New prints by Claudine O’Sullivan, including ‘Kevin the Fox’ (above)
‘sup?
Mark at Jam Art Factory writes:
To celebrate a fresh delivery of signed A3 giclée prints from Claudine O’Sullivan, we’d like to give one away to a Broadsheet reader who tells us an obscure fact about an animal of their choosing. Most fascinating wins.
Lines must close at 1pm 10pm.
The Jam Art print competitions runs here every Friday until Christmas.
Sponsored Link
Rabbits eat their own poo.
and their babies
once by brother made a small hole in the bottom of a chocolate buttons pack, took out the chocolate and filled it back up with rabbit poops as a gift to me
Do anecdotal facts count?
Let’s see…
In the area I live there are a large number of raven roosts.
Every year in the week of the summer solstice, what can only be described as a conspiracy of ravens arrives from far afield to take position on the surrounding roofs.
All together it’s a sight to behold, like a scene from the Hitchcock classic – The Birds. The largest ensemble was a couple of years ago and was easily a couple of thousand.
As the chatter subsides they position themselves…
all turns calm as they sit silently waiting for the sun to set…
Perched aloft, all facing West… they witness the suns demise.
Growing up in the burbs I had never experienced this curious yet enchanting spectacle.
I often get the sense that they know the real solstice isn’t an arbitrary date on a calendar but a shared inherent knowing.
Now every year we both mark this almost symbolic event as a reminder of summer’s passing to come.
After a little research I discovered that teenage ravens will gather en masse like this before adulthood, before pairing off…
The reason why they choose to honour the solstice in this way we may never know, but it’s a mystery I’m quite content for the ravens to hold secret.
lovely,
Happy winter solstice…cawwww
Thanks Janet… and a solstice salute to you and yours this wintertide.
All true by the way.
Ever cross your fingers wishing to ward off bad luck when you see a poor magpie, well that’s a gesture dating back to early Christianity when the shape of the Christian cross was thought to be good luck.
fingers crossed I win ;)
…isn’t there a poem country folk say to the singular magpie to deflect the hex?
Or am I mistaken?
Anyone…?
calling all boggers ;)
i believe a spit breaks the curse of a solitary magpie. others recite a simple ‘one in flight is worth two in sight’ and feck a rock at the bastard.
The grey herons were the preferred quarry of falconers during medieval times. These birds were known for skillfully dodging the stoops of the falcon and were highly regarded for their excellent flying skills. Besides, roasted grey heron meat was a popular delicacy in medieval banquets.
The brown bear is Finland’s national animal
I’m 5 percentage Finn so it’s like five percent my spirit animal, the rest is half sloth half hare, half cougar ;) half mathematician, god I’m bored, I need some lovely prints to distract me from the fact the walls are closing in :)
…years ago, in a previous life, a Finlander gave someone I know a tin can with a picture of a bear on it,…he turned and gave it to me…
Me thinking cat food, stopped in my tracks…
I looked at the tin, paused, looked at him, then at the tin again and said isn’t this a bit small for a bear?
Never occurred to me it was for eating.
Needless to say I nodded sheepishly and politely accepted it… The embarrassment was unbearable I can tell ya.
It was still on the ‘apocalypse shelf’ in the cupboard up until recently. ;-)
and now the apocalypse is upon us !
…*stares wistfully at kitchen cabinet*
At least a real animal.
Scotland’s national animal is the Unicorn.
ha, a buckfast too many and they are all over the kip
now I want my aunties drop scoans, square sausage and back to bed
The animal of my choice, mankind, wacky, wonderful, capable, cruel, unstoppable, complicated and unpredictable yet so say predictable,
When lovers look into each others’ eyes, their heartbeats synchronize and yet the brain cannot feel pain, Neurons travel 150 mph in the brain but we have an attention span of goldfish. We care more about a single person than about massive tragedies and it takes five positive things to outweigh one negative.
* so sadly predictable
Sex in Snails is a subject and the first factor that complicates snail sex is their genitalia as they are hermaphrodites, any two snails can reproduce with each other regardless of sex. But in order for a couple of snails to make snail babies, one of them needs to take on the role of the female. That’s where the love dart comes in.
The love dart, called a gypsobelum, isn’t exactly the Cupid’s arrow the name suggests. It’s a nail-clipping-sized spike that snails jab into their partners about 30 minutes before the actual sex act takes place. The sliver is packed with hormones that prepare the receiving snail’s body for sperm. Depending on the species, only one snail might release the dart, or they both might in an attempt to avoid becoming the female of the pair.
For sex to be successful, both snails must insert their penises into the other’s vaginal tracts at the same time. Both snails deposit sperm, and the strength of the love dart ultimately determines whether or not that sperm fertilizes their partner’s eggs.
That’s assuming the snail survives the little love-stab. In human proportions, the love dart is the equivalent of a 15-inch knife. Snails also have a way of making it up to their partners after skewering them with a hormone stick. Their sperm deposit contains a dose of fortifying nutrients, something scientists refer to as a nuptial gift. It may not equal the energy expended during sex, but its enough to give them a small post-coital boost.
Don’t let this put you off ordering la douzaine Chez Max!
yum
A snail can sleep for three years at a time.
lucky fuppers
In a litter of puppies there can be different breeds of dog (different fathers)! Only found this out when we adopted our dog – she’s a Collie/Belgian shepherd cross, her brother is a Collie/Bernese cross. :O
It is estimated that Penguin Urine composes 3% of the ice on antartica.
I watched a documentary recently about the Poison Dart Frog, found in parts of tropical Central and South America. So called because their toxins were harvested and used in the tip of blow-darts by Native Americans in their hunting techniques. Visually they are famous for very bright colours and stripes, referred to as aposematicness, and is an advertising function to tell would be predators to keep walking so to speak.
Some frogs which display these bright colours and striping have no toxicity but are just mimicking their dangerous cousins without having to go to all the trouble. The poison dart frogs do not produce the toxins themselves but instead derive them from eating a rich diet of toxic mites, ants and centipedes, a magnificent evolutionary step to not become victims themselves and instead take the sustenance and process the toxins into defensive patches of poisons contained on areas of their skin.
The most poisonous of all these frogs, the Golden Poison Frog, has enough toxin on average to kill 10 to 20 men or about 10,000 mice. This is all the more remarkable when you consider their size, weighing in at an average of 28 grams and measuring 1.5 cms in length, comfortably fitting on the average thumbnail. The extracted chemicals they produce have some medical applications with one such poison used to make a painkiller 200 times as potent as morphine.
(A little help from Wikipedia)
Flamingos are naturally grey but are pink because of the fish they eat!
Ostriches can run faster than horses
the housefly hums in the key of F. ( for fupping annoying )
Foxes have whiskers on their legs that help them navigate in the dark