By Vladimir Brezina
Here’s another response to Ailsa’s travel-themed photo challenge this week, Couples. (The first response was here.)
This was just one moment in a long, elaborate dance that this pelican couple performed for the camera…
You can just hear what these couples are saying to each other, can’t you?
Posted in Nature, Photography
Tagged Animals, Birds, Couples, Photography, postaday, postaweek, postaweek2012, Weekly Photo Challenge
By Vladimir Brezina and Johna Till Johnson
“You are not seeing me…”
“Harrumph.”
“I wonder…”
“What do we have here?!”
“Surely you can’t be serious.”
“Now what?”
“What are YOU looking at?!?”
Pretty in pink.
“Peekaboo!”
The elegant hunter.
“Look at me! Aren’t I pretty?”
“Honk.”
“What’s up with that?”
“I’m getting too old for this…”
“Whadda you want, wise guy?”
“Go away.”
“I wonder what those kids taste like.”
Sniff!
Scaredy rabbit.
“I want to be your friend!”
“Arrrogh!”
This is our second post in response to Ailsa’s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge, Animals. Our first post was here.
By Vladimir Brezina
The Daily Post’s Photo Challenge this week is Happy. And Ailsa’s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge is Animals. So…
Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, “The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish.”
Huizi said, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?”
Zhuangzi said, “You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?”
Huizi said, “I am not you, to be sure, so I don’t know what it is to be you. But by the same token, since you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the happiness of fish stands intact.”
Zhuangzi said, “Let’s go back to the starting point. You said, ‘Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must have known it from here, up above the Hao River.”
I don’t know about fish, but these squirrels sure look happy to me…
A second interpretation of “Animals” is here.
Posted in Nature, Philosophy, Photography
Tagged Animals, Happy, Photography, postaday, postaweek, postaweek2012, Squirrels, Weekly Photo Challenge
By Vladimir Brezina
Ailsa‘s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge for this week is Texture.
No color… just texture!
Belize, 2010.
A second take on “Texture” is here.
Posted in Nature, Photography
Tagged Animals, Iguana, Photography, postaday, postaweek, postaweek2012, Texture, Travel, Weekly Photo Challenge
By Vladimir Brezina
It’s heartwarming to see how much the Coast Guard loves and cherishes its birds! It spares no effort to erect, along every waterway, ingenious structures calculated to be ideal for gulls, cormorants, even ospreys to rest on and, now that it’s spring, to build their nests and raise their young, safe from predators and from human intrusion… well, except for some kayakers ;-)
Posted in Nature
Tagged Animals, Birds, Coast Guard, Cormorants, Gulls, Hudson River, Navigational Aids, New York Harbor, Ospreys
By Vladimir Brezina and Johna Till Johnson
After more than 15 (Johna) and 20 (Vlad) years living in New York City (in Vlad’s case, just one block away from Central Park), we finally managed to visit the Central Park Zoo.
The Central Park Zoo was New York City’s first zoo, starting in 1859 as a menagerie of exotic animals given to the Park. (Nowadays, owners of exotic animals that have grown uncomfortably large for small New York City apartments are too impatient for donation: they simply dump the animals in the Park—that’s how we get alligators in the sewers…) The zoo is small (6.5 acres) but manages to house a surprisingly large number of animals—we didn’t get to see even half of them—in “natural” enclosures, some of them walk-through, that do not feel at all cramped.
As it turns out, the Zoo’s inhabitants are some of the most quintessential New Yorkers: The birds and beasts embody all the characteristic New York attitudes, from vanity to boredom to slit-eyed suspicion.
Posted in Nature, New York City
Tagged Animals, Birds, Central Park Zoo, Leopard, New York City, Panda, Photography, Polar Bear, Sea Lion
By Vladimir Brezina
To survive and to thrive in the big city, it sometimes seems that New York City’s wildlife has diversified to fill much the same niches as the city’s human inhabitants…
Some specialize in being decorative
Some are charming hustlers
Others still are quick small-time opportunists
The hustlers just won’t take no for an answer!
Many establish societies, in plain sight yet with their own secret rules, in the interstices of the city
But all come to watch the sunset along the river…
(All photos taken yesterday in Central and Riverside Parks, Manhattan.)
Posted in Nature, New York City
Tagged Animals, Birds, Duck, Gull, New York City, Photography, Pigeon, Sparrow, Squirrel
By Vladimir Brezina
With a white coat of freshly fallen snow hiding for the moment the drabness of winter, it was a bright, festive day in Central Park yesterday.
.
.
Everyone was out having fun!
Everyone was in a happy, outgoing mood. And so, more than usual, it was a day for getting together with other members of your species…
Posted in Nature, New York City
Tagged Animals, Birds, Central Park, Dogs, Manhattan, New York City, Photography, Snow, Sparrows, Squirrels
By Vladimir Brezina
Tortoises are not the most agile or graceful of creatures. Their movements have a certain grim ponderousness about them–but they get the job done, otherwise tortoises would not be here.
Recently, at Amelia Island, Florida, I saw in the sand dunes a pair of tortoises–gopher tortoises, I presume–dancing their slow mating dance.
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.
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Wind Against Current 