Posted in birds, tagged domestic duck, domestic mallard, duckling, Pekin duck on March 29, 2015| 1 Comment »
I’ve named the pekins Churchill and Homer. They are not sexed, but I think the names fit.
Churchill is the bigger, fatter one. Homer is big and yellow and loves to eat.
Churchill on the left. Homer on the right.
Close-up of Churchill :
I had never really noticed it, but Pekins have blue eyes. They are dark blue, so you can’t really tell from a distance.
Posted in birds, tagged domestic duck, domestic mallard, Duck, duckling, Rouen duck on March 29, 2015|
Posted in Retriever history, working dogs, working retrievers, tagged gun dogs, Irish setter, retriever, Russian retriever, setter, St. John's Water Dog, wavy-coated retriever on March 29, 2015| 4 Comments »
These hunters must have been borrowing heavily from the British traditions. Two setters or a setter and pointer in the cart and black retriever in the front. These men may have even been British who brought their dogs in the Russian wild for a some “primitive” rough shooting in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.
I cannot make out the birds they were hunting. Maybe snipe?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged domestic duck, domestic mallard, mallard, Pekin duck, Rouen duck on March 28, 2015| 8 Comments »
Well, the Rouen duck hatch was a failure. One duckling out of 20 eggs isn’t good hatch rate.
But because the remaining duckling needs companionship to learn how to be a duck, a trip to the feed store was due.
Two Rouen/mallard crosses, which are sold as “mallards” this time of year, and two pudgy, lazy pekins were added to the brooder. The Rouen that hatched is the duck in front of the pekin that is lying down.
I used to incubate chicken eggs when I was a kid, and not a single egg hatched.
For just a few ducks, I don’t think incubating is worth it. Plus, it is crushing when you have one that was able to pip through a shell and then die, which is what happened this morning.
All the eggs in the Janoel incubator are dead. The embryos formed so perfectly for 3 weeks, and then they just died.
These five will be a good start to a flock, which will likely be augmented with Khaki Campbell mutts as the summer progresses.
So the Rouen hatch was a failure.
Posted in birds, tagged domestic duck, domestic mallard, Rouen duck on March 27, 2015| 1 Comment »
Healthy and hardy. Very social. A dinosaur that fits in the palm of your hand.
Posted in birds, tagged domestic mallard, mallard, Rouen, Rouen duck, Rouen duckling on March 26, 2015|
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ducking, Rouen duck, Rouen duckling hatch on March 26, 2015| 3 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Adnan Oktar, Harun Yahya on March 18, 2015| 1 Comment »
We know him best by his pen name, Harun Yahya.
He’s also best known for his Atlas of Creation, which argues evolution doesn’t occur. He has 42-million-year old wolf fossils to prove it! And he has Siberian huskies pictured as wolves!
The oldest fossils of canids are only about 40 million years old, so he’s a bit off. Those first dogs were more or less like genet-fox-racoon looking things than anything like wolves.
His argument isn’t like Kent Hovind’s. Kent Hovind says the earth is 6,000 and non-avian dinosaurs still roam the earth. All life on earth descends from kinds that were on Noah’s Ark, so the Hovind type of creationist allows for some level of evolution. All dogs and wolves descend from a pair of dog kind that were on the Ark.
Adnan Oktar would says that no evolution ever happens. All life has remained the same for millions of years.
I can’t decide which of these two types of creationism is worse, but they both require ignoring tons of evidence.
Like his Christian counterpart, Oktar has been in prison for a few things. He is also prone to conspiracy theories involving Freemasons and Zionists.
But at least he knows that Islam allows you the right to live like Hugh Hefner.
Posted in dog breeds, working dogs, tagged Rottweiler, Swiss mountain dog on March 17, 2015| 5 Comments »
I don’t know where this idea came from, but there is profound misunderstanding about what rottweilers are.
Rottweilers are sometimes referred to as Metzgerhund, which means “butcher’s dog,” and someone decided that this meant the same thing as the English “butcher’s dog.” In Medieval and early modern England, butcher’s dogs, which became the bulldogs, baited cattle before slaughter. When the dogs were released upon bulls, many people would show up to watch the spectacle. These events eventually became the bull-baiting contests that were quite popular throughout England.
However, that is not the function of a rottweiler. Rottweilers are not closely related to bulldogs at all. A few years ago, researchers at UCLA released a study on dog origins, which posited a close relationship between domestic dogs and Middle Eastern wolves. Because the researchers looked a large sample of DNA from each dog, they were able to draw a phylogenetic wheel of domestic dogs.
Rottweilers don’t fit with any of the mastiffs, bullmastiffs, or bulldogs. Instead, they share a common ancestry with the Great Dane, the Bernese mountain dog, and the St. Bernard.
Only two Swiss mountain dog breeds were sampled for the study, the Bernese and the St. Bernard. I bet if the researchers had included the Greater Swiss, the Entlebucher, and the Appenzeller, I think we would find these breeds were even closer to the Rottweiler than the Great Dane.
If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. If you look at where Rottweil is on the map, it is not that far from Switzerland. It actually joined the Swiss Confederacy in the fifteenth century, and there was extensive trade between Switzerland and Rottweil for many centuries.
The origins of the rottweiler actually lie with the Swiss mountain dogs that would be used to drive cattle into the butcher shops.
The dogs were not baiters. They were herders and guards.
So when you see someone lumping rottweilers with members of the bulldog, mastiff, and bull and terrier dogs, this person simply hasn’t the foggiest clue about the proper classification of dogs.
I also think it is past time to drop the term “Molosser” to describe dogs that have big, broad heads. It assumes all these breeds are related, but they clearly aren’t. Never mind that the history behind that term is either misinterpreted or the result of wild speculation.
A rottweiler is a droving dog, a farm dog, and a guard. The bulldog and mastiff family have their origins in the big game hunting dogs of Western Europe, which were later used on domestic stock.
I know this discussion of breed classification may seem a bit trivial, but there are real world issues involved here.
Some people promote the mythology of a monophyletic Molosser family of dogs because it romantically connects their boxers and French bulldogs to the war dogs of Rome or the mountain dogs of Tibet. Others use it to conflate bogus statistics about dog attacks. The former better realize that the latter are a clear and present danger when it comes to BSL.
So it might be wise for everyone to correctly classify dogs based upon actual science and a more careful reading of history.
The monophyly of Molossers has simply been discredited.
So stop using the term!
Posted in Carnivorans, wildlife, tagged bay lynx, bobcat, bobcat scat, Lynx rufus, red lynx on March 16, 2015| 1 Comment »
Bobcat poo turns chalky white when it gets old. There is a lot of calcium carbonate in the feces, which means they turn chalky when left exposed for a few days.
Natural History 