In the NYT Book Review yesterday, a set of three reviews of quirky books about people and animals (elephants, a tawny owl, and the giant squid); and then today in the Daily Post (Palo Alto and Mid-Peninsula), the story “Another cougar reported” (by Angelo Ruggiero), which I took at first to be a silly story about sexually aggressive older women in the area but which turned out (of course) to be about mountain lions.

The NYT reviews:

by Sara Gruen, of Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save World War II, by Vicki Constantine Coke [about Lt. Col. James Howard Williams, nicknamed “Elephant Bill”]

by Liesl Schillinger, of The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living With a Tawny Owl, by Martin Windrow [about his own owl]

by Jon Mooallem, of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, by Matthew Gavin Frank [about the Rev. Moses Harvey]

All three books are about eccentrics passionately involved with animals; the third appears to have an eccentric author as well. Delightful to see the three reviews packaged together.

Then there’s the local cougar. The story begins:

For the third time this month, a mountain lion has been spotted in San Mateo.

The area has loads of undeveloped space — foothills, parklands, forests, creeks, and so on — and plenty of deer and smaller animals for cougars to prey on (residents are of course concerned about their household pets, not to mention their small children).

On the big cat, from Wikipedia:

The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as the mountain lion, puma, panther, painter, mountain cat, or catamount, is a large cat of the family Felidae native to the Americas. Its range, from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes of South America, is the greatest of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in most American habitat types.

Then there’s the slang term cougar. For a change, this one seems to be genuinely recent; from Wikipedia:

Cougar is a slang term that refers to a woman who seeks sexual relations with considerably younger men. It typically refers to women aged 30–40 years old. ABC News states that these women pursue sexual relations with people more than eight years younger than they are, while The New York Times states that the women are over the age of 40 and aggressively pursue sexual relations with men in their twenties or thirties. However, the term can also refer to any female who has a male partner much younger than herself, regardless of age or age difference.

The origin of the word cougar as a slang term is debated, but it is thought to have originated in Western Canada and first appeared in print on the Canadian dating website Cougardate.com.

For some discussion, see this piece by lexicographer Grant Barrett, who takes slang cougar back to 2001 in Canada.

There doesn’t yet seem to be a generally used term for a cougar’s boytoy.

From the 8/30/14 New Scientist, three stories: one with a piece of technical terminology I hadn’t heard before, and two perfectly straightforward stories (on the mapping of Antarctic Ocean life and on the mating customs of the giraffe weevil) with some language play that’s characteristic of much science writing.

The thanatomicrobiome. Annals of lexical innovation, from the article “Death: the great bacterial takeover”:

Surprisingly, what happens [to the body’s microbes after death] has largely been a mystery. Now researchers have made the first study of the thanatomicrobiome – the army of gut microbes that take over your internal organs once you are dead.

A technical term, combining the thanato ‘death’ formative with microbiome (from Wikipedia on human microbiome: ‘the aggregate of microorganisms, a microbiome that resides on the surface and in deep layers of skin, in the saliva and oral mucosa, in the conjunctiva, and in the gastrointestinal tracts’).

Mapping ocean life. The beginning of the article “Antarctic Ocean life gets mapped”:

Whale what’s going on here then? Climate change’s dramatic effects on the Southern Ocean just got easier to track, thanks to a comprehensive biodiversity map of the region.

Ouch. A pun on whale / well, alluding to the whales in the Antarctic Ocean and to a comic formula conventionally associated with British policemen when they come across some situation:

Well / Right / Now / Ello, what’s going on here then?

(further variants for the initial element: well then, now then, ‘ello ‘ello ‘ello, etc.).

The formula is most famously associated with a Monty Python sketch about Police Constable Pan-Am:

Policeman: (Graham Chapman) Right. Right! RIGHT! Now then! Now then! Your turn.

Chemist: (Michael Palin) Aren’t you going to say ‘What’s all this then?’?

Policeman: Oh! Right, what’s all this, then?

The sketch clearly alludes to a pre-existing formula, but I haven’t been able to track down its earlier history.

Giraffe weevils. And then the article “Sometimes it pays to be the lesser of two weevils”, where the language play comes in the title: weevil / evil, based on the phrasal idiom lesser of two evils ‘the less bad thing of two bad things':

The latest sex tapes confirm it: size doesn’t matter – so long as you’re sneaky. Smaller male New Zealand giraffe weevils use their diminutiveness to their advantage to mate with females under the noses of their larger peers.

The bizarre-looking male giraffe weevil (Lasiorhynchus barbicornis) uses its enormous snout, or rostrum – which can make up over half its body length – to joust with other males and win mating rights. But some males have snouts just one-sixth the length of those of their most well-endowed peers.

Small males don’t let this disadvantage stand in their way, though, says Christina Painting at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She monitored the private lives of 79 weevils and found that small males with short snouts instead use sly sexual behaviour to mate. Some would hide under a female while she copulated with a large male, ready to jump in should the larger male get distracted by a rival. Others would slowly slide unnoticed between a copulating pair and take over from the larger male.

Using these tactics, small males were as sexually successful as larger ones, mating just as often (Behavioral Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/aru140).

On size in humans, see my 1/19/11 XBlog posting “In praise of little guys” (on AZBlogX because it has full frontal nudity), which celebrates compact men (small in overall body size) and men with smaller than average penises. By the way, I don’t know of any research on penis size and sexual success in humans (as opposed to snout size and sexual success in giraffe weevils).

(Only a little bit about language.)

From New Scientist on 8/30/14, “Beautiful but doomed: Hubristic humans should heed the tale of the passenger pigeon” by Adrian Barnett, beginning:

This September marks a melancholy anniversary: the first of the month is the centennial of the death of Martha the pigeon in Cincinnati zoo and, with her passing, the extinction of the passenger pigeon. It was an extinction that 100 years earlier would have been inconceivable.

This was a species that moved in flocks of billions of individuals, so dense as to blot out the sun and take days to pass.

… The anniversary has been marked by the publication of three very different books, all focusing on how a species can go from sky-darkening abundance to a single, aged individual in a matter of decades – and what this may tell us about the future.

A pair of passenger pigeons, in a color plate by Audubon:

and notes from Wikipedia:

The passenger pigeon or wild pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is an extinct North American bird.

