It’s probably a combination of the lighting and how your phone takes pictures that makes it seem a bit off. A lot of phones these days like the pixel actually do a bit of automatic post-editing the clear up images, but can sometimes make things a bit surreal
Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there's a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).
There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They'll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.
Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They're just the best.
Years ago I was walking through a park area of UC Berkeley while on vacation and this squirrel walked right in front of me and stood there, so I stopped and watched it. I realized I had some food in my backpack and there might be something squirrel-appropriate, so I very slowly took it off and opened it up, hoping the squirrel wouldn't get scared and run away. I found something - like a grape or something, don't remember what - and got it out to toss to the squirrel, but when he saw it he ran up my pants leg and stopped at about my waist. Scared the crap out of me. I held out the food and he took it with one hand, stuck it in his mouth, and ran away.
That's when I learned that there are apparently tame squirrels all around Berkeley.
Jealous! My sister lived in that area and we went squirrel walking a few times on visits but I was never so lucky as to have one crawl over me.
That walking up to you and standing up behavior - I've started to see that at a cemetery here in Portland that we walk around, but so far all the squirrels have waited a short distance away for food to be thrown to them.
Huh! I was aware of an animal looking vaguely like this by the name of “quokka,” but I didn’t realize they were marsupial. What a weird biological niche.
Various forms of the kangaroo build are spreading across the world, it's apparently a pretty efficient form factor. Wallabies I believe have spread to England, Vietnam?, and the US and are now invasive species in every continent.
I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.
Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.
It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.
Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.
Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.
Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.
My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.
My boy has since passed on, but he would never consider leaving us. So we just let him off the leash on the trails. Whenever we heard people ahead of us we'd call him back and put him back on the leash until they were out of earshot again. It never caused any problems in the 12 years he was with us. Such a precious, beautiful boy.
Same with mine. When he was new to us, he ran away twice so I put him on a leash strictly and put a GPS tracker on him. Thought he just wasn't one of those off the leash dogs. A year later a friend of mine told me "just cut him loose". I told him he runs, he looked at the dog and said "nah. He isn't going to. Try it."
Was hectars and hectars of his private forest, so I thought "what the hell, we'll find him with the tracker when he's hungry" and massive surprise: He really never ran off. Not that day and never since. 20m ahead, 20m back, never have to worry, as soon as people can be heard or he loses sight of me he's by my side immediately.
I wish he was good enough for that but he believes he's a hunting dog and if he smells deer scent he's gone... He event managed to dig out a portridge once! He picked up the scent, stopped listening to us and 30 seconds later bam, bird came out of hiding 10m from us and our dog came back as if nothing happened.
This picture was taken in front of a suburban elementary school.
I feel terrible for her because I think she chose her nesting spot when covid lockdown was in effect and now she is stuck with tons of children running by twice a day. Literally 2 meters away from her.
Will give her credit where credit is due that she sticks it out and doesn't leave her nest.
(Don't worry, she's roped off and they make regular announcements to use as reminders for everyone to look out for her.)
Yeah, they made a nest in the gravel left behind from a torn down building near where I live. I found the nest because as I was walking ~40 feet away one of them started going nuts. I never would've noticed the nest had they not called my attention to it :/
It was fun watching the baby birds emerge though, I thought the rain had drowned them for a while.
They're really stupid but have adapted really well to their stupidity. If you get too close to the nest, a parent will often mime having a broken wing to lead predators away from the eggs.
aww
Top