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Archive for January, 2010

Robert Burns Day

Today is Robert Burns Day, and to celebrate the Bard of Ayshire, I’m going to embed my favorite poem of his, a beautiful exposition of Enlightenment virtues:

Source.

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Yellow flat-coated retriever

This one is a bit darker in color than the yellow flat-coats I’ve seen, and he looks a lot like a golden retriever.

Source.

(The black dog is a curly/Labrador cross.)

The yellow pup looks a lot like this working strain golden:

Source.

The similarities exist because golden and flat-coated retrievers both descend from the old wavy-coated retriever. Until 1908, goldens were considered liver flat-coats. Then a special color variety was made for them called “Flat-coats (yellow).” However, this variety failed to be popular at shows, so the yellow and red retriever lovers moved to separate the breed from the black dogs. However, in order to do that, they had to make up a fanciful story about how the yellow dogs came from Russian circus dogs and were in no way related to those black ones. Never mind that the yellow dogs all had the best black flat-coat bloodlines behind them, and never mind that the one of the early top trial retrievers (Don of Gerwn) was a liver flat-coat with a golden retriever father. And also never mind that the three founding lines of golden retriever all were heavily interbred with black flat-coats. In the literature of the day, it is very hard to find any mention that these two breeds are close relatives.

I’d be the first to admit that the two breeds are different today, but they aren’t as different form each other as much as they are a theme and variation of a similar type. There are still blocky flat-coats and lithe goldens. It’s just that now the gene pools of both breeds have a tendency towards one form or the other.

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Badger is good for you!

This man eats roadkill. (And some of it is somewhat decomposed.)

And he’s not from West Virginia. He’s from the UK.

He takes the notion of “honest meat” a bit too far, don’t you think?

Lots of eccentric people  are featured in this video. This film includes quests for panthers on Bodmin Moor and tone deaf renditions of Christian hymns.

And thus it’s worth watching!

This is the part of England where they talk like pirates or maybe Captain Quint (who was from Massachusetts and shouldn’t have talked like that at all! The New England dialects originated in East Anglia, which is on the other side of England)

Part II

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Rene Dahinden the Sasquatch hunter

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Most important question: “Couldn’t this be a man in a fur suit?’

Click here for the full piece.

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Red Green’s Dog Wash

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The deer

These are fallow deer.

Poland has three native species of deer: the elk (moose), the red deer, and the roe deer.

It also has two introduced species the Sika deer (a close relative of the red deer) and the fallow deer. Both of these species have white spots on their backs during the summer months, although fallow deer come in several different color varieties, and this particular color phase lacks the white spots.

The normal coloration for most fallow deer  something like this:

photo by Rob Bendall

My guess is you have seen these deer at petting zoos. They are one of the easiest deer to raise in captivity, and they can be docile enough for children to feed and pet.

Roe deer look like this:

Photo by Nickshanks

The head shape of the roe deer is very different from that of the fallow deer. The fallow deer have head more like a cow, while the roe resemble very small versions of North American white-tails and mule deer. Their most distinctive features are their high-set ears  and relatively vertical antlers.

Fallow deer did live in Central and Northern Europe, but they became extinct in that region during the Holocene. They continued to exist in the Mediterranean, and the Romans reintroduced them to their former northern range.

The male fallow deer develop very interesting antlers:

Photo by B. Navez.

The species also has a distinctive Adam’s apple, which you can see very clearly in that photo.

Now, I did mention that Sika deer inhabit Poland, but those deer were not Sika deer.  Sika deer have more elongated heads.

Photo by Wildfeuer

The head shape is the main diagnostic feature that these deer are Fallow deer, even though they don’t look like the fallows we typically see at zoos and game parks.

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Working curly in Denmark

Source

I love this dog’s name (“Xingu”).  The Xingu is a tributary of the Amazon. It is also the name of a Schwarzbier from Brazil.  It is pronounced “Sheengoo.”

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