It has been one of those weeks from hell, hasn’t it? I need something to bring a smile to my face, and I figured just maybe you do too! Sometimes nothing softens the heart and makes us smile like those non-human species we call animals or critters. I snagged these from The Guardian’s ‘Week in Wildlife’ feature last week …
Sambar deer cool off in shallow water at Yala National Park, some 250 km south-west of Colombo, Sri Lanka Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images
A fox on Russky Island. The local population is rebounding after a fall in the 90s caused by poaching. Photograph: Yuri Smityuk/TASS/Getty Images
A reed warbler feeding a cuckoo, taken from a hide at WWT Martin Mere. Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, which raise the chicks in place of their own offspring. Photograph: Maggie Bullock/WWT/PA
A Formosan ferret badger at the Taipei Zoo, one of a number of animals to have been suggested as the intermediary carrier of the coronavirus. Photograph: Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images
A cardinal sits in a flowering tree at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. Warm weather has led to blossoms blooming earlier than expected. Photograph: Eva Hambach/AFP/Getty Images
Brown hares are seen in a field near Niederleis, Austria, on Good Friday. Photograph: Georg Hochmuth/APA/AFP/Getty Images
A northern corroboree frog – one of Australia’s most endangered species – is seen in the breeding tank at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Its population in the wild was severely impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires. Photograph: Jenny Evans/Getty Images
A popular bald eagle nesting livestream from the Friends of the Redding Eagles, northern California, which rushed to install its webcam for the pandemic audience last summer after a five-year absence. Liberty, a 22-year-old female, is on her third “marriage” and her three chicks with seven-year-old partner Guardian were hatched between 21 and 24 March. Liberty has raised 22 offspring from egg to fledgling, including three sets of triplets. Photograph: Friends of the Redding Eagles
A royal Bengal tiger at Bardiya National Park in Nepal. Previously known as the Royal Karnali Wildlife Reserve in 1976, the park is famous for royal Bengal tiger sightings. Photograph: Niranjan Shrestha/AP
A grey whale is seen at Ojo de Liebre Lagoon in Guerrero Negro, Mexico. Each year hundreds of north Pacific grey whales travel thousands of miles from Alaska to the Baja California Peninsula breeding lagoons. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images
A leopard walks at Yala National Park, some 250 km southwest of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images
One of 185 seized baby giant tortoises, in Puerto Ayora, Galapagos, Ecuador, which had been stuffed in a suitcase to be trafficked. Photograph: Galapagos Ecologic Airport/AFP/Getty Images
Researchers follow a Polar bear in the Arctic Ocean during the Umka 2021 expedition organised by the Russian Geographical Society. It aims to research and monitor the polar bear population and assess the impact of climate change. Photograph: Gavriil Grigorov/TASS/Getty Images
Sambar deer at Bardiya National Park, Nepal. Photograph: Niranjan Shrestha/AP
A Lesser Antillean iguana (Iguana delicatissima), a lizard endemic to the Lesser Antilles, in its natural habitat on the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Photograph: Lionel Chamoiseau/AFP/Getty Images
Lutjanus bohar, the two-spot red snapper, is a species of snapper belonging to the family Lutjanidae, at the Rowley Shoals archipelago off WA, Australia. A study shows that fishing restrictions across the Rowley Shoals archipelago helped sustain threatened species and biodiversity during a time of ‘unprecedented’ decline. Photograph: Courtesy of Matt Birt/BRUV
Wasps on aruera flowers (Bidens bipinnata) at the Lunarejo Valley, in Rivera, Uruguay. The national park, in northern Uruguay at the border with Brazil, is seeing an increase in tourist traffic, as people look for less crowded places to visit. The valley is home to many species of flora and fauna, with at least 150 types of birds, snakes, amphibians, anteaters, armadillo, foxes and wild boars. Photograph: Raúl Martínez/EPA
Kentish plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) chick at Nafplio, Greece. Photograph: Bougiotis Vangelis/EPA
People watching migratory birds at a wetland near the Yalu River in Dandong, in China’s north-eastern Liaoning province. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Storks stand in their nest in Kizilcahamam, outside the Turkish capital of Ankara. Every year, storks migrate to Turkey for an incubation period as the weather gets warmer in spring. Photograph: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images
An illegal bow trap set in Brescia, where bird poaching incidents are the highest in Italy. With 5 million birds a year illegally caught in Italy, activists are teaming up with local police to trap the hunters. Photograph: WWF Italy
Mandarin ducks on the Erdaobai River at the foot of Changbai Mountain in Jilin Province. Photograph: Sipa Asia/REX/Shutterstock
If you’ve got a minute more to spare, I highly recommend you hop over to Annie’s blog and check out the most adorable penguin and how he evaded the sharks that were determined to turn him into a snack! It’s a short video, but I promise it will leave a smile on your face!
Happy weekend, my friends!
She started to take photography seriously following a trip to India in 1989. Since then, she has visited more than 70 countries, camera in hand. She fell in love with Antarctica during her first trip there in 1997. She has since devoted most of her time to photographing the Polar Regions. In 20 years of polar exploration, she has joined more than 80 expeditions to Antarctica and the Arctic. Among her accomplishments, she has skied the final degree to the North Pole.
During the past 11 years, she has roamed extensively through bear country, from the Great Bear Rainforest in her home province of British Columbia to Alaska and the high Arctic. During the course of her photographic travels she has documented the challenges facing North America’s bears, including the black bear, Kermode, grizzly and polar bear.
Gilardini’s images have been published internationally in leading magazines such as National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Canadian Geographic, Nature’s Best and Outdoor Photography. Her images have also been used by high-profile NGOs such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, among others.
So, how was your weekend? Mine was quiet with a capital Q! Daughter Chris had four separate band performances on Saturday and two on Sunday, so she was largely either gone, or napping on the sofa, for she was marching outdoors in a wool kilt, wool socks, and the temps were in the 90s! Needless to say, she was t-i-r-e-d! So, Miss Goose and I did our own thing and few words were spoken, except for Saturday evening when we collaborated on a Chinese supper … she made the Chow Mein, I made the cream-cheese Rangoon, and we had Pandora frozen Eggrolls. It was both fun and tasty!
He took the modified Roomba to the Target store where he originally bought it for what he refers to as a bit of “market research” and turned it loose.
The store manager, however, failed to see the humour, and ultimately Michael concluded that the general public is not ready for his invention.
And that wraps up yet another Jolly Monday, my friends! Please … share those gorgeous smiles with everyone you see this week … we all could use a kindly smile, a touch on the shoulder, a hug. Keep safe and have a wonderful week! Love ‘n hugs from Filosofa and Jolly!
What are you guys doing here … you’re a day early … it’s not Monday yet! It is? Whoa … I’ve lost a day … I thought it was still Sunday … where did Sunday go? Okay, well … give me just a minute … luckily, I did some baking last night, so let me see what I can rustle up …
The sandwich, which features cookies as “buns,” contains bits of candied hot dog meat and spicy mustard ice cream. The company said its Wienermobile will drive around Manhattan during the week of Aug. 12 to distribute free samples of the unusual dessert.
Nobody has mentioned a Guinness World Record yet, but it is said to be “the first ever case to be documented worldwide, where so many minute teeth were found in a single individual.”
Alright, folks, that wraps up another Jolly Monday. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and friends … remember it’s hard times these days … share a smile with someone who’s having a hard time right now. They will feel just a bit happier, and so will you. Love ‘n hugs from Filosofa & Jolly!
Gorgeous place, isn’t it? Don’t you just love all the wildlife running free? What? Where is it? It is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Feel free to grab a couple of the pictures to remember it by, for soon … soon it is likely that it will no longer be so pristine, so beautiful, and the animals are likely to be gone.
This land has long been a source of controversy between those who would protect both the land and the wildlife, and the others who would like to drill for oil on the land. In 1987, an impact study showed that if drilling were to take place …
Shortly after taking office, Trump unveiled his fossil fuel-dependent “America First Energy Plan”. In his first months, he signed several Executive Orders designed to pave the way for opening previously protected lands and waters for resource extraction. In May, Interior Secretary Zinke signed an order that requested an updated assessment of untapped potential oil and gas reserves in Alaska, which could then be used to make a case for drilling in the Arctic Refuge.
In an August memo, it was revealed the Department of the Interior wanted to lift a longstanding moratorium on exploratory seismic studies in the refuge. Now – remember the donor tax cuts bill that passed last December? Yeah, that one … the one that gave all those lovely tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%, increased both our debt and deficit, and left the rest of us in worse shape than before. Well, turns out that the republicans in Congress folded legislation into that bill that will ultimately open the doors to drilling for both gas and oil.
This week, the first permit application to begin seismic testing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), was submitted by two Alaska Native corporations and a small oil services firm. The Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service was not happy, however. The Fish and Wildlife Service complained that the permit application failed to provide studies about the effects of the seismic work and equipment on wildlife, the tundra and the aquatic conditions in the refuge. In other words, no environmental impact study was included.
The area is home to polar bears in winter and porcupine caribou and hundreds of migratory bird species in summer. No drilling has been done there since it became a refuge in 1980 and no seismic work since the mid-1980s.
Why would anybody go to all that trouble to steal a cell tower? It seems almost certain that one would get caught at some stage of the process. And then what to do with it when you get it home? Well, then on Friday came a brief statement from the RCMP that there had been a “miscommunication” and the tower was not stolen, but was being moved from its previous location by new owners. Well, a bit anti-climactic, but it was a fun story while it lasted.
The new dispensers are actually an improvement over public restrooms in some parts of China that offer no toilet tissue at all, or have a single roll for everybody to share! And oh yes … I almost forgot to mention, while on the subject … there is a brand of toilets in China named Trump! Fitting, don’t you think?
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