MARINA ZURKOW
Squirrels. Imagine them: Red feather headdresses versus gray flannel suits of the Wall Street reivers. Landgrabbing American Grays – purveyors of squirrel pox pockets – turn little Reds into sludge. BRITAIN’S FAVORED NATIVES SACKED BY IMMIGRANTS, say headlines; diseases carrying foreigners, or foreigners carrying disease – either way. Like Mayflower, like Ailanthus, they come with…
“Giant pandas are ‘charismatic megafauna,’ a category that includes whales and other sea mammals, salmon and other inspirational fish, eagles and other flashy raptors. In each instance, the creatures help spotlight the hundreds of humbler but equally endangered species: the black-spored quillwort, the longhorn fairy shrimp.” —”Birth and Rebirth,” USA Today, August 23, 1999 Usually…
Animals that eat jellyfish also eat plastic bags Animals that eat plankton or fish eggs also eat plastic pellets Animals that eat fish also eat plastic. MSNBC posted a story on April 9, about leatherback turtles’ diet of plastic bags. A new study looked at necropsy reports of more than 400 leatherbacks that have died…
It’s spring break the oceans over. Australia’s beaches regularly host many types of toxic gelatinous animals, including the notorious Portuguese Man-of-War and Chironex fleckeri, a type of box jellyfish that is the world’s most venomous animal; a Chironex can kill a person in under three minutes. In addition, some species of potentially deadly box jellyfish…
Enter the Jellyfish Fantasy Hall at Enoshima Aquarium south of Tokyo and you will find yourself surrounded by dazzling swarms of gently pulsating creatures… Jellyfish, which have inhabited the world’s oceans in one form or another for over one billion years, come in a dizzying array of shapes, sizes and colors. – from Pink Tentacle…
In an effort to save the native Red Squirrel, the invasive Gray Squirrel in the UK been subject to a holocaust (esp in Northumbria, the last stronghold of the reds): Over 20,000 Gray Squirrels are Culled. Gray Squirrels were brought over from America in the early 19th century “to amuse the rich;” now they’ve gotten…
So much for the natives feeling less antipathy towards their compatriots. Elvis, an injured red squirrel, attacked a pensioner who came to his aid at the weekend, leaving the man needing hospital treatment. Ernie Gordon, 75, a squirrel fanatic who wrote a children’s book The Adventures of Rusty Red Coat, was called out last Friday…
Yggdrasil the world tree. Wägner, Wilhelm. 1882. Nordisch-germanische Götter und Helden In Norse mythology, Ratatoskr (Old Norse, generally considered “drill-tooth” or “bore-tooth”) is a squirrel who runs up and down the world tree Yggdrasil to carry messages between the unnamed eagle, perched atop Yggdrasil, and the wyrm Níðhöggr, who dwells beneath one of the three…
Our in-betweens keep getting closer. “Doga combines massage and meditation with gentle stretching for dogs and their human partners. In chaturanga, dogs sit with their front paws in the air while their human partners provide support. In an “upward-paw pose,” or sun salutation, owners lift dogs onto their hind legs. In a resting pose, the…
This, from a great collection in the Science and Society Picture Library: and this, too:
.. for some reason, an Oracle consulting firm is housing all these images. Thanks.
Farne Island is home to the Lindisfarne Priory ruins, whose monks in the 7th century created the Gospels, an unusual and exquisite Celtic Christian illuminated manuscript. Birds are rife in the manuscript as well as a cat on the front page, quite unusual in the iconography, according to Aly Wolff-Mills, a student at ITP who…
Also at the National Science Library, this book of Conrad Gesner’s beautiful 16th century animal woodcuts, real and imagined (so much was hearsay anyway).
There’s a magnifabulous online book of the 1585 edition of Oeuvresby Ambroise Paré, 16th century surgeon, considered the first humane surgeon to come out of the barber-surgeon tradition. He was also very interested in ‘monstrous’ forms. The book’s at the National Library of Medicine
Fritz Haeg’s Animal Estates “produces events and exhibitions to consider the animals that we share our cities with, and creates dwellings for animals that have been unwelcome or displaced by humans. As animal habitats dwindle daily, Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards,…
I found this site originally from a class at UCSB, Interspecies Collaborations, “a collaborative research space for documenting the progress of art projects made together with non-human animals and for posting resources relevant to such endeavors.”