week and I’m used to geese sitting or walking in the road, but this time they walked faster, and one of them went “ka-PLECK ka-PLECK” in a weird way. Coming closer, I saw that it was not a goose at all, but a swan with a limp, presumably chasing the geese away from where its mate sat on eggs.

I took three pictures, but with getting the camera from my bag (while the swan got the geese well out of the threat zone) and a car trying to park off-camera on the left only the first was any good.

Location: Noordenbergsingel, Deventer. In the background is the railway bridge over the River IJssel.

…or a really small elephant?

This is Rhynchocyon udzungwensis, the grey-faced sengi, a giant elephant-shrew. According to Galen Rathbun who discovered it, it is “the first new species of giant elephant-shrew to be discovered in more than 126 years”.

It weighs almost a pound and a half and is easily the size of a rabbit. I wouldn’t want to find that in my stew.

A gentleman dining at Crewe
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter “Don’t shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one, too.”

It’s actually more closely related to normal elephants than to normal mice.

The setting: the city park, large sloped lawns with occasional trees.

The cast:

Human #1: male, sporty business type, jacket over open-necked shirt, carrying a white tennis ball. Accompanied by…
Dog #1: large long-legged young black love-to-run type, male (aggressively so).
Human #2: male, middle-aged, dressed nondescriptly, wielding a ball-thrower with a yellow tennis ball. Accompanied by…
Dog #2: laid-back elderly retriever, probably eunuch.

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Taken by Rebecca sometime last month when there suddenly was snow in the morning. The cat in question was probably the youngish ginger tom we call Tinklepuss because of his bell.

I took this (and five others which didn’t come out as pretty as this one) on December 16, leaning dangerously out of Rebecca’s bedroom window. It was a full double rainbow at that point, but the old Canon doesn’t have a wide-angle lens and the rainbow was changing too fast to risk the panorama function, which I’ve never tried properly.

Note the slightly lighter sky outside the outer rainbow and the much lighter sky inside the inner rainbow. If it hadn’t shown in the picture I’d probably have thought that it was an optical illusion, and if the sky on the inside hadn’t been much lighter (the effect in reality was even stronger than in the photograph) I’d have seen it as a band of darker sky between the two rainbows.

Every morning, we’re treated to a new and unique piece of snail art. Or perhaps slug art, I never see the critters as they do it in the night, but all the slithery things I see during the day carry their house on their back.