Undomesticated Peeves Part 1

(Well, they can’t be “pet peeves” if they’re about wildlife, can they?)

Recently Patti Abbott posted a question on her blog asking what relatively small things annoyed her readers. Being who I am, I had to struggle to keep the list down, but one of my foremost irritations is, of course, a biology-related one.

Often—faaaar too often, in our supposedly civilized society—people confuse mammals with animals. This is not to say that mammals are not animals. However, just as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, “animals” is a category that includes a vast array of species that are not anything like mammals (which themselves make up only a tiny percentage of the number of animals out there).

And I have to admit, I’m baffled when people say that insects or fish or octopi aren’t animals. What do they think they are—fruit?

[this mantis shrimp is having an existential crisis:
when it looks in the mirror, does it see an animal?]

This is not just a trivial thing, given that it highlights both our mammal-centric thinking (dangerous as well as profoundly inaccurate) and our general ignorance of basic zoology. Or maybe it’s not true ignorance so much as carelessness; surely if someone paused to think, he or she would realize that there is no category other than “animal” into which they could place alligators or stick insects or barnacles. But it worries me that anyone would have to pause to think about it.

Maybe I’m just being snobbish, complaining about these taxonomical inaccuracies. But—here’s the great part—I don’t care!

Don’t say that jellyfish, or fruitflies, or any other species lacking hair and mammary glands, aren’t animals. There’s just no excuse for that kind of thing.

Stay tuned for more of my education-through-harangues campaign!

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Box Turtle

Last weekend, I discovered this Aldabra tortoise having squinched itself (himself, I think) into the corner of his outdoor enclosure.

The reason was not apparent to me.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: I Want THAT Piece

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Bella Gad, in Memory

Bella Gad was my grandmother’s cousin (or at least that’s as close as I’ll get to being precise about family relationships). This isn’t the place in which to paint a portrait of her even if I thought I could. I will say, though, that Bella was a mixture of extremely strong—even when baseless—opinions, great humor, and tremendous affection. She also had a very good eye and an excellent artistic sense, and I was always very flattered that she was such an enthusiastic supporter of my photography—not just the photos of animals looking winsome, but those in which I tried to frame things differently, to focus on form or abstraction or try a new perspective.

Bella lived in Israel and, although she spoke several languages, didn’t speak English; she and I wrote to each other in mutually half-forgotten French, resorting regularly to the dictionary. Several times a year, I would send her an “album,” a collection of my photos with brief captions in my scant French.

I was only starting to think about which photos I would include in an album this fall when I learned that she had died last week. These are some of the photos I would have included in that album. I wish she could see them.

Tu me manques, Bella.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: Mud Tortoise

This is actually a typical Aldabra tortoise (of the kind involved in the disturbing romantic interludes I previously witnessed and described) that has just emerged from a voluntary mud—well, I can’t say “mudbath” because it was more complete than that—mud-submersion, maybe: she had burrowed herself into the slimy stuff until only her shell was high and dry. Then, after a few days (really), she rose out of it, the Creature from the Tan Lagoon.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

“I’ve Been Saying it for Years: Don’t Get out of Bed!”

(Not my line but that of a friend, Goldie Greenstein.)

Unfortunately, there have been very few times in my life when I’ve obeyed that injunction—but they’ve been good times. Other animals, though, seem much more capable than we are of following that advice. Even wild animals, who have to find food and mates, care for their young and avoid predators, seem to better able to appreciate the value of resting than we do. Of course, they also don’t have television.

In any case, there’s nothing like seeing animals enjoy a good snooze to inspire you to sleep in:








Happy Labor Day, everyone!

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Odds and Ends

No, there won’t be any photos of animal tails or behinds to illustrate this entry; I’ve used that joke once already, and I think that’s probably more than enough, at least for this year. But there were a few photos and brief anecdotes that I wanted to include at some point, and a Thursday just seems like a good day to do that.

First, the tortoises were at it again Tuesday morning (though not, thank god, making any noise):

[this image has been blurred to protect the identities of those involved]

—Although, on Wednesday, they acted all innocent, nesting in the straw:


(Their behavior gave me the idea for a new phrase, “finding a tortoise in a haystack,” which would probably be a lot simpler than the proverbial needle: maybe that could be used to describe tasks of only moderate difficulty? E.g., “Finding this mystery novel in the paperback section is like finding a tortoise in a haystack.” As opposed to tasks with no difficulty at all, like, “Coming across a TV show whose gender/race/class stereotypes annoy me is like finding an orca in a haystack.”)

