Any Minute Now…

It will be summer again! That’s right—very soon, our days will grow long and lazy and drenched in sunlight!

To celebrate that fact and that it’s Chanukah—which is a holiday commemorating that there was just a little more (oil) than you thought—I’m also including a couple of red-panda photos (there are always a few more than I think there are. Or several hundred more, give or take).

[oh, there are even more;
just you wait...]

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An Orgy of Grooming and a Bouquet of Ears

[one of the red panda cubs]

Once again the week has gotten away from me, and I haven’t had time to write up my observations about the red pandas—or anything else. But I have soo many pictures of these guys that I couldn’t put them all in a single post anyway—so today I will simply share with you some photos from another moment with the red panda mother and cubs.

Their mother frequently becomes convinced that, in the past half an hour or so, one or both of her cubs has become unbearably filthy, and so she’s going to groom them back to respectability, whether they like it or not.

["Mo-oooom!"]

At one point, as the mother began grooming a cub, the other cub apparently decided that she could be a groomer, too—so she clumsily scrambled onto her mother’s back...

...and thus began a veritable orgy of grooming:

Eventually one of the cubs tired of the exercise and extracted herself, but she stayed close enough to her sister and mother to form part of an amazing collection of fuzzy white ears—more ears, it seemed at the time, than there were red pandas.

They really are cuter than any animal has a right to be.

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Not Quite Nothing

Things have been a bit hectic here lately--or they’ve felt hectic, anyway--and so I haven’t gotten around to going through my photos or my impressions of the adorable, six-months-old red panda cubs at the zoo. I will simply say that: the one tricky thing when watching these two sisters in the enclosure with their parents is that the adult red pandas are so cute themselves, and the cubs are so well-grown, that it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. The cubs have puffier faces, though, like those of big, red, masked teddy bears, while their parents are a bit sleeker—more like fox-bears than bear-bears. Perhaps the photo below will help—the mother is in the lower left and one of her cubs is in the upper right corner:

That's all for now, folks.

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Photo Sequence: How I'd Like to Get Up in the Morning

Come to think of it, that is how I get up some mornings...

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One Good Shot: Hoping You Have a Lazy Weekend

Just to let you know, I will be out of the country until April 25th, so whatever posts appear (having been scheduled in advance) may be a little light on text, and I certainly won't be able to respond to comments. If you're longing for more Beasts in a Populous City-ness, then take the caption contest, and encourage your friends to do the same! It will provide you with hours of entertainment and distract you from the aching void created by my absence from this website.

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Even in DC...

…It sometimes snows. Having been born and raised in Michigan and having lived in Boston for a number of years, I have a certain degree of cheerful scorn for the panic with which people in and around the District respond to a whole four to five inches of snow. Nevertheless, I concede that it is fairly hard to get around here when it snows even a little, since nobody seems to have any idea what to do about this white stuff falling from the sky. Except the animals at the zoo, of course.

Not all of the animals are outside when it snows; the lions and tigers, for example, are kept in, and some warmer-weather creatures like the lemurs and anteaters and small-clawed otters have been kept in warmer indoor areas for over a month now. But most of the residents of the Kids’ farm stay out and about, although they don’t always look too thrilled about it:


And of course, there’s always wild wildlife to be seen:


But what impressed me yesterday was seeing the panda, lolling about outside--although, admittedly, not in the snow:


--And, most of all, the red panda, who was curled up unconcernedly on a branch as the snow started…


…and who stayed there as the snow continued falling, its thick fur protecting it from the cold:

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I’ve Gotten a Little Behind

Apologies for having fallen down on the job of posting lately, but rest assured that I will be getting back on track this week, even though the season of Solstice and Christmas and New Year’s is upon us, full of things to distract an innocent blogger from her task. But I shall remain steadfast! And, if I’m lucky, I may even be able to see and photograph some lion cubs before the new year. But I can’t promise anything; these zoo types are being ve-ry cagey about when the new cubs will be out… --Either way, there are plenty of zoo stories to tell. And tell them I shall! (Once I've gotten a little sleep and can stop writing in Epic Voice.)

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The Charisma Continues: Red Pandas (part 2)

It's been a lovely Thanksgiving weekend, but I'm still in a somewhat comatose state from the holiday (and the eating...), so I hope you'll forgive the lack of introduction for these further photos of red pandas. Hopefully the cuteness speaks for itself.

[The End]

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The Charisma Begins: Red Pandas (part one)

I don’t have a whole lot to say about red pandas (beyond what I already wrote in this post) except, “They’re so cute!” But then, since that’s sort of the reason for this entry, it’s not really a problem. I can say that they are not cooperative photo subjects; in some ways, they’re even worse than otters, for all that the otters are more frenetically active. Red pandas like to do things like curl up, ever so adorably, in trees, where branches and leaves obscure their fox-like features.


Or they like to walk through their enclosure, scent-marking it—all very admirable, I’m sure, but even at a slow pace, they climb up and down and behind things, making it very difficult to get a clear shot.


There have been lucky moments, however, and now that it’s late autumn and the trees are mainly bare of leaves, it’s much easier to get pictures that include these guys’ faces (there’s a male and a female). So enough of the narrative; enjoy the photos.

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Battle of the Charismatic Macrofauna

“Charismatic macrofauna,” as some of you may remember, is the term used by biologists (at least, the ones I spend time with) to describe those species of animals that are large (or larger than the majority of animal life on the planet, such as insects, parasites, krill, etc.) and considered cute by almost everybody. These species are often used as poster animals for conservation causes, since most people have greater emotional interest in saving an adorable bear than a lichen. –But this is all peripheral to the subject of today’s post.

I happen to have a number of photos of a few species of the zoo’s charismatic macrofauna, and while I will probably post entries about all of these species at some point, I wanted to ask you, my readers, which you’d like to see first.

So, would you prefer a post, with plenty of pictures, about:

Pandas?


Ring-tailed lemurs?


Asian small-clawed otters?


Or red pandas?


(Bear in mind that the quality or cuteness level of these particular pictures does not represent the general cuteness level of the photos I have for each species; in fact, I’m deliberately tantalizing you with my less-than-best images of these guys.)

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Everybody Itches

[cedar waxwing scratching its ear]

This observation is not, I acknowledge, particularly profound, but it does have the virtue of being true, and I have the photographic evidence to prove it. I never really thought about it myself until I started noticing just how many pictures I have of animals scratching. These were not deliberately acquired —I didn’t set out to collect photographs of scratching animals—and yet here they are. I can only conclude, therefore, that everyone itches—and can only speculate that it must be even worse for nonhuman animals than it is for us. Just imagine having none of the protection of clothes or insect repellent! –For someone who, as it is, gets mobbed by mosquitoes the minute she goes out her door, it doesn’t bear thinking about.



(I did try to come up with a better, punnier title for today’s entry, and I thought of a few, but I just couldn’t decide on one. Should it be “Life’s an Itch and then You Die”?


Or “From Scratch”?


Or “The Wicked Itch of the East”?


Or “A Scratch Made in Heaven”?


So hard to choose...