Slow news day? You can rely on the gutter press in the UK to try and make a story out of nothing.
Thankfully, you can also rely on the good old British public to not let them get away with it:
He’s got a good point.
Although I’ve had a couple of really low landings that didn’t really work either (Corfu 2002 and London City 2023 springing immediately to mind).
Yesterday, we filled you in on how to identify your raccoons. Not that hard, given that there are only 3 species, and they are pretty much geographically distinct. Your only real issue is around Panama, which interestingly is pretty much the same as when you are traveling the length of the Americas.
Today, we’re upping our game a bit and bringing it back to Africa (and North Carolina), with a great guide on how to tell lemurs apart. The clever guys at the Duke Lemur Centre have noticed that aside from a few different personality traits and odd bald spots, their Ring-Tailed Lemurs have telltale signs regarding their ear shapes. And they’ve made a quadrant chart to assist them (and others) in how to identify their RTL stock. The four different ear shapes are Round and Elf (most specifically regarding the tufts on the lemurs’ ears), and Cat to Airplane (basically pointing upwards or sideways):
Of course, this doesn’t help distinguish Ring-Tailed Lemurs from other lemurs in the way that yesterday’s raccoon graphic does. But you can use the rings on their tails to do that. And the fact that at the DLC, they’ll be in the Ring-Tailed Lemur enclosure.
I love the personalities in the shot above. Aside from Seagrams (middle-left, just to the right of the word Round), who looks like he’s just been arrested, all of the other lemurs there look like they’ve just gone in for their passport photos, which is actually quite amusing; but I’m wondering if you could further identify at least one of them – it’s Liesl (middle-bottom) – by her amazing resting bitch face.
Wow. Someone got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.
However, when Liesl is happier and Seagrams hasn’t just had a mugshot, remember that ears are the way to go for RTL ID.
So that’s Raccoons: geographic location, and lemurs: shape of the ears.
Will this ad-hoc foreign mammal identification series continue tomorrow?
I don’t think so.
And honestly, that’s probably a good thing.
Almost forgot to blog this evening after a bit of a weird day.
So quickly let me educate us all on racoons:
There’s absolutely no need to know this information in Africa (unless you are heading for a pub quiz), but then you never know when you might be heading for a pub quiz, so here it is.
Tomorrow (if I remember): Know Your Lemurs.
I’m not even joking.
Not had very many of them recently, and not the biggest fan of international football, but both South Africa and England are on their way to North America for next year’s World Cup.
England’s progression was a bit of a foregone conclusion, but Bafana Bafana needed to put last week’s rubbish performance behind them and win, and hope that Nigeria did the business over Benin.
All the things happened, all the stars aligned, and so it was a good night for the football.
I’ve been rearranging spring cleaning my office, and it’s taking a while to get done. Mainly because other tasks keep getting in the way.
But I had no excuse this afternoon, when I was tidying out a cupboard and found a couple of old hard drives. And then started looking through the tens of thousands of photos on them.
I took this in January 2019. Apparently.
Probably somewhere Agulhas… the dirt road through to Prinskraal from the R319?
Maybe?
No streetview along there, so I can’t confirm.
But what a shot! /s
And wow. 3 hours of tidying time wasted, just like that.