I don't know, but . . .

The mamba was three feet long, and coiled in a neat oval. As I trotted out on an errand I planted my foot on something soft and looked down. My left foot was squarely across the middle of the snake's coil, and about two inches back from its head.

I wasn't known for atheletic prowess, but I put in good speed as I yelled "Snake, snake!" Men congregated, bearing sticks and a shovel, and the snake soon came apart. At first the snake must have been surprised -- it didn't move much, but when the blows started landing it whipped around pretty fast, though fruitlessly.

I don't remember who got to take the meat home.

Roberts Field has had power outages, and sometimes planes have had to divert.

The Liberia Airport Authority (LAA) has informed the Senate Transport Committee that a group of birds, feeding from nearby dumpsites, has been causing significant disruptions to the airport’s power supply.

Initially, the LAA had attributed the disruption to an electrical issue stemming from the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC) power grid.

However, in a subsequent update, LAA officials revealed that the birds have been perching on the airport’s transformers, leading to frequent electricity problems. This unusual interference has resulted in intermittent power outages, significantly impacting operations at the airport.

Image taken from Knews Online.

Goat herd behavior: I'd not heard of this before. Goats have never been much in my orbit.

If you are responsible for feeding your herd, they will associate you with the Flock Queen. The herd may attempt to follow you wherever you go and may be in a state of confusion when you are not around.

and

If you move your herd by driving them from the rear, they will come to think of you as the Top Buck. ... If you hold this position, you may have trouble handling the other bucks in the herd who are constantly challenging your authority.

A rabbit track, as usual--I was curious if AmerIndians domesticated goats (seems not), and found a list that included stingless bees. That sounded interesting--it might help get around objections to bee-keeping in the city.

Unfortunately, they are tropical or subtropical only. Their honey is expensive (\100ドル/pound or thereabouts). It apparently contains more flavonoids than the usual honeybee's output, and all sorts of wonderful claims are made for its medicinal properties. "stingless bee honey has antioxidant, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, and natural moisturizing properties that aid in wound healing. Moisture content, water activity, pH, peroxide, non-peroxide, phenolic acids, flavonoids, vitamins, and enzymes are likely to be the components of stingless bee honey that contribute to fast wound healing".

An alligator was found in a lake near Green Bay. It wasn't very big.

Somebody must have brought it here and either lost or abandoned it. Although alligators can survive a little while if the water is frozen over, it gets a bit too cold for them. Maybe one could bury itself deeply enough in the mud, but I doubt it.

The alligator's "brumation"--quasi-hibernation while still awake--is new to me. It doesn't sound like they can do much until they warm up, though

Now that I think of it, it reminds me of ticks, which in contrast are not rare here. They can sit still waiting for a host for months. But they spring into action immediately.

Many of the metal ends (rostrums) on the end of Roman and Carthaginian rams survived, and a previously unlocated naval battle is now known. One end of the rostrum was a hollow socket to fit on the end of the wooden prow. The front of it was split into several shovel-like spikes for poking holes into other ships, with gaps between to help snag the enemy's oars if you wound up skimming alongside instead of hitting squarely.

Strangely, the divers have found that the hollowed-out insides are often filled with small objects such as coins. This, he says, is the work of octopuses, who have turned the rostrums into temporary dens. They have a magpie-like tendency to pick up treasure – and fill their homes with trinkets. "They are inveterate collectors," he says. "They'll take anything they can get their hands – or tentacles – on."

Even after a year of exposure to the nuts and rocks chimps didn't figure out that they could crack the nuts. (Some chimps elsewhere do crack nuts with rocks.) "According to the zone of latent solutions hypothesis in Anthropology, chimpanzees ... can reinvent cultural behaviors individually." The experiment seems to disprove this; chimps have to learn how. They apparently show each other. I'd never heard of the zone of latent solutions before, and it sounds overly expansive. Cats are natural hunters, but to be effective hunters they have to learn--and that's just using native equipment, not external tools.

I wonder how much the chimps learned from watching humans.

Sometimes I like a background I don't have to pay attention to, like a live La Palma volcano feed, or a waterhole in the Namib desert. (As I type an oryx is drinking.) A few minutes ago an owl splashed in the waterhole, and then rested by the side a while. In the infrared light his eyes glared white. But when he turned to walk away and then fly off, he essentially turned invisible. Why his back feathers would be IR-neutral with his surroundings, and not the rest of him, I don't know. Blending in with visible light makes sense. Snakes, mosquitoes, fish and frogs can sometimes see IR--not all of them are relevant in the desert, or for birds.

