When the humans stay indoors, the goats are emboldened:
My favourite (photo 15 (and their favourite because they also put it at the top)) of these lockdown photos.
See also, a raccoon in Central Park (photo 2), with Big New York Things in the background.
And: fallow deer in East London (photo 7). I hope they aren’t playing a ball game.
My go-to guy for creature postings, which I like to do on Friday, is Steve Stewart-Williams, and he has recently tweeted about plenty of impressive creaturely behaviour. There’s this shark, jumping out of the sea. There’s this butterfly pretending to be leaves. There are fishes doing social distancing. There are lions and hyenas having a dust up, although the interesting thing to me about this is how little actual damage they seem to be doing to each other. There are donkeys, one of them a bit cleverer. And much else besides of a creature-related sort.
But honestly, the recent SS-W tweet that I want to pick out is the one with this graphic, which identifies one of the most important moments in all of human history:
If that graph, or another like it, is not entirely familiar to you, then it damn well should be. It pinpoints the moment when our own species started seriously looking after its own creature comforts. This was, you might say, the moment when most of us stopped being treated little better than farm animals, and we began turning ourselves into each others’ pets.
Patrick Crozier and I will be speaking about this amazing moment in the history of the human animal in our next recorded conversation. That will, if the conversation happens as we hope and the recording works as we hope, find its way to here.
At the end of last month, I did a posting in which I grumbled about the boringness of my immediate neighbourhood. To my surprise, the effect on my state of mind of getting these grumbles off my chest and onto this blog caused me immediately to start looking at my immediate neighbourhood with fresh eyes. In the posting linked to in the previous sentence, I displayed photos of things I am mostly pretty familiar with, like those big lumpy buildings on the other side of Victoria Street. But I have also found myself searching out oddities in my locality that I had not properly noticed before.
Oddities like these two statues:
I photoed the above photos just moments after photoing these photos.
This deer, with its big twiddly antlers, and this lion, chasing the deer, are to be seen in the north easterly of two triangles of vegetation in the vicinity of, or which together add up to, Grosvenor Gardens.
So, what on earth are they doing there? Who thought that such statues would make sense? Secret London explains:
In 1993, Jonathan Kenworthy, famed for his animal sculptures, was asked by the Duke and Duchess of Westminster to create this piece for a lake at Eaton Hall in Cheshire. A second casting was placed here in 2000 to mark the opening of the gardens to the people of Westminster.
So there we are. A Duke thought it would be a shame to confine two decent and probably quite expensive bits of animal sculpture to Cheshire, and had further copies of them put in London. There was no logical connection between the bit of London he put them in and the sculptures, but he was a Duke and he owned the place, and he thought it a good notion to put these sculptures there, in Upper Grosvenor Gardens, so that was what happened. I mean, who was going to object?
Via David Thompson, some giant creatures.
I like 5, a big snail:
And 9, a big rabbit:
All hail The Internet.
There are fifty photos altogether, but the best ones, I think, are of regular pet type animals or animals we are all familiar with, like the snail and the rabbit. That an oceanic manta ray turns out to be a giant oceanic manta ray is not a giant surprise to me.
When I say I like the big snail, I think what I really mean is I like how she’s holding it. Although, to be clear: rather her than me. The big rabbit, I just like.
One of my favourite insects just now is the Babylon Bee. I especially liked this graphic, from quite a while back now:
Most flowcharts done in this graphic manner are extremely complicated. Lots of questions. Lots of arrows. This one hits its target by being very uncomplicated.
The BB churns out lots of stuff, so there’s a good chance that (a) this amuses you, but (b) you missed it when they first unveiled it, back in June.
The Broadgate Tower, because I like it. This particular City of London Big Thing is in a slightly different style to the more celebrated Big Things just to its south, in that it is one of those towers that is pretending to be a little clutch of separate towers. No one of these towers is that distinctive, but together they make a pleasing aggregate. (Also, the late afternoon sun can bounce off this Thing in a way that is downright spectacular, but that’s for a different posting.)
