A Horse Walks Into A Bar...

... and the Barman says "Why the long face?"

Yes I know it's a crap joke but it's the only title I could think of. As longtime readers of this blog will note, I have a fondness for posting weird animal articles, so here's another one, courtesy of the BBC News website. Gotta love a horse that has a fondness for John Smiths bitter (even though I can't stand the stuff myself).

Why Do Bears Climb Trees?

To escape cats apparently! As another in an irregular series of strange animal related articles, I bring you a link to this story on the BBC News website, in which a black bear was twice chased up a tree by a 15lb housecat! I've heard of wolverines taking on bears before (even though bears are like 10 times the size of a wolverine) and winning, but this takes the piss frankly. My faith in bears being these awesome fierce creatures is shaken by this that's for sure. Have a read and have a laugh, I know I did.

Ordered Chaos

Work was a bit boring today. Not stressful like yesterday though. Mondays is always crazy in the office and I'll tell you why. All the grocery items in the store (basically everything that isn't a fresh food line) are ordered via the order pads. These folders are taken down from the office to the shop floor every day, filled in and then brought back to the office for us Admin clerks to tap onto the system. This order is suppossed to be complete and sent off by 4:30pm (4pm on a Sunday). It almost never is, and it's usually more like 4:45 before it is confirmed.

On Mondays though the department managers have a meeting from 2pm until whenever it finishes. This is usually about 3pm. This wouldn't be a problem, only several of the order pads are filled out by the managers, and they then don't start filling them in until gone 3pm... and there are a lot of these pads, like 20 of them! So filling them in takes some time, as does tapping them on. This almost always results in a frenzied effort after 4pm to tap the bloody things into the system, all the while the phone is ringing and we have the stock counts from the various Fresh departments to tap on also.

So today was a nice change from that. The order pads were still late being sent off today, but things were a lot less hectic in the office. I finished at 5pm and bpught a couple loaves of bread before heading home. Only I didn't go straight home, I detoured to the weirs in Goodland Gardens. This is one of my favourite places in Taunton (and yes I'll take a photo of it and post it here on a Tour article sometime soon), as it is here that ducks can be found in large numbers.

I love ducks and by ducks I mean Mallards. Not Swans and certainly not Geese. I had bread and set to feeding the few that were there, smiling as more and more ducks turned up in short order. I always try to spread the bread around when I throw it as well as doing my best not to throw it near where the thieving bastard seagulls are! Or the pigeons for that matter! I also throw more towards the females, because they need the food more, especialy at this time of year.

With one loaf thrown away and devoured, I headed for home intending to bring the other loaf with me tomorrow and feed the ducks again. I like feeding the ducks, I find it very calming. Still, as I was walking along the Millstream I saw a quartet of male Mallards in the stream and decided to open the other loaf and throw them some bread also. And while they were busy eating that, a female who had been hiding from them on the other bank, flew across to my feet.

She seemed quite tame, either that or desperate for food and she was only a little afraid of me. So I fed her a couple slices of bread, and I fed her by hand. As she was feeding one of the males clambered up the bank towards her and I thought he was going to attack her, because it is that time of year and I'd certainly seen enough of that behaviour whilst feeding the others. Instead he stood back, ate only a couple of the bits I threw to him and he let the female have the rest of the bread. That put a smile on my face that I'm still wearing. I love ducks, they have so much character... and I've still got most of a loaf for tomorrow!

And Now For Something Bunny

I was browsing the BBC News website and I saw a link to the Newsround section (which for those of you who don't know the BBC, is a news program for children), about Herman, who may well be the world's largest rabbit. The full story is here.

I've included the picture here though, because just looking at it stuns me. That is one massive bunny! I like rabbits. I can remember the "joke" my Dad played on myself and my two siblings years back when he got us to eat rabbit. All of us were appalled when he told us what it was that we had eaten and I think it was a while before he was forgiven.

I get to see wild rabbits whenever I walk to the cinema, as the parkland either side of the River Tone, that stretches from the Town Centre to the Riverside complex where the cinema is, is home to hundreds of them. As I walk along the trackway through the park, so up ahead I'll see bunnies diving into the hedgerow, alerted by the tremors of my approaching footsteps.