I remember reading decades ago that dogs didn't seem very interested in movies. They were alert to sounds, but the motion on the screen meant nothing to them.

On the other hand, dogs can watch TV and cats can too. From the latter: "Yes, cats can watch TV but process images differently than humans. TV images are tougher for cats to identify to see because they process at a rate of 70 – 80 Hz; faster than what TV’s show. Cats can see many of the same colors although some red colors are desaturated." Dogs do not see as well, and have fewer colors.

There's a difference between modern TVs and old projection movies. The movies projected images one after another and relied on human persistence of vision to have the images blend together rather than flicker. Nobody likes to watch flicker, and dogs and cats seem to need higher frame rates than people do (predator eyes?). So movies wouldn't be so attractive.

But old-style TV's used glowing phosphors--would their fading overlap the next image? Not really. Different colors have different fading times, but they're generally less than 1/1000 second. The monitors I used to use at work had refresh rates of 60-80 Hz: good enough for me, but maybe marginal for a cat. LCD displays can have refresh rates of over 5/1000 second. That's plenty fast enough to keep it from flickering for a cat.

Of course the pixel colors are designed to look realistic for human eyes. I don't know exactly how to map that for cat vision. If cats are nearsighted (per the link), then the "everything-in-focus" world of a nearby TV screen might be especially fascinating.

During conversation after dinner, our birthday guest mentioned that border collies were highly intelligent, but if not given adequate training and stimulation, would become destructive. Naturally this reminded me of college students. "Due to their demanding personalities and need for mental stimulation and exercise, many border collies develop problematic behaviors in households that are not able to provide for their needs. They are infamous for chewing holes in walls and furniture, and destructive scraping and hole digging, due to boredom." The parallels seemed obvious.

A more detailed explanation of what makes border collies tick suggests that this isn't perfectly comparable, though.

When you recline in a recliner chair, the foot rest unfolds up to form a rest for you, and the sides which protected the seat parts jut out below it. From your point of view this is a comfortable foot rest, but from below this makes a little cave just right for a small enough dog to curl up in.

They landed on D-Day

Bing and the other dogs proved to be very useful, especially for locating mines and booby traps. "They would sniff excitedly over it for a few seconds and then sit down looking back at the handler with a quaint mixture of smugness and expectancy," he wrote, noting that the dogs would then be rewarded with a treat. "The dogs also helped on patrols by sniffing out enemy positions and personnel, hence saving many Allied lives," he added.

However, in addition to being saviors, the dogs were also victims. Monty was severely wounded on D-Day, while Ranee was separated from her battalion shortly after landing in Normandy and never seen again. But they were later replaced by two German shepherds who had switched sides and soon became friends with Bing.

My wife was listening to one of Drachinifel's "dry dock" (Q&A) episodes, when the subject of ship's pets came up. Apparently in the early 70's the Royal Navy decided that (presumably for reasons of hygiene), no ship's pets were permitted. That did not prevent sailors from trying.

How about an elephant?

HMS COURAGEOUS 1974-1979 adopted an African Elephant that someone found tethered to a bollard next to the taxi rank on Helensburghs mainstreet. They called him *Mongo* and he lived in an old Chacon that they put in their Lay-apart store just up from 6-Berth.

I can imagine sailors yarning a hoax like this--they're famous for them. I can also easily imagine them trying to do it just to prove they could. And if anyplace would be challenging to fit an elephant it would be on a nuclear submarine.

Unfortunately for the story, I can't see any easy openings in the deck big enough to sling one below, and I can't imagine a captain agreeing to keep such an attention-getting passenger on top. Maybe on a cruiser... But then it wouldn't just be the elephant acquisition method that was untrue, but the ship's name as well. Pity. It would be such a wonderful way to tell the brass where to put their rules about pets.

By the way, the text in the link about the elephant was lifted from a thread on "Rum Ration" about Ships Pets and Mascots. Somewhat more plausible mascots, including "unsinkable Sam," are shown here.

While contemplating a tiny spider the other morning I wondered: are there any vegetarian arachnids?

Spiders and scorpions and ticks and even horseshoe crabs (new addition--or maybe a very old one). The latter sometimes eat algae, harvestmen eat anything handy, mites eat--it depends on the species, but anything handy, but ticks--no, scorpions--no. Spiders: Bagheera Kiplingi sometimes eats insects but more often eats "protein- and fat-rich nubs called Beltian bodies" on Mimoseae trees. I like the name, but it isn't appropriate for a largely green vegetarian.