And, of course, yesterday after I had posted my entry I got better pictures of the cheetah (or another one—how would I know?), but I’ll include only one that is less technically perfect but more amusing—to me, at least:


Finally, I stopped by the pandas the other day only to discover that this panda had apparently dropped its wallet:


You never know what you’ll see at the zoo.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

The Reptile House

There are considerably fewer exclamations of “Oh how cute!” in here than in the small-mammal house, although I happen to think that the frogs in particular are very personable. There are, however, far more cries of “I found it!”, since a number of the lizards and snakes—and frogs—are incredibly well camouflaged and difficult to find, even when they’re right in front of you. It does give one a pleasant feeling of accomplishment to finally spot the chameleon or mossy frog that’s been eluding your searching eyes.


And of course these animals, while they lack the fuzzy charm of mammals, have the romance of danger. I myself don’t have a lot of time for snakes that aren’t doing much of anything—and aren’t doing it in a photogenic way—but I’ve seen kids and adults with their faces almost pressed to the glass, riveted by the sight of a python or a particularly venomous viper. The knowledge that only that thin pane of glass separates them from something that could coil them into oblivion or kill them with a bite—it’s irresistible.



For me, the reptile house is filled with a number of aesthetic marvels. The textures of reptiles’ scales and spines, the colors of poison-dart frogs, with skin so smooth and startlingly bright that they look like plastic models—that’s what impresses me. I only wish I were more talented at capturing their shapes and colors, their gem-like, liquid eyes glistening within skin dry as stone.




A certain degree of awe creeps up on you as you go through the reptile house; these animals have a foreign, ancient quality to them. The giant snapping turtle, with its gaping mouth and tongue from which suspends a fleshy lure, is clearly a prehistoric monster, somehow transported to the present day and condescending, for the moment, to be gawked at by fascinated humans.


The toad with its heavy eyebrow ridges is a creature out of dark German forests, one that inspired the Grimm brothers when they wrote of sprites and hobgoblins. The tortoises and crocodilians are reminders of what used to overrun the earth while mammals were wide-eyed nocturnal scuttlers, scurrying through the underbrush and peering cautiously from trees.


Not that these animals themselves are dinosaurs (though surely their ancestors were present at the time when those giants walked the earth)—in fact, dinosaurs, physiology-wise, were probably more similar to big bald birds than to alligators or turtles. Still, to the untrained observer—and I include myself in this category—their appearance strikes a chord. And it does make me wonder if the world wasn’t a somewhat better place when scaly things were almost all you saw, before mammals diversified as much as they have. At least when reptiles and dinosaurs were the dominant species they didn’t have the capacity to precipitate environmental disasters as we have—no oil-drilling explosions for them.


In any case, the world is different now, and some mammals have skipped out on a crepuscular existence and started doing all sorts of things by sunlight. Including, in some cases, going to the zoo to look at reptiles and imagine being transported to a past they can’t even begin to remember.

Or just saying, “Cool! I want one of those!”

Something Tells Me It's All Happening at the Zoo

I had just started my walk through the zoo yesterday morning, having paused for a while to admire (and photograph) the butterflies on a butterfly bush, when I heard a strange sound: a somewhat resonant, but very low, sort of groan. I looked around: I was near the frog pond, across from the Reptile House and the alligator pond, and for a while I thought it could be the alligator making some kind of restrained bellow. But the alligator wasn’t out.

The groan continued. Could it be an ape? After all, the gibbons had produced sounds I had not believed could come from a living organism. But no; the orangutans weren’t out, and it seemed too far away for the noise to be carried from the gorillas, even supposing they would make such a sound.

I kept walking, past the entrance to the Reptile House, and—there: in the outdoor tortoise enclosure, the mystery was solved. Two of the immensely large Aldabra tortoises were mating. The male, on top, would every now and then lift his hind legs off of the ground, and the groans—or perhaps moans—were in time with this movement.

I admit, though I’m a little embarrassed, that I was profoundly shocked. Even after having read Gerald Durrell’s excellent book, My Family and Other Animals, which includes a passage describing the sex lives of (smaller) Greek tortoises, I just…didn’t expect this. Insects mating, of course. Birds and mammals—well, sure. Mollusks—not when I needed them to for my dissertation, but otherwise, yes. But somehow I had not anticipated sex among these enormous, ancient-looking creatures—and I’m not being ageist: I mean they look like prehistoric creatures, not old ones. (Well, they look old, too, but that wasn’t the problem.)

That and the moaning. That was something else.

But of course, even in the midst of my minor trauma, I took some pictures:

[an image of the action]


[a close-up; the much smaller female
is just visible]


[the leg-lifts that accompanied the sound]