oh noes!!1!

Here is a closeup of Kianga from Sunday morning:

She is looking very fierce because of:

Yes, kids, she laid again! She laid two in March, and I let her sit on them, and thought that was it for the year. The past few weeks she had been acting a bit hormonal, trying to feed my hand when I had her out, and getting very excited. When she made a pest of herself, I just put her back in her cage. I didn't think she would lay again this year. But Friday evening she was sitting on the bottom of her cage all evening, and when she got up on her perch, I saw this egg. She laid a second one Tuesday night, a longer delay than usual. Hopefully, she will sit on these and we won't have any problems - like her trying to lay more. The worst part is that I'm visiting my parents, so I can't keep an eye on her myself. I am getting reports from the homefront, however, and she has been eating and otherwise seems fine.

cat killer!

Oh sweet Jeebus:

Hilmo was already in jail on drug, firearm and probation violation charges, Gwinnett County sheriff's spokeswoman Stacey Bourbonnais said.

The new warrant charges that Hilmo "did give injured live cats and kittens to his pit bull dogs and let the pit bulls kill the already injured cats and kittens. Hilmo would capture and injure neighborhood cats for this purpose."

Sorry to say this, but he looks like a hick cracker, too. I usually am not in favor of it, but in his case I would argue for chemical castration. He ought to be weeded out of the gene pool.

bunny snatcher!

Someone snatched some poor kid's rabbit:

Someone stole a prize-winning rabbit from its cage at the Puyallup Fair.

The orange Netherlands Dwarf rabbit named "RJ" won a blue ribbon Friday for his owner, 13-year-old Stefan Johnson, a 4-H club member from Vancouver.

A police report says a witness saw a man leaving the fair barn Saturday with an orange rabbit.

I'm really sad to read this. This is the largest fair in the state, it's a really big deal. I enjoy it so much, I make a point of going several days each year over the fair's 3-week run, in order to see as many of the animals as possible. This year, I went on the 14th (rabbits, goats, cattle, horses)(this was the day RJ won his ribbon) and 17th (rabbits, goats, cattle, horses, llamas and alpacas), and am going again this Saturday the 22nd (cattle, horses, and chickens!). Probably my favorite thing about the fair is seeing all the 4-H kids and their animals. These kids work very hard for those ribbons - plus the fact that during this time, they are missing school and have to make up the work. After wandering barns all day, we usually head to the arena in the afternoon to watch the 4-H riding trials. We see the kids do some amazing things with their horses, and it is really obvious that some of them spend a lot of time working with their animals, who are ready to do anything the kids ask them to.

What is worst of all in this story, what do you want to bet that the asshole who took this little rabbit has no idea how to take care of it?

godwit migration

The godwit migrates between New Zealand and Alaska, without even stopping to feed. The flight is over 7,000 miles. Simply amazing.

very sad

Alex has died at 31:

But last week Alex, an African Grey parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of its life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.

Now, many parrots are kept under less than ideal conditions, and die prematurely. African Grey parrots in captivity should live twice as long. Alex always showed signs of being stressed, for example, his feather picking. As a wild-caught bird, I think Alex was less suited to being a research subject than perhaps the two domestic Greys Pepperberg has more recently been using.

I do hope I can avoid losing any of my Greys at this young an age - I certainly have the expectation that they would even outlive me. That said, Alex has done much to further our understanding of what birds are capable of cognitively speaking - between his language skills and the problem-solving abilities displayed by corvids, we have a whole new appreciation for "bird brains."

Be in peace, Alex.

Update: Reading more about Alex, it appears that he may have been a domestically bred bird after all, though I had read before that he was wild-caught. Still, hopefully birds Griffin and Wart will prove to be less stressed out as research subjects than Alex obviously was at times.

the naked crapenter

What will we tell the children?

Honniball, 51, was arrested last year after he was spotted building cabinets in the buff at a home where he had been hired to work.

The carpenter has said he likes to work in the nude because it's more comfortable and it helps him keep his clothes clean.

I'm of the opinion that a loincloth would be both economical and prudent. It would only take one little 'accident' with a nail gun for him to reconsider his entire approach to carpentry.

alien!

Something to think about when you're watching those Alien movies...it turns out there really are creatures with those double-jaws – and they're right here on Earth!