After looking up the first link, I looked up Donald Swann. I had no idea anyone had tried to make an opera of Perelandra. Some time after Lewis’ death, however, the film rights to the Perelandra story had been sold and as a result, an embargo was placed on commercial dramatic adaptations. Following this, the Perelandra Opera vanished into obscurity for another 50 years, until the Oxford CS Lewis Society arranged a limited reproduction of it in 2009. There are no commercially available recordings of the performance, but it was recorded and high-quality archive CD-sets made available at selected research institutions."

Unfortunately, the UW-Madison doesn't seem to be one of them. Wheaton looks like the nearest And I wonder who owns the film rights--or if they reverted from disuse They reverted. (I can't imagine a successful film version. Too much of the story involves interior reactions to sights and sounds and tastes that the rest of us, in a bent world, would have different reactions to.)

Three short selections.

This morning I had the window open, and heard a loud honking. A flight of geese flew over at about 20' high--pretty low given that there's not much open space beyond the trees in that direction. About 10 seconds later, another wave flew over, between houses, this time at about 10' high.

10 seconds after them, a couple of geese ran down the road after them.

"Supermarkets snub coconut goods picked by monkeys"

BBC reported that several British companies, panicked by PETA, have "vowed to stop selling" "any products sourced from monkey labour."

Male monkeys are able to pick up to 1,000 coconuts a day, Peta says. It's thought that a human can pick about 80.

It said it also discovered "monkey schools", where the animals were trained to pick fruit, as well as ride bikes or play basketball for the entertainment of tourists.

As usual, PETA describes the worst case as normative. That's when they don't outright lie: I read what they wrote of treatment of cows in Wisconsin--did they think we who live here don't have eyes?

I gather that the companies are perfectly happy to have humans do this harvesting instead--which is much more difficult and dangerous for a human than for a monkey. Priorities, you understand...

Wasn't there once an advertising slogan "Untouched by human hands?"

While resting on the pier by the marina on the harborwalk at Port Washington, we watched the barn swallows perching on the wires. One of them seemed to have acquired a 2" fluffy gull feather behind its feet that it could not dislodge, despite about half an hour's effort.

The feather didn't seem to seriously impair flying.

A second barn swallow kept coming back to this one. At one point it looked like there was an attempt to mate, chased off by the first.

I wondered if the feather made the first bird look receptive. "Barn swallows prefer mates with long tail feathers. In general, it is the females that do the selecting in pairing and they prefer younger, more fertile males." So, unless that was two females, with the feather making the first bird look hyper-masculine, probably not.

But the second bird wasn't usually doing anything that might look agressive, so the feather wasn't making it look like a "chase it away" alien.

Has anybody seen this sort of thing before?

I watched a video of a whale breaching, and heard it was to help get rid of whale lice.

OK, whales don't have hands to groom the way monkeys do in the ubiquitous monkey-grooming videos, but they could still brush up against each other and help brush crud off, couldn't they?

It turns out the lice like to hang out around barnacles on the whales; the water moves slower there.

Maybe it could be a two-fer--whales could maybe rub off barnacles too. They do against beaches and boats.

I forgot. Barnacles are kind of pointy at that end. The whales would scratch each other--not quite what the doctor ordered. Brushing might be useful prophylactically, to keep barnacles from getting ahold in the first place, but not once they get started. And most whales don't seem to be very cuddly creatures--though some dolphins swim very close together.

If sharks were more social, they might get rid of remoras fairly easily that way--sand them off each other.

I figured cats were introduced to the Americas by Europeans, and so it was. A post here discusses names for cat in different Amerindian languages. Generally these are borrow words.

How quickly did the Amerindians start keeping cats once they showed up?

I didn't find anything old, but "Prior to Columbus we kept domestic dogs, but according to the stories told by my great grandmother we Comanches also kept tamed birds, opossums (she had one as a girl), and tarantulas. We acquired cats at the same time we acquired horses. I have seen old pictures of relatives of mine riding horseback with a cat on one shoulder. We kept all these animals despite being nomadic. I imagine sedentary tribes kept even more animals."

At a guess, such useful creatures were adopted very quickly.

---

Did Polynesians bring chickes to South America before Columbus? Hard to be sure--one study doesn't quite convince me. A linguistic study suggests chickens showed up very early--this one presumes the Europeans brought them, but it's consistent with earlier arrivals too. The study finds almost no borrow words--so the tribes acquired them before the arrival of a lot of Europeans. That would be either very quick dissemination of escapees, or the birds were there well before.