I have seen a big bunny before, back when I used to be friends with a guy called Greg, who kept this big rabbit (which used to chase the local cats if they came into the back garden), and the size of that startled me. But this? This rabbit could eat Greg's rabbit whole and likely have room for seconds!

Part of me thinks "Urgh, that is some serious messing with nature", and a far larger part of me is wickedly envious of the guy holding it, cos damn that is one cool bunny!

Bears Rock!

I love bears. The largest land-based predators in the world, and yet despite their size and strength they are remarkably shy, prefering to avoid humans rather than confront us. I saw this picture on the net and I just had to grab it and post it here, cos this brown bear just looks so cool standing there. Course you have to bear in mind (pardon the pun), that the bear is likely about 10' tall (and the Kodiak, which is a subspecies of Brown Bear can grow to 13 feet in height when reared up!) on his hind legs! I just thought I'd share this cool photo with you.

EDIT (22/1/06): Ohh and I just checked my list of files, and found out that this is the 200th post published.

The Phantom Slugs

A little history. I moved out of my parents house about three and a half years ago, and was the last of my parents brood of three to leave the nest. I left because, well my Dad was fed up of me being around (though he was glad I was there whenever he went on holiday, cos they had a house sitter), and Mum the previous year when I asked what she wanted for her 49th birthday, had said something along the lines of "I'm not sure, but I can tell you what I want for my next birthday, you out of the house". Granted it wasn't said angrily, but the message was clear.

So in May of 2002 I moved into a small 2 room flat (well okay, technically 3 room, but the loo/shower room might as well have been a closet it was so small). It wasn't much, but it was mine. It was also bloody cold in winter, but that's another story. Pretty soon though I discovered that I wasn't alone in the flat, I had slugs. I knew they were there, because the little bastards leave those glistening slime trails behind them.

Only these trails started in the middle of the floor, and swirled about in some bizarre pattern that probably makes sense if you're a slug, but to a human looks like the route that even a really drunk person couldn't walk in. And they ended in the middle of the floor too. No sign of an entrance, no sign of an exit, and absoloutely no sign of any actual slugs. So I called them phantom slugs.

Sure enough, every morning almost without fail, I'd wake to find some new slug pattern on the carpet in my lounge (always near my computer desk) and in my bedroom (always near my chest freezer, told you it was a small flat). But try as I might, I could not find how they got in or out and I could not find them. And believe me I looked!! No stone, desk, sofa, freezer, bed, bookcase or table wasn't overturned in the hunt for my elusive tormentors. Did I find them? Did I hell!

This went on for two years, until in August 2004 when I moved into this house. No more phantom slugs, they could go and slowly drive barmy the next resident of the flat. I walked into the utility room at the base of the house about an hour ago to get something from the freezer. The floor was covered in glistening slug trails that started and stopped in the middle of the carpet. No sign of how the slug arrived... no sign of how the slug left... and no slug! They're Back!!

Commando Pheasants

So while I get stalked in my dreams by purple alligators, my housemate Tony is now convinced that the pheasants of Exmoor are out to get him. In the past three days, he's been attacked on his motorbike going to or from work, by four of them. He's pretty sure he eliminated three of his would-be assassins, but the fourth might have survived to try again another day.

While the thought of losing my best friend to a fat feathery fowl with less brains than a pigeon is depressing, it is also murderously funny! Reminds me of the Tae Kwon Dodo's from the movie Ice Age!

The Cruelty of Humanity

So I finished work and was walking home today, and was walking over the metal foot bridge over the River Tone and watched then as some schmuck of a kid (cheered on by another little shit stood on the bridge) charged along the floating dock in the river, sending the better than 3 dozen ducks who were asleep on it fleeing into the river, he then stomping around to scare the couple who had gone to the landward side of the dock until they too fled into the main part of the river.

I didn't say anything, I mean what was I going to say? Don't do that again? Like they would have listened! But it appalled