Back in April, somebody at the community garden got ambitious.
Weeds usually grow pretty profusely around the edges of the garden. But on one Thursday in April, when I walked by on my way to work, the weeds in the corner I pass every day had been completely turned over, in preparation for vegetables.
I was sad. That was the corner with the milkweed. Continue reading
It was everyone’s favorite week of the year here at LWON. Yay, Snark Week! We, the People of LWON, absolutely love to snark about nature’s weirdest, silliest, tallest, most evil, or most benign creatures, and we think we do it pretty well. Read for yourself if you haven’t already:
Start with a guest post from Mitchell Leslie warning us to stop embracing sloths, with their funky fur and disemboweling claws. Seriously, if you encounter one, just turn and walk away at your leisure.
Then, warns LWON’s Sarah G., you better duck and swat or risk a rather intimate interaction with a very affectionate owl. Who knew that’s what the bird namers meant by “horned”?
Continue Snark Week by hating on Chihuahuas with Jenny. Jenny has issues with these non-dogs and their stupid little heads.
Next comes Eric and the ball-attacking monkeys. Long-tailed macaques are little monsters that will steal your pancakes and grab your privates. Oh, and sometimes monkeys kill people. Yikes.
And we ended the week with a warning from Cameron: Don’t get too close to giraffes. You’ll be horrified by all the reasons why.
I did not know this when I moved here, but Santa Barbara is the giraffe equivalent of a rabbit nest. In the last four years, five giraffes have been born at the small zoo here. One more is due this summer.
At one point, I thought this was adorable. I rallied my children to the zoo to ooh and ahh over the latest six-foot-tall newborn. But this summer, Betty Lou will receive no baby shower gifts from me, even though she’s been pregnant for nearly 15 months. Now that I know what I know about giraffes, I will knit no more blue or pink hats for young giraffes, with little holes for the ossicones they’re born with. (They’re one of the few animals that comes out of the womb with horns. Maybe that should have been a clue to their nefarious ways.) Continue reading
It was a sunny morning in Ton Sai Beach, Krabi, Thailand, 2003. The birds sang, the Andaman breeze blew its gentle perfumed air through the trees as I sat down to my morning banana pancake. Oblivious to the danger lurking above me. Watching. Waiting.
My girlfriend and I were on a yearlong rock climbing trip and, as I took my first few bites, we discussed our plans that day for climbing the sheer limestone walls lining the peninsula. Without a care in the world. Oh, to be so blissfully naive again.
On my third bite, it struck – moving silently along a nearby power line. With lust and hatred in its beady little eyes, it leapt from the line to the table and dove into the pancakes with those sweet, perfectly grilled banana slices nestled within.
It was the dreaded long-tailed macaque. That’s right. A monkey was stealing my pancakes.
It’s said that how we act in moments of crisis define us. I don’t know if that’s true. Some might call my actions that balmy morning heroic, but I’d like to think I did what any red-blooded, banana-loving tourist would do. I grabbed the butter knife and made several ferocious swings toward the monstrous hell-demon with naught but malice and bloodlust in its tiny heart.
Guys, this isn’t easy for me—please know that I’m quite conflicted over what I’m about to write. It goes against a big part of who I am. But judge me as you will. After years of hiding behind a gentle loves-all-animals exterior, it’s time for me to expose this personal inner truth.
I hate Chihuahuas.
There. I wrote it. I put it down on a public page and there’s no taking it back.
I’m a person who chats amicably with the spider living above my shower, who puts worms caught on my trowel back into the soil, who brakes for toads and braves highway traffic to move crossing turtles (even the snapping kind) to safety. If I had the brutal choice to save either a mutt or a man, I’d have to think on it—and I can’t promise that man would make it home for dinner. That’s how much I love the world’s non-human creatures.
Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate a wide variety of hipster girl paraphernalia.
But beware, because owl tufts are not really ears. And this is where the treachery begins. Instead, owl ears are clandestine, twisted caverns, buried out of sight on either side of the bird’s sinisterly rounded skull. Worse, one is high, and one, low – an asymmetry that allows owls to triangulate on the exact location of sounds. Sounds made by things they will snab with their razor sharp talons and eviscerate with weird, hooked little nose-job beaks. Things like…YOU. Continue reading
This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity. If you happen to notice we’ve written about sloths before, you may consider the following a timely and urgent update — less a blog post than a tornado warning.
The National Safety Office (NSO) is issuing a Code 2 advisory covering all species of sloths (class Mammalia, order Pliosa, families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae). This alert level indicates that the animals pose a significant risk of injury, illness, and death for travelers, forest workers, and other individuals who may come into contact with them.
Sloths are arboreal herbivores that inhabit parts of Central and South America. Their benign, almost friendly appearance belies their ferocious nature and encourages foolhardy behavior, such as attempts to pet or cuddle these dangerous animals. At the very least, touching a sloth exposes the individual to the large number of bacteria and fungi that inhabit its fur, including potential pathogens. Because a sloth’s pelt is often coated with algae and provides a home to numerous ticks, mites, and other arthropods, contact with it has been reported to trigger nausea, vomiting, and expressions of disgust. Immediate hand washing may reduce the odds of developing these symptoms, but to prevent contamination the NSO advises individuals who have handled a sloth to promptly immerse themselves in surgical disinfectant. Continue reading
Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week. We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid. Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of going about their lives, are out to murder and mayhem you. So as a public service, we devote this week to stern, even frightening, warnings of several of these animals. In the past, we’ve had to issue similar warnings and have thereby saved innumerable lives, every one of which was worth saving.
And you can trust us, we’re science writers: every word of these posts is true. Read, Heed, and Hide.
The first Snark Week post follows on Monday; it reveals the true nature of a creature that — no, I just can’t say it, I can’t.
