Posts by Lilith __
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And a sleeping gull.
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Many creatures use my local beach, not only racehorses.
Here’s a variable oystercatcher, and some flying stilts.
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(not mine)
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Jackson, I see your footprint and raise you a hoofprint!
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And, by popular demand, here is my assistant.
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My Mum spent her teen years living in Central Otago and Dunedin. Where I live now, in the country south of Dunedin, there used to be market gardens. Mum remembers admiring the hillsides of daffodils in the spring.
The paddock behind my house is grazed by sheep most of the year, but for a short time in the spring the owners keep the sheep elsewhere so the daffs can have their moment. They gather a few armfuls of blooms, and so do I, but mostly the daffodils sing their golden song uninterrupted. Photos don’t do justice to the experience of standing among so many thousands of shining faces.
Last year there was a lunar eclipse and I sat at the top of the garden to watch it. My cat preferred to be face-down in the cat-mint, but each to their own. It was very late, very dark, and very quiet. When I decided I’d better go to bed I stood and picked up my chair, and turned around…and got a huge fright. I’d forgotten the daffodils, and my dark-adjusted eyes were startled to see this bright multitude standing to attention, just behind me.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to nzlemming,
I think humans get to judge animals approximately never. Given our record of laying waste not merely to individual animals, but to whole species, and whole ecosystems.
Lots of people are not nice at all as well. These things are not mutually exclusive.
You seemed to be making a moral judgement on a whole species, because sometimes pukeko kill ducklings.
I think we have to resist the temptation to ascribe moral values to the actions of animals. They don't have the capacity for reason and choice that humans do. Animal behaviours sometimes seem wonderful, and sometimes horrifying: either or both can be seen in any animal.
It makes me sad that pukekos are seen by so many people as a "pest" bird, for no good reason. It's legal to hunt them in shooting season, but they are apparently not pleasant to eat, so hunters blast them out of existence just for the hell of it.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Sorry to hear about this, Paul.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to Bart Janssen,
one day we witnessed a female duck being mobbed by a group of males – we came past later to see she had drowned.
Yes, forcible mating is fairly common in mallards, and sometimes results in the death of the female. Unfathomable.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to nzlemming,
Pukeko are Not Nice Birds. At all.
I think humans get to judge animals approximately never. Given our record of laying waste not merely to individual animals, but to whole species, and whole ecosystems.
