Eff-Stop Local: Small-Radius Travel: wildlife

Showing posts with label wildlife. Show all posts

24.11.15

17.11.15

The Blue Raccoon

Harborwalking at dawn, Port Angeles...

Port Angeles, WA

4.1.15

My Many Hats (1. The Pith Helmet)

A few weeks ago I alluded (tantalizingly, I hope) to my "jungle explorer phase." Now, for the first post of 2015 and the seventh year kickoff of this multifarious blog, I give a hat-tip (if you'll pardon the pun) to the current Sepia Saturday theme by delving somewhat deeper into that period of my distant youth.

The author, aka "Bwana," takes aim at a 1963 Christmas wildebeest, or perhaps his baby sister.
I believe that's a red/green/white flashlight at the waist. Note the gunbelt for the de rigeur .45.

In the early 1960s, I had run across, in the children's section of our local library, the books of one Carl Ethan Akeley.

Akeley won renown in the early 20th century with not only his explorations of the then still "darkest Africa" but his groundbreaking expertise in the lifelike taxidermy of large mammals.

I had gotten hooked on Africa around this time, thanks to this movie.

Set in the modern day, "Hatari" did not have the suspenseful atmosphere of Akeley's books, which despite their dated diction (with a spot of paternalistic racism) were thrilling, set in a time when "white men" had to rely on native tribespeople to guide them through an uncharted, savage wilderness.

I spent many a happy hour memorizing Swahili words from Akely's glossary.
Such as the essential "Bwana."

I was young, and we all were too naive at the time, to register the sad realities of Akeley's adventures, which were primarily undertaken under the auspices of the New York Museum of Natural History, to build a stellar collection of African wildlife specimens. Although he did do a lot of photographing of rare wildlife, including the mountain gorilla and the newly discovered okapi, even designing a movie camera for his fieldwork, most of Akeley's work ultimately meant the shooting of large numbers of animals.

Akeley and his camera

Akeley's famous elephant exhibit, 1914

Still, it was the adventure I was keen on, such as Akeley's famous hand-to-hand combat with a leopard, which miraculously, though not without damage, he won, or his being half-crushed between the tusks of a bull elephant.

Tip: To kill a leopard with your bare hands, crush its rib cage by kneeling on it.

Tip: Don't get in the way of a mad elephant.

One panel from a great Akeley comicbook

Carl's wife, Mary Jobe Akeley, accompanied him on most of his trips, and wrote or co-wrote many of the books I devoured.

21.1.11

Three Winters

Winter 2010-2011

Winter 2007

Winter 2008

For more monochrome,visit blackandwhiteweekend.blogspot.com!

6.1.11

Not a drop to drink

Less stormy water shots from California.

Koi, Mission at San Juan Capistrano

Huntington Gardens, Pasadena

Seals, La Jolla Cove

Egret, Dana Point

Wife, Seven Springs Inn, Palm Springs

15.10.10

Astronomy Domine

Spotted from our back yard, the rarely seen Arachnid Nebula.

If you dare, click to enlarge.
Happy Halloween...

14.8.10

Sepia Saturday Interlude: Animal Baseball

Last week, one of the Sepia Saturday entries featured some classic baseball cards. It put me in mind of one of my favorite pieces of memorabilia of my father's. He had always been a fan of the Thornton Burgess animal stories. And he was a baseball fan. Not surprisingly then, when he was about 15 (c. 1933) he invented the Animal Baseball card game. He kept the cards in this box.

He started with a commercial deck based on Burgess's creations, which I gather was equivalent to Old Maid, and added cards sufficient to make up two teams, by both cutting out Burgess characters from books or magazines, and drawing the rest.

The homemade cards were backed with cardboard -- sometimes from cereal boxes or other sources. One is a movie flier of some sort; the blurb for the 1933 Western, "Smoke Lightning," IMdB says "Branded as a killer--hunted, hounded, driven to desperation, he turned on his hunters and shot his way to freedom--and the heart of the only girl." The plot for "Grand slam" is too complicated to go into here!

The numbered cards (from another deck) determine the baseball play. At the bottom of the following stats sheet (he kept meticulous records for every game he played) is the valuable key to scoring runs.

1=Single; 2=Out; 3=Strike Out; 4=Out; 5=Double; 6=Out; 7=Double Play!!; 7=Out; 8=Second Base; 9=Out; 10=Triple; 11=Out; 12=Out; 13=Walk; 14=Walk; 15=Home Run

He would call out the plays as they occurred, as though he were a radio sports reporter. In fact, before deciding to go into English, he wanted to be a sports announcer or reporter. (A future Sepia Saturday will feature excerpts fom his long-running hand-produced "Daily Blah" newspaper, which he singlehandedly issued throughout high school).

He also made some of the cards from photos, including two of his dogs...Mike was supposedly an Airedale, and I have never seen any other photos of him, but this does not look anything like an Airedale to me! Some card illustrations were from other sources. Reynard the Fox was marked as team manager.

Here is the stats chart for the Animal Baseball team.

Buster Bear and Grandfather Frog were apparently hall-of-famers who got special plaques.

19.7.10

Visitors from the Ravine

Since we're situated on a greenbelt, we have lots of birds... flickers, crows, chickadees, eagles (well at a distance), starlings, robins, sparrows, towhees, swallows, etc. But also four- and six-legged interlopers. Here's a fair sampling, most of whom survived our three Felis domestica.