The “etcetera” bit of this posting is because although the Broadgate Tower was my officially designated destination for the afternoon, the weather was rather grim and as you will see, my photos of the Tower itself didn’t come out that well. Better were the close-up views of diverting things that I also photoed that day. My taxis-with-adverts habit had by then kicked in, and the adverts on taxis look pretty good whatever the state of the light is. And adverts in general were a source of photo-fun on that particular day, what with that part of town being so very different from the part where I live:
We start at whatever station that was that I went to to get started. Hoxton? Shoreditch High St? Don’t know? Didn’t take (but should have taken) a photo-note. Then we get several photos of the Broadgate Tower, and in among them, the real fun starts, in the form of the signs and adverts and other curiosities I encountered. I ended up in the City, where quite Big Things are reflected in other Bigger Things.
There’s even a bridge, of a sort that I really like, one that joins two buildings across a narrow street. It’s a double-decker bridge, which I particularly enjoy.
Today’s weather is rather grim. However, these photos were all photoed on July 27th 2015, exactly five years ago to the day. The weather was, as already stated, rather grim on that day also. But, I hope you agree that I worked around it okay.
Food and drink makes it into the categories list because of the bottle tops, which adorn a pub and which add up to a male figure, in the manner of a Gormley project. But: not. Also, one of the taxis says to just eat.
Steve Stewart-Williams does great tweets, and his animal tweets are especially appealing. If you just want cute, there’s plenty of that. But if you want to tell yourself that you are also learning some science, he often lets you do that too.
So, here are links to a big clutch of recent SS-W creature tweets, starting with how ape brains compare to the human brain, what with humans being apes of the particular sort that understand the universe.
Apes a like humans in all sorts of ways. Young chimps laugh when being tickled. Gorillas trying to keep dry behave just like humans trying to keep dry. Another chimp fact: underneath all that fur they are ripped, in the manner of some humans.
The Portuguese man o’ war is not even in a single creature. Each one is a colony of creatures. Also weird is this gender fluid stag beetle.
Humans and other apes play, but so do other creatures. Here is a dog playing on a slide. But is this dog playing on the slide merely to oblige its human? Could be. So, how about this crow playing on a seesaw? Crows don’t care about obliging humans. Do they? Maybe some crows do.
More bird tweets. Here is a silly bird, pecking at the flowers on a lady’s dress. Here are peacocks. You often see pictures of peacocks showing off to peahens. Less common are photos of peacocks fighting each other. Follow that link for both. And click on this next link to see a bird’s nest woven into a leaf.
From birds to a gecko. Here’s a gecko trapped in amber, 54 millions years ago.
A feline tweets now. From this one, about cats negotiating obstacle courses, I actually learned something. When cats walk, their back legs go exactly where they front legs have just been. So, if they choose where to put their front legs carefully, then that obstacle course is successfully negotiated.
And here is another feline tweet, concerning how a a kitten turns into a cat. That kittens turn into cats I already knew. Hard to pass that off as science.
Tarantulas can swim. I didn’t know that, so that is science. Also, the laws of physics don’t apply to goats, which must be science because physics.
And finally, back to a human, in this case Sitting Bull. He makes the cut because Sitting Bull was human, but bulls are creatures. Someone has done a picture of Sitting Bull with dice.
I hope you have been having a nice Friday.
Liking, as I so definitely do, those temporary moments in the ongoing pageant that is London’s variegated history, I remember fondly the time when Trafalgar Square sported a big blue cock:
My version of that moment of course includes the fact that photoers were photoing the big blue cock, with their friends in shot, sometimes holding the big blue cock up in their upraised hands.
I especially liked this photo of cock and photoer, where the big blue cock that the photoer was photoing is reflected in a big bus window behind the photoer that I was photoing:
I do like good reflections.
Other famous birds were also present, and photoers, knowing of their fame, were photoing them also:
But maybe my favourite photoer photo that I photoed that day was this, also bird related:
Real Photographers work away to contrive the exact photographs they want, and then they photograph them. But good luck contriving that one, ladies and gentlemen. Photoers like me just photo lots of photos, and then pick out the best ones to show somewhere like here, whether we contrived them or whether they were just flukes.
I said, in this posting about a terrific photo by Andrew Sharpe of Ely Cathedral:
Sharpe would appear to have a very similar photo-relationship with Ely Cathedral to the one that this guy has with Salisbury Cathedral. Both photo the same cathedral, lots of times, with the cathedral looking different every time.
Here is another Andrew Sharpe photo of Ely Cathedral, one of two photos that he displayed on his Twitter feed earlier this month, both of them featuring light on the land and on the cathedral, with a dark sky behind:
Wonderful. Of the two, I prefer that one, because of the sheep having been included in the foreground.