… The common name “passenger pigeon” derives from the French word passager, which means “to pass by” in a fleeting manner. The generic epithet [Ectopistes] translates as “wandering about”, the specific [migratorius] indicates it is migratory

Back to the book reviews in New Scientist:

The most visually beautiful is Errol Fuller’s The Passenger Pigeon, which gives a fine account of the species, its biology and its demise. We also learn what a superb long-distance flying machine this bird was, with huge flight muscles, greatly enlarged shoulder bones and sternum for endurance, and a tapering, highly aerodynamic shape and falcon-like wings for speed. As Fuller emphasises, this was no dodderer, extinct because it was too stupid or frail to survive.

Instead, as Joel Greenberg shows in A Feathered River Across the Sky, it was habitat destruction that largely did for the species [though incredibly aggressive hunting also played a role]. Accustomed to peregrinations in search of patchy and ephemeral resources, passenger pigeons simply couldn’t adapt to the newly deforested, industrialising landscape of 19th-century North America. This, plus the odd fact that pigeons left fattened, ground-foraging young to fend for themselves for the last two weeks before they could fly, ultimately led to their disappearance.

In A Message from Martha, Mark Avery, who was formerly conservation director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, puts passenger pigeon biology in context by comparisons with great migrators such as the Manx shearwater and the albatross. He then provides a detailed analysis of how humans caused an inevitable decline.

The demise of the passenger pigeon, culminating in Martha’s death, has been widely covered recently, for instance in the NYT Sunday Review of August 31st, in “Saving Our Birds” by John W. Fitzpatrick.

I’ve been reading through Amy Butler Greenfield’s fascinating A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (HarperCollins 2005, paperback in 2006), which abounds in great topics: conquest, colonialism, skullduggery, official secrecy, piracy, medieval-style commercial guilds, mysteries of natural history, the growth of science, international trade, cultural diffusion, and more. Officially it’s about dyes, in particular the intense and durable true red dye sought by cultures around much of the world. So of course it turns out to be about cactuses and scale insects. Plenty of linguistic interest in there.

Background for reference. First from Wikipedia:

The cochineal ([pronounced /ˈkVtʃɨˌniːl/, where V is /a/ or /o/] … Dactylopius coccus) is a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha, from which the crimson-coloured natural dye carmine is derived. A primarily sessile parasite native to tropical and subtropical South America and Mexico, this insect lives on cacti in the genus Opuntia [Spanish nopal ‘prickly pear’, literally ‘paddle’], feeding on plant moisture and nutrients.

That leads to the fine English word nopalry ‘plantation of nopal’.

And then from NOAD2, where we see that the noun can refer to the insect, the dried bodies of the insect, or the dye derived from those bodies:

1 a scarlet dye used chiefly for coloring food

• the dried bodies of a female scale insect, which are crushed to yield this dye
• a similar dye or preparation made from the oak kermes insect

2 (cochineal insect) the scale insect that is used for cochineal, native to Mexico and formerly widely cultivated on cacti.

ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French cochenille or Spanish cochinilla, from Latin coccinus ‘scarlet,’ from Greek kokkos ‘berry’ (because the insect bodies were originally mistaken for grains or berries).

(Note on the etymology: Spain kept the nature of cochineal a closely guarded secret for a very long time. Outsiders were unsure whether it came from a plant or an animal — a worm of some kind — or possibly a plant-animal hybrid, and speculation abounded.)

Photos: a prickly pear, or Barbary fig (Opuntia ficus-indica), in a botanical illustration from The Cactaceae (1919-1923) by Britton & Rose:

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As a bonus, Opuntia microdasys the ‘bunny ears cactus':

(#2)

The scale insects can feast on a number of different species of Opuntia.

A Mexican cochineal insect, magnified;

(#3)

(Scale insects are not very photogenic.)

And some dyed yarn:

(#4)

Two personal digressions.

Digression 1: my childhood chemistry set. On an antiques site, a 1936 Gilbert Chemistry Outfit, with

32 wooden chemical barrels, among them: cochineal, copper sulphate, gum arabic, ferric ammonium sulphate, logwood, magnesium sulphate, magnesium dioxide, borax, boric acid, ammonium chloride, ammonium sulphate, manganese sulphate, potassium permanganate, powdered iron sulphide, charcoal, sulfur, powdered iron, chrome alum [spelling somewhat regularized]

I don’t think I appreciated the story of cochineal at the time.

Digression 2: the merchant guilds. The actors in the story include the governors of New Spain, the peasants there, pirates (who sometimes seized huge amounts of cochineal), the administration back in Spain, and the merchant guilds who dealt with the product. On guilds, from Wikipedia:

A guild … is an association of artisans or merchants who control the practice of their craft in a particular town. The earliest types of guild were formed as confraternities of workers. They were organized in a manner something between a professional association, trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials.

That’s all quite serious, but my view of guilds has been irrevocably colored by the ones in Terry Pratchett’s comic novels. On Pratchett, from Wikipedia:

Sir Terence David John “Terry” Pratchett, OBE (born 28 April 1948) is an English author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of about 40 volumes.

And on the guilds, ditto:

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of fantasy novels, there are almost 300 Guilds in the city of Ankh-Morpork.

The list of guilds includes ordinary occupational associations, with some surprises tucked in: alchemists, assassins, chefs, conjurers, fools, lawyers, rat-catchers, thieves, town criers, watchmen, …

Now, back to Greenfield’s book and her surprising story about one consequence of the way cochineal was cultivated in New Spain (from the paperback ed.):

p. 100: …. cochineal cultivation was an attractive way of generating the small cash income that most indigenous households needed or desired. Unlike most forms of paid labor under the Spaniards, it did not require Indians to part from their villages and families or to suffer the degradation of working directly under the people who had conquered them. Instead, it allowed them to work at home, in the company of their children and extended family.

p. 101: By the middle of the sixteenth century, the devastating twin impact of Spanish rule and Old World diseases had fragmented many native communities. Entire cultures were disappearing. But in areas where cochineal was grown – areas where people were able to make a living while remaining close to their kin – communities demonstrated a remarkable ability to withstand such pressures, many villages that grew cochineal were able to preserve their languages, traditions, and cultures for centuries, which helps explain why Oaxaca, the chief cochineal-producing region, remains today the most culturally and linguistically diverse state in Mexico.

Now the flowers of the late summer and early fall. Message from Liz Fannin in Columbus OH a little while ago:

Today I had the best reward for planting echinacea: a goldfinch on it. There was a little female who was so engrossed in eating those seeds that she didn’t even fly off when I went out the front door to the car.

