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I have many I have been saving, some worth your time, some that just caught my eye An example of the second is this horrifying skeletal "bird", aptly titled "Epic Bird Anatomy FAIL":

Love those feather bones..

On the serious front, we have more dispatches from the front lines of the AR fascists' attempts to make us cease all contact with our animals, from the invaluable and necessary Bedlam Farm blog. "We",  ie the side of sanity, won the first battle for the continuing existence of the New York Carriage horses, but can we be complacent? Jonathan Katz says no.

He also revisits the larger issue here; whether it is possible to have a traditional relation with an animal, say WORKING, in our society. I would have thought he was being paranoid, but after belatedly reading Ted Kerasote's latest, Pukka (review TK) I learn that a large majority of urban Americans think that ALL dogs must be spayed and neutered. Where do these mooncalves think that dogs COME FROM?

A quote from Bedlam Farm:

" The truth is that American dogs live the best lives of any animals in the world, very few of them suffer and die at the hands of abusive and uncaring owners...

" We are moving towards a kind of quarantine for dogs, increasingly sealed off from the opportunity to socialize them, to give them varied and stimulating lives, to accompany us in our travels, be appreciated by other people. Dogs deserve better than to be isolated only in homes and backyards because society does not permit us to take any risks with them."


Eleanora's falcons have always been thought  strange. Island - nesting relatives of the European Hobby, they resemble little Peregrines with big wings. They live on Medterranean islands, and breed during the FALL passerine migration to Africa, using that bounty to fuel their reproduction.

 Now it appears that they keep "prisoners" in a larder as well. Please forgive format-- it came out this way:

"...the falcons keep or ‘imprison’ some preys in a relatively deep cavity or in a fissure of rocks from where they can’t escape as their flight feathers (both tail and wings feathers) were already pulled out ... Or by keeping them trapped in a tight and deep hole which makes them unable to move neither their wings nor their hanging legs...
"The authors reported also that this behaviour can occur even before the eggs hatch, and was already well known to a local fisherman who is staying in the archipelago in a more or less regular basis for decades..."

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Last before dinner: a relative, a wild Eurasian Hobby, flies down a Swift . That we have not yet mastered such flights, apparently done easily in the Old Days, should suggest we don't know everything yet...