On echinacea, from Wikipedia:

Echinacea … is a genus … of herbaceous flowering plants in the daisy family, Asteraceae. The nine species it contains are commonly called coneflowers. They are endemic to eastern and central North America, where they are found growing in moist to dry prairies and open wooded areas. They have large, showy heads of composite flowers, blooming from early to late summer. The generic name is derived from the Greek word ἐχῖνος (echino), meaning “sea urchin,” due to the spiny central disk. Some species are used in herbal medicines and some are cultivated in gardens for their showy flowers.

… The flower heads have typically 200-300 fertile, bisexual disc florets but some have more. The corollas are pinkish, greenish, reddish-purple or yellow

I’ll get to the goldfinches in a moment.

A drift of coneflowers, both yellow and purple, in my Columbus garden (photo by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky in 1998):

(#1)

(You can see why they’re called coneflowers.)

Two of those nine species:

Echinacea purpurea (eastern purple coneflower or purple coneflower) is a species of flowering plant in the genus Echinacea of the family Asteraceae. Its cone-shaped flowering heads are usually, but not always, purple in the wild. It is native to eastern North America and present to some extent in the wild in much of the eastern, southeastern and midwest United States. (link)

Echinacea paradoxa (Bush’s purple coneflower, Yellow Coneflower) is a perennial species of flowering plant in the genus Echinacea. Echinacea paradoxa is native to Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and is listed as threatened in Arkansas. (link)

There are fancy cultivars of these:

(#2)

(#3)

Now the goldfinch. From Wikipedia:

The American goldfinch (Spinus tristis), also known as the eastern goldfinch, is a small North American bird in the finch family. It is migratory, ranging from mid-Alberta to North Carolina during the breeding season, and from just south of the Canadian border to Mexico during the winter.

… The American goldfinch is a granivore and adapted for the consumption of seedheads, with a conical beak to remove the seeds and agile feet to grip the stems of seedheads while feeding. It is a social bird, and will gather in large flocks while feeding and migrating.

(#4)

(A male, showier than the female.)

I was worried that goldfinches were endangered, like many pretty songbirds. But, pleasingly, no:

Human activity has generally benefited the American goldfinch. It is often found in residential areas, attracted to bird feeders which increase its survival rate in these areas. Deforestation also creates open meadow areas which are its preferred habitat.

Now two bonuses.

Bonus 1: black-eyed Susans. Another summer composite, closely related to the echinaceas, and especially noticeable at this time of the year.

Rudbeckia hirta, commonly called black-eyed Susan, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae, native to the Eastern and Central United States. It is one of a number of plants with the common name black-eyed Susan. Other common names for this plant include: brown-eyed Susan, brown Betty, gloriosa daisy, golden Jerusalem, Poorland daisy, yellow daisy, and yellow ox-eye daisy.

… The genus name honors Olaus Rudbeck, who was a professor of botany at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and was one of Linnaeus’s teachers. The specific epithet refers to the trichomes (hairs) occurring on leaves and stems.

… R. hirta is widely cultivated in parks and gardens, for summer bedding schemes, borders, containers, wildflower gardens, prairie-style plantings and cut flowers. Numerous cultivars have been developed (link)

(#5)

Bonus 2: California echinacea. Here in Palo Alto we aren’t as far along in the blooming season as in Columbus, but here are some local photos from Elizabeth. A purple echinacea, one that’s fading, and the (dewy) developing seed head on a third:

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(#7)

(#8)

In the NYT on Monday (9/30), “Once Considered Won, Battle Against Invasive Beetles Is Renewed” by Paul Glader, beginning:

It is a menace from Asia that over the past two decades has ravaged tens of thousands of trees in several states. But after being wiped out in New Jersey, it seemed to be in retreat in New York thanks to a warlike response from federal and state governments. It was gone from Staten Island and Manhattan, and the battle against it was tilting toward eradication in Queens, in Brooklyn and on Long Island.

That was until Charlie Crimi spotted one in his Long Island backyard — an Asian long-horned beetle. “I didn’t really know what it was,” Mr. Crimi said of the large, white polka-dot, shiny black bug with long, wavy antennas that he saw in the summer of 2013. But after some Internet research, Mr. Crimi, 54, realized he had seen the notorious insect equivalent of Jesse James. He emailed a photo of the bug to a state forestry worker and received confirmation that what he had seen was, in fact, an Asian long-horned beetle.

From Wikipedia on this creature:

The Asian long-horned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis), also known as the starry sky, sky beetle, or ALB, is a species native to eastern China, Japan, and Korea. This species has now been accidentally introduced into the United States, where it was first discovered in 1996, as well as Canada, Trinidad, and several countries in Europe, including Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. This beetle is believed to have been spread from Asia in solid wood packaging material.

And on the genus:

Anoplophora is a genus of beetles in the longhorn beetle family (Cerambycidae). They are native to Asia. Most are large and colorful and thus are depicted in artwork and sought after by beetle collectors. The genus also includes several notorious pest insects.

… The Asian long-horned beetle (A. glabripennis) is native to China and Korea, and it is now widespread in Europe as an introduced species. It is also common in some major cities in North America, including Toronto, Chicago, and New York City, where it has infested and damaged thousands of street and park trees. Many tree species can serve as hosts to the beetle, but it especially favors maples.

The citrus long-horned beetle (A. chinensis syn. A. malasiaca) has been introduced from Asia to Europe and North America. It is a pest of citrus and other fruit and nut trees. It infests forest trees and ornamentals. It attacks over 100 species of trees, shrubs, and herbs from many plant families. Damage from its wood-boring larvae can kill trees.

The citrus trunk borer (A. versteegi) is the most serious pest of citrus in northeastern India. The larvae kill trees.

About the names: the long “horns” of long-horned beetles are just antennae — like horns in appearance, but not organs of offense or defense (unlike the mandibles of stag beetles, which are used as weapons). Hence the genus name, which incorporates the anoplo- element, from Greek ἄνοπλ-ος ‘unarmed’ ( < privative ἀν + ὅπλον ‘weapon’).

Long-horn(ed) beetles are also known as longicorns, from the Latin name.

Back to Long Island, in the NYT:

This fall, workers will start removing 4,500 trees along the Southern State Parkway in western Suffolk County to prevent further spread of the beetle. Removing the trees the beetle likes to attack — including maple, willow and birch — eliminates the insect’s habitat.

… The adult beetles lay eggs (sometimes dozens) just under the bark of a tree. The larvae grow inside the tree all winter [eating the cambium layer], turning the inside of the tree into a soggy mush and leaving its vascular system to rot as it burrows out, making exit holes that leave the tree looking as if it were machine-gunned.

Ick.

At this point I wondered what the workers did with all this tree material they removed, and how they avoided spreading the beetles in the process. Burning, or what?

Today’s Zippy, at the Existential Automat:

(#1)

First, a litany of philosophical approaches, then one of animated cartoon studios, plus Woody Woodpecker in the last panel (and, by allusion to the pileated woodpecker, in the title of the strip).

The studios:

Disney. The big dog in this territory, home of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and lots more. (I find it almost impossible to think about the Disney studio without having the Mickey Mouse Club March run through my head: M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Evil earworm.)

Terrytoons. From Wikipedia:

Terrytoons was an animation studio founded by Paul Terry. The studio, located in suburban New Rochelle, New York, operated from 1929 to 1968. The studio created many popular cartoon characters including Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, Gandy Goose, Sourpuss, Dinky Duck and Luno. The “New Terrytoons” period of the late 1950s and 60s brought us Sidney, Hector Heathcote, Hashimoto and Deputy Dawg as well as The Mighty Heroes. Famed animator Ralph Bakshi got his start at Terrytoons.

Looney Tunes. From this blog, on 6/15/14, about Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones, a posting, listing some of the popular Looney Tunes characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester, Tweety, Wile E. Coyote, and the Road Runner.

The Fleischers. From Wikipedia:

Fleischer Studios, Inc., was an American corporation which originated as an animation studio located at 1600 Broadway, New York City, New York. It was founded in 1921 as Inkwell Studios (or Out of the Inkwell Films) by brothers Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer who ran the company from its inception until Paramount Pictures, the studio’s parent company and the distributor of its films, forced them to resign in April 1942. In its prime, it was Walt Disney Productions’s very first significant competitor and is notable for bringing to the screen cartoons featuring Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Bimbo, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman. Unlike other studios, whose most famous characters were anthropomorphic animals, the Fleischers’ most popular characters were humans.

And Woody Woodpecker. First, from Wikipedia:

Woody Woodpecker is an anthropomorphic animated woodpecker who appeared in theatrical short films produced by the Walter Lantz animation studio and distributed by Universal Pictures. Though not the first of the screwball characters that became popular in the 1940s, Woody is perhaps the most indicative of the type.
Woody was created in 1940 by Lantz and storyboard artist Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, who had previously laid the groundwork for two other screwball characters, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, at the Warner Bros. cartoon studio in the late 1930s.

(Another annoying earworm: “The Woody Woodpecker Song”, featuring Woody’s famous laugh (an imitation of a woodpecker call). According to Wikipedia, Woody got his own theme song in 1947, and then “Kay Kyser’s 1948 recording of the song, with Harry Babbitt’s laugh interrupting vocalist Gloria Wood, became one of the biggest hit singles of 1948″ and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song.)

According to Wikipedia on the acorn woodpecker, “Walter Lantz is believed to have patterned the call of his cartoon character Woody Woodpecker on that of the acorn woodpecker, while patterning his appearance on that of the pileated woodpecker, which has a prominent crest”:

(#2)

An actual pileated woodpecker:

(#3)

On the bird, from Wikipedia:

The pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus, formerly Picus pileatus) is a very large North American woodpecker, roughly crow-sized, inhabiting deciduous forests in eastern North America, the Great Lakes, the boreal forests of Canada, and parts of the Pacific coast. It is also the largest woodpecker in the United States, except the possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.

(Pileated woodpeckers are both very large and very noisy.)

And on the name pileated, with definitions from Merriam-Webster (at m-w.com online):

pileated ‘having a crest covering the pileum’ [pronounced /ˈpV li ˌe təd/, where V is aj or I]

pileum ‘the top of the head of a bird from the bill to the nape’ [pronounced /ˈpaj li əm/

Woodpeckers seem to count as intrinsically silly, perhaps in part because of the name woodpecker, whose second element is a U.S. vulgar slang term for ‘penis’. And many people find pileated also silly, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me (though maybe a first syllable that sounds like either pile or pill has something to do with it).

In any case, Woody Woodpecker is in fact a very silly character.

In the latest (10/20/14) New Yorker, a hilarious and simultaneously disturbing piece by Patricia Marx, “Pets Allowed: Why are so many animals now in places where they shouldn’t be?” (starting on p. 36), about emotional-support animals. From p. 37, on E.S.A.s vs. service dogs:

Contrary to what many business managers think, having an emotional-support card merely means that one’s pet is registered in a database of animals whose owners have paid anywhere from seventy to two hundred dollars to one of several organizations, none of which are recognized by the government. (You could register a Beanie Baby, as long as you send a check.) Even with a card, it is against the law and a violation of the city’s health code to take an animal into a restaurant. Nor does an emotional-support card entitle you to bring your pet into a hotel, store, taxi, train, or park.

No such restrictions apply to service dogs, which, like Secret Service agents and Betty White, are allowed to go anywhere. In contrast to an emotional-support animal (E.S.A.), a service dog is trained to perform specific tasks, such as pulling a wheelchair and responding to seizures. The I.R.S. classifies these dogs as a deductible medical expense, whereas an emotional-support animal is more like a blankie.

In the piece, Marx attempts (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to take (purported) E.S.A.s into places where animals are in fact not allowed, using creatures borrowed from acquaintances: a turtle, a (large) snake, a turkey, an alpaca, and a pig.

In the latest (10/25/14) NewScientist, a piece “Shy lemurs communicate using toilet trees” (on-line; in print with the jokey title “Wee need to stay in touch”):

The white-footed sportive lemur does not need to see its family often – it keeps in touch by urinating instead.

Unlike many other primates, these lemurs do not groom each other. They do not share their tree hideouts with others, and go to great lengths to avoid spending time with the mates and offspring they share their territory with.

… Iris Dröscher of the German Primate Centre in Göttingen spent over 1000 hours watching the toilet habits of 14 adult sportive lemurs, and found that family groups went to the same places to defecate and urinate at different times throughout the night (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology …). “The chemical traces in the urine are unique for each lemur, so by leaving scent marks the lemurs can interact and bond with their family without meeting them,” says Dröscher.

Two things here: the delightful name white-footed sportive lemur, and of course their means of communication.

A lemur in a tree:

and the quick Wikipedia story:

The white-footed sportive lemur, white-footed weasel lemur, or dry-bush weasel lemur (Lepilemur leucopus) is a species of lemur in the family Lepilemuridae, the sportive lemurs. It is similar in appearance to other lemurs in the family, with a grey back, a pale grey to white ventral side, and a light brown tail. It is a nocturnal animal that moves through the forest using a vertical clinging and leaping technique. It is endemic to Madagascar, inhabiting the southern subtropical or tropical dry shrubland.

In The American Scholar, Autumn 2014 (pp. 87-91), a piece by Jan Morris, “Carnival of the Animals: The Italian artist Carpaccio cast a careful, loving eye on his many nonhuman subjects” — an essay adapted from her book Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation (published on November 3rd). The book is an appreciation (with lots of color plates) of the 15th-century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio, and this essay is an appreciation of Carpaccio’s depictions of animals and birds, as in the Flight Into Egypt:

Morris writes that the ass bearing the Holy Family away from Herod’s slaughter is “as elegant as any Golden Stallion, and as beautifully groomed.”

From Wikipedia:

Vittore Carpaccio ( … c. 1465 – 1525/1526) was an Italian painter of the Venetian school, who studied under Gentile Bellini. He is best known for a cycle of nine paintings, The Legend of Saint Ursula. His style was somewhat conservative, showing little influence from the Humanist trends that transformed Italian Renaissance painting during his lifetime. He was influenced by the style of Antonello da Messina and Early Netherlandish art. For this reason, and also because so much of his best work remains in Venice, his art has been rather neglected by comparison with other Venetian contemporaries, such as Giovanni Bellini or Giorgione.

Carpaccio was born in Venice or in Capodistria in Istria (then part of Venice, now Koper in Slovenia), the son of Piero Scarpazza, a leather merchant. The family background was Istrian, which may explain his special association with the Dalmatian School in Venice. Although few details of his life are known, according to some Albanian authors his parents were Albanian from Korçë. His principal works were executed between 1490 and 1519, ranking him among the early masters of the Venetian Renaissance. He is first mentioned in 1472 in a will of his uncle Fra Ilario. Upon entering the Humanist circles of Venice, he changed his family name to Carpaccio.

On the name change, from Morris:

When Latin forms became all the rage among the literati of Venice, Vittore Latinized his signature indiscriminately as Carpatio, Charpatio, Carpatius, Carpacio, Carpazio, Carpathus, or Carpathius. Only after his death did Carpaccio catch on.

And then there’s the raw meat preparation carpaccio, which it turns out was named (pretty recently) after the painter; the story is told in “More raw protein” of 8/13/13.

From Anne Cutler a while ago, a postcard from Tasmania (where she and Bill were visiting their childhood haunts) depicting Little Penguins (“the smallest of the 17 species of penguin and … the only one to breed in southern Australia”). From Wikipedia:

The Little penguin (Eudyptula minor) is the smallest species of penguin. It grows to an average of 33 cm (13 in) in height and 43 cm (17 in) in length, though specific measurements vary by subspecies. It is found on the coastlines of southern Australia and New Zealand, with possible records from Chile. In Australia, they are often called Fairy penguins. In New Zealand, they are more commonly known as Little blue penguins or Blue penguins, owing to their slate-blue plumage. They are also known by their Māori name: kororā.

At the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach CA:

  (#1)

On to fairies and fairy X (with fairy as a modifier), as in fairy penguin.

From NOAD2 on fairy:

noun  1 a small imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, esp. a female one.  2 informal, offensive   a male homosexual. [possibly from use for specifically female fairies]

adjective [that is, modifying noun]  belonging to, resembling, or associated with fairies: fairy gold.

On the homosexual sense. From OED3 (December 2013):

slang (orig. U.S.). An effeminate or homosexual man. Freq. derogatory.

[first cite] 1895   Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 7 216   This coincides with what is known of the peculiar societies of inverts. Coffee-clatches, where the members dress themselves with aprons, etc., and knit, gossip and crotchet; balls, where men adopt the ladies’ evening dress, are well known in Europe. ‘The Fairies’ of New York are said to be a similar secret organization.

[as modifier] slang (orig. U.S.). Chiefly derogatory. Designating an effeminate or homosexual man; of or relating to such men. [first cite 1925]

This looks like the common shift of words denoting females to uses denoting effeminate or homosexual males.

Belonging to or associated with fairies. Under ‘belonging to’ or ‘associated with’ fairies (the magical beings): a range of fairy X compounds, some of them semantically transparent, some of them requiring considerable background knowledge for understanding:

fairy gold, fairy godmother, fairy ring , fairyland, fairy tale, fairy queen, fairy dust, fairy wand, …

Notes on fairy gold, from the Merriam-Webster site:

1 money held to be given by fairies but turned into rubbish when put to use

2 wealth or prosperity that may vanish as swiftly as it is acquired:  precarious or illusory wealth <was to have been, according to those who profited most from its fairy gold, an era that would transcend the business cycle — Stringfellow Barr>

And a fairy ring is a circle of mushrooms, believed to be a dancing place for fairies.

OED3 notes an association between the foxglove plant and fairies:

The number of regional names for the foxglove with fairy as the first element is notable: many have precedents or parallels in Celtic languages.

Resembling fairies. Resembling in various ways. For instance, by being small or delicate, as in:

fairy penguin, fairy shrimp, fairy cake, fairy cycle

Fairy penguin above. Then fairy shrimp, from Wikipedia:

Anostraca is one of the four orders of crustaceans in the class Branchiopoda; its members are also known as fairy shrimp. They are usually 6–25 mm (0.24–0.98 in) long (exceptionally up to 170 mm or 6.7 in). Most species have 20 body segments, bearing 11 pairs of leaf-like phyllopodia (swimming legs), and the body lacks a carapace. They live in vernal pools and hypersaline lakes across the world, including pools in deserts, in ice-covered mountain lakes and in Antarctica. They swim “upside-down” and feed by filtering organic particles from the water or by scraping algae from surfaces. They are an important food for many birds and fish, and are cultured and harvested for use as fish food. There are 300 species spread across 8 families.

Artemia salina:

  (#2)

Then fairy cakes, small versions of cupcakes (in British English) and fairy cycle, British English again, a type of low small-wheeled bicycle for children.

I’m not sure where fairy bread fits in here. From OED3:

Cookery (a) = French toast … (now rare); (b) chiefly Austral. and N.Z. a dish of sliced bread and butter covered with hundreds and thousands (‘sprinkles’). [first cite 1874]

Another type of resemblance comes from the fact that fairies are unnatural, non-standard, or ‘perverse’ creatures (another possible contribution to the ‘effeminate or homosexual male’ sense of the noun fairy). So we get fairy chess. From Wikipedia:

Fairy chess comprises chess problems that differ from classical (also called orthodox) chess [or orthochess] problems in that they are not direct mates. The term was introduced by Henry Tate in 1914 and has resisted change since then.

A very common sort of fairy chess is antichess (which I play as giveaway chess). From Wikipedia:

Antichess (also known as Losing chess, the Losing Game, Giveaway chess, Suicide chess, Killer chess, or Take-all chess) is a chess variant in which the objective of each player is to lose all of his pieces or be stalemated, that is, a misère version… Antichess is one of the most popular of all chess variants.

On ADS-L, an antedating for bunyip, a fabulous creature of the Australian aborigines, which I connected to a puppet character on American television, and that reminded Jon Lighter of the Flub-a-dub on Howdy Doody.

On bunyip in OED2:

(A name for) a fabulous monster inhabiting the rushy swamps and lagoons in the interior of Australia.

[first cite] 1848   W. Westgarth Australia Felix 391   Certain large fossil bones..have been referred by the natives..to a huge animal of extraordinary appearance, called in some districts the Bunyup, in others the Kianpraty, which they assert to be still alive.

Now, from poster Hugo on ADS-L, an earlier cite: “WONDERFUL DISCOVERY OF A NEW ANIMAL.” Geelong Advertiser Squatters’ Advocate 2 Jul 1845 — with a description of the creature as uniting the characteristics of a bird and an alligator. That led me to children’s tv in Philadelphia. From Wikipedia:

Bertie the Bunyip was the lead puppet character on the popular American children’s television series The Bertie the Bunyip Show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the 1950s and 60s. He was portrayed as a black-colored seal-looking character with a duck-bill-type face. For children he was cute and friendly, getting into harmless situations.

Created by Australian Lee Dexter, Bertie was a bunyip (a mythological Australian creature), described by Dexter as “a cross between a bunny, a collie dog and a duck billed platypus.”

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On to Flub-a-dub. From the TV Acres site:

Flub-a-dub – Strange creature composed of many parts seen on the classic children’s puppet program HOWDY DOODY/NBC/1947-60.

Flub-a-dub (originally Flubdub) was a unique South American animal with a duck’s head, a cat’s whiskers, a giraffe’s neck (encircled with rings), a cocker spaniel’s ears, a seal’s flippers (and four webbed feet), a raccoon’s tail hairpiece, a dachshund’s body and the memory of an elephant.

When Flub-a-dub got hungry, it yelled, “Meatballs!, Meatballs!” (a prototype of SESAME STREET’s Cookie Monster who shouts, “Cookies!”).

(#2)

Briefly noted, in “No Time for Bats to Rest Easy’ by Natalie Angier in yesterday’s NYT Science Times:

“A politician in Australia said, ‘Bomb the bats,’ ” Dr. Wang [bat virologist Lin-Fa Wang] said. “But if you do that, you’ll destroy the ecosystem and then you’ll get more infectious disease, not less.” The risks from wanton batricide could well be immediate: Recent research suggests that bats are likeliest to shed viral particles when they are under stress and their numbers are shrinking.

Yes, batricide. I can’t tell whether this is a playful coinage on Angier’s part, or whether bat scientists (chiropterists?) actually use the term.

(The article is absolutely fascinating, by the way.)

Today’s Calvin and Hobbes features the dreaded snow shark:

(#1)

It all started with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws, with its threatening fins moving through the water and its ominous music. In the cartoon, the fins are moving through the snow, advancing on the hapless snowman.

Almost immediately, Saturday Night Live played on the concept, with the dreaded land shark (using the music but not the advancing fins). From Wikipedia:

The Land Shark (also land shark, landshark, LandShark) was a recurring character from the sketch comedy television series Saturday Night Live.

The character first appeared in the fall of 1975 as a response to the release of the film Jaws, and the subsequent hysteria over purported shark sightings. It was one of the most popular and imitated sketches of SNL‘s first season.[

The Land Shark first appeared in a sketch entitled “Jaws II” on the Candace Bergen-hosted episode of season 1 (the fourth episode). As narrated by Don Pardo (the announcer):

the Land Shark is considered the cleverest of all sharks. Unlike the Great White shark, which tends to inhabit the waters and harbors of recreational beach areas, the Land Shark may strike at any place, any time. It is capable of disguising its voice, and generally preys on young, single women.

The sketch depicted the Land Shark (voiced by Chevy Chase) attacking several people after knocking on their doors, pretending to be repairmen, door-to-door salesmen, and the like. Once the intended victim opens the door, the Land Shark quickly enters and swallows them.

(So land shark is a N + N compound referring to a kind of (figurative) shark that operates on land rather than in the ocean. Similarly for snow shark.)

A video clip from SNL is here.

Wikipedia adds:

The concept is influenced by the Monty Python’s Flying Circus‘ sketch “Burglar/Encyclopedia Salesman” and there have been many other comedy sketches that riff on the original Land Shark sketch.

In the SNL version, the creature claims to be a plumber, a delivery man, or whatever, but then turns out to be a savage predator.In the Monty Python version, the man at the door claims to be merely a burglar, but turns out to be that most dreaded of creatures, an encyclopedia salesman. The video is here.

Next up seems to be the 90s tv show Street Sharks, which introduces the hybrid monster theme. From Wikipedia:

Street Sharks is an American-Canadian animated television series about crime-fighting half-man/half-sharks. It was produced by DIC Entertainment and aired from 1994 to 1997, originally as a part of the Amazin’ Adventures lineup.

The horror theme continues in the 21st century, with the movies Sand Sharks (2011) and Snow Sharks (2012). IMDB describes the plot of the first: “a shark who swims in sand terrorizes a tropical paradise”; it’s an extremely low-budget movie starring Corin Nemec, Brooke Hogan, and Vanessa Evigan .

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Some complexity is added here by the fact that there is an actual animal called the sand shark. From Wikipedia:

Sand sharks, also known as sand tiger sharks, grey nurse sharks or ragged tooth sharks, are mackerel sharks of the family Odontaspididae. They are found worldwide in temperate and tropical waters.

… The name sand shark comes from their tendency toward shoreline habitats, and they are often seen swimming around the ocean floor in the surf zone; at times, they come very close to shore. They are often found in warm or temperate waters throughout the world’s oceans, except the eastern Pacific. They also frequent the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas at depths from 20 to 200 m (65 to 650 ft) and sometimes more.

(So: not sharks that swim through sand, but sharks that swim close to the sand — a more distant semantic relationship than that in land shark, street shark, the horror-movie sand shark, or snow shark.)

Finally, to snow sharks as in #1. On the movie, from Wikipedia:

Snow Shark is a 2012 horror film directed by Sam Qualiana about an outrageous and spine-tingling shark that swims through frozen snow and hunt people. It starred Sam Qualiana, Michael OHear, Jackey Hall, Kathy Murphy, CJ Qualiana, Andrew Elias and Robert Bozek.

Plot: Frozen for thousands of years, freed by an earthquake, and really, really hungry. In 1999, a team of animal biologists investigating a rash of wildlife killings disappeared in the lonely woods near a small town. Years later, a local resident claims to have killed a prehistoric carnivorous creature living in the snow. Now, someone – or something – is making lunch of the locals. As curiosity-seekers and crypto zoologists descend on the small town, drawn by the legend of the Snow Shark, Mike – sole survivor of an earlier attack – leads an armed and dangerous posse into a deadly battle.

The fin in the snow:

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And a poster for the movie:

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It’s not safe out of the water!

This is day 2 in a pair of specifically U.S. hoidays. Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday; today is Groundhog Day.

The Super Bowl. NFL [National Football League] Super Bowl XLIX:  New England Patriots over the Seattle Seahawks, 28-24. Extensive coverage at the Super Bowl 49 site.

Super Bowl games are especially noted for their elaborate halftime shows and their commercials. From yesterday’s game, this super-cute puppy and horse commercial.

Groundhog Day. Start with the groundhog:

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From the Michigan Animal Removal site:

Groundhogs are also known as woodchucks or whistle-pigs. Whatever you call them, these critters typically grow 17-26 inches long, and weigh about 4.5 to 9 pounds. They will absolutely destroy your lawn, digging away with thick, long claws and strong arms. They have two coats of fur, one a thicker, longer inside layer, and a lighter-colored protective layer outside. You can tell a rodent on your lawn is a groundhog if it appears “frosted” in color, as the longer, outside hairs are typically the lighter-colored layer.

Then the holiday. From Wikipedia:

Groundhog Day … is a day celebrated on February 2. According to folklore, if it is cloudy when a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day, then spring will come early; if it is sunny, the groundhog will supposedly see its shadow and retreat back into its burrow, and the winter weather will persist for six more weeks.

Modern customs of the holiday involve celebrations where early morning festivals are held to watch the groundhog emerging from its burrow.

In southeastern Pennsylvania, Groundhog Lodges (Grundsow Lodges) celebrate the holiday with fersommlinge, social events in which food is served, speeches are made, and one or more g’spiel (plays or skits) are performed for entertainment. The Pennsylvania German dialect is the only language spoken at the event, and those who speak English pay a penalty, usually in the form of a nickel, dime, or quarter per word spoken, with the money put into a bowl in the center of the table.

The holiday has been made famous through a Bill Murray movie:

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Groundhog Day is a 1993 American fantasy comedy film directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, and Chris Elliott. It was written by Ramis and Danny Rubin, based on a story by Rubin.

Murray plays Phil Connors, an arrogant Pittsburgh TV weatherman who, during an assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, finds himself in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again.

Two images on Facebook recently: a Sandra Boynton drawing for Manatee Appreciation Day (March 25th, yesterday); and a wordless cartoon (on the “Mermaid Melissa” site, artist uncredited) picturing a narwhal as a unicorn in disguise):

(#1)

(#2)

(#2 has an actual narwhal for comparison.)

From Wikipedia on marine mammals:

Marine mammals, which include seals, whales, dolphins, porpoises, manatees, dugongs, otters, walruses, and polar bears form a diverse group of 129 species that rely on the ocean for their existence. They do not represent a distinct biological grouping, but rather are unified by their reliance on the aquatic environment for feeding.

… Marine mammals can be subdivided into four recognised groups; cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), pinnipeds (seals, sea lions and walruses), sirenians (manatees and dugongs), and fissipeds, which are the group of carnivores with separate digits (the polar bear, and two species of otter). Both cetaceans and sirenians are fully aquatic and therefore are obligate ocean dwellers. Pinnipeds are semiaquatic; they spend the majority of their time in the water, but need to return to land for important activities such as mating, breeding and molting. In contrast, both otters and the polar bear are much less adapted to ocean living.

Manatees. #1 has a cartoon manatee. Here’s one in real life:

(#3)

From Wikipedia:

Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus) are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), and the West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). They measure up to 13 feet (4.0 m) long, weigh as much as 1,300 pounds (590 kg), and have paddle-like flippers. The name manatí comes from the Taíno, a pre-Columbian people of the Caribbean, meaning “breast”.

… Manatees comprise three of the four living species in the order Sirenia. The fourth is the Eastern Hemisphere’s dugong. The Sirenia are thought to have evolved from four-legged land mammals over 60 million years ago, with the closest living relatives being the Proboscidea (elephants) and Hyracoidea (hyraxes).

(Boynton drawings previously on this blog: 1/20/14, #2; 3/4/14; 12/8/14 two drawings.

Narwhals. On this blog on 1/15/15, discussion of the narwhal, a tusked whale. Here’s another one swimming:

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Bonus: a cartoon whale. Here’s a Benjamin Schwartz cartoon from the New Yorker of 12/2/13, showing a boy hitting the giant blue whale in the Museum of Natural History like a piñata:

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(Schwartz previously on this blog: 5/18/14 , #2 on Canadian eh; 6/20/14 on emoticons.)

Pinnipeds. So much for sirenians and cetaceans. Now on to pinnipeds. Here’s a Mischa Richter cartoon from the New Yorker of 7/19/93, showing two walruses watching a group of penguins advancing:

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Marine mammals face marine birds.

(Richter on this blog: one cartoon on 4/4/13, with information on the artist.)

Finally, fissipeds. In particular, polar bears. Here’s a Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker cartoon of 2/17/14, with two polar bears eating spaghetti and meatballs, when one of them spills sauce on his stomach:

(#7)

Two names this morning: Quetzalcoatl (the mythical plumed serpent), Hoatzin (the extravagantly plumed bird).

Quetzalcoatl. From Wikipedia:

Quetzalcoatl … (Classical Nahuatl: Quetzalcohuātl …) is a Mesoamerican deity whose name comes from the Nahuatl language and means “feathered serpent”. The worship of a feathered serpent is first known documented in Teotihuacan in the first century BCE or first century CE.

The creature is associated with Mayan, and later, Aztec culture.

At temples such as the aptly named “Quetzalcoatl temple” in the Ciudadela complex, feathered serpents figure prominently and alternate with a different kind of serpent head. The earliest depictions of the feathered serpent deity were fully zoomorphic, depicting the serpent as an actual snake, but already among the Classic Maya the deity began acquiring human features.

Earlier and later versions: (#1)

(#2)

Note 1: Quetzalcoatl has come up on this blog once before in a 12/6/10 posting on possibly unfortunate names, in section 1 of which The Plumed Serpent ends up as the name of a gay bar.

The Plumed Serpent begins as the title of A D.H. Lawrence novel set in Mexico. The title is a reference to the cult of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed (feathered) serpent.

Then comes serpent as slang for penis, and that gets you to a gay bar.

Note 2: A memorable schlocky movie of my childhood (played at Halloween parties at the local YMCA) was The Flying Serpent,

a 1946 American fantasy-horror film film directed by Sam Newfield and featuring George Zucco, Ralph Lewis, Hope Kramer and Eddie Acuff.

… Insane archaeologist Professor Andrew Forbes (George Zucco) uses a beast he unearthed to kill his enemies. The creature is the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Slowly those who know this try to stop the maniac and his monster. (Wikipedia link)

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Hoatzin. Then there’s the bird:

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The hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin), also known as the stinkbird, or Canje pheasant, is a species of tropical bird found in swamps, riparian forests, and mangroves of the Amazon and the Orinoco Delta in South America. It is notable for having chicks that possess claws on two of their wing digits.

It is the only member of the genus Opisthocomus (Ancient Greek: “wearing long hair behind”, referring to its large crest), which in turn is the only extant genus in the family Opisthocomidae. (Wikipedia link)

First cousin to Quetzalcoatl.

Making the rounds in science reporting recently: newly discovered peacock spiders. From National Geographic on the 24th. the story “Behold Sparklemuffin and Skeletorus, New Peacock Spiders: A few new species of these colorful, dancing spiders have been found in eastern Australia” by Carrie Arnold:

If you don’t think of spiders as cute and cuddly, then you’ve never met Sparklemuffin, Skeletorus, and the elephant spider. Scientists have identified these three new species of peacock spiders in various parts of eastern Australia.

Less than a quarter-inch long (five millimeters), male peacock spiders are known for their bright colors and a rolling-shaking mating dance that would make Miley Cyrus jealous.

Two of them:

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A new species of peacock spider, nicknamed “Sparklemuffin” by the graduate student who discovered it, performs a leg-waving mating dance.

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The peacock spider Maratus sceletus earned the nickname “Skeletorus” for its black-and-white markings.

Scientists being playful in naming the organisms they study.

On the genus, from Wikipedia:

Maratus is a spider genus of the Salticidae family (jumping spiders). These spiders are commonly referred to as peacock spiders due to their colorful abdominal flaps that they display during courtship. In at least one species, Maratus vespertilio, the expansion of the flaps also occurs during ritualised contests between males.

All described species, except M. furvus, are endemic to Australia.

Annals of remarkable birds (like the hoatzin, here): an image passed on to me by Chris Hansen:

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Two blue-footed boobies. Yes, that’s their real color. But why boobies?

About the birds, from Wikipedia:

The blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii) is a marine bird in the family Sulidae, which includes ten species of long-winged seabirds. Blue-footed boobies belong to the genus Sula, which comprises six species of boobies. It is easily recognizable by its distinctive bright blue feet, which is a sexually selected trait. Males display their feet in an elaborate mating ritual by lifting their feet up and down while strutting before the female.

… The natural breeding habitats of the blue-footed booby are the tropical and subtropical islands of the Pacific Ocean. It can be found from the Gulf of California down along the western coasts of Central and South America down to Peru. Approximately one half of all breeding pairs nest on the Galápagos Islands.

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NOAD2 gives two senses for booby: ‘a stupid or childish person’ and the bird (above), with

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: probably from Spanish bobo (in both senses), from Latin balbus ‘stammering’

The tentative etymology treats the two senses as one historically, seeing the bird and an oaf or fool as deeply similar. Then from the first sense, we get the compounds booby trap and booby hatch. From NOAD2:

booby trap: a thing designed to catch the unwary, in particular:

– an apparently harmless object containing a concealed explosive device designed to kill or injure anyone who touches it: miles of mines, booby traps, and underground fortifications
– a trap intended as a practical joke, such as an object placed on top of a door ajar ready to fall on the next person to pass through

booby hatch: (N. Amer. informal) a psychiatric hospital

And from boob, the slang compound boob tube ‘television set’, attested in the OED from 1966.

Also, from this item the first sense of booby, we get shortened boob ‘stupid fellow, clown'; the datings in the OED make it clear that that this boob is a shortening of booby, rather than the reverse.

There are more loose ends. First, there’s another sense ‘jail, jail cell’ for both boob and booby, though the historical sequence is unclear.

Then there’s a slang ‘breast’ sense for both boob and booby (both most often attested in the plural); the first is attested in the OED in 1949, the second in 1934. OED has booby as the clearly older item, a variant of the now-obsolete or dialectal slang bubby (first attested in 1690), which the OED says is comparable to German bübbi ‘teat’.

There’s a lot of supposition in these stories.

This morning’s names, both dactylic, for nocturnal animals: the pangolin and the kinkajou.

The pangolin. From Wikipedia:

The pangolin (also referred to as a scaly anteater or trenggiling) is a mammal of the order Pholidota. The one extant family, Manidae, has one genus, Manis, which comprises eight species. These species range in size from 30 to 100 cm (12 to 39 in). A number of extinct species are also known. The name pangolin comes from the Malay word “pengguling”, meaning “something that rolls up”. It is found naturally in tropical regions throughout Africa and Asia.

Pangolins have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin. The pangolin is the only known mammal with this adaptation.

They live in hollow trees or burrows, depending on the species. Pangolins are nocturnal, and their diet consists of mainly ants and termites which they capture using their long, specially adapted tongues.

(#1)

The kinkajou. From Wikipedia:

The kinkajou (Potos flavus) is a rainforest mammal of the family Procyonidae related to olingos, coatis, raccoons, and the ringtail and cacomistle. It is the only member of the genus Potos and is also known as the “honey bear” (a name that it shares with the sun bear). Kinkajous may be mistaken for ferrets or monkeys, but are not closely related to either. Native to Central America and South America, this mostly frugivorous, arboreal mammal is not an endangered species, though it is seldom seen by people because of its strict nocturnal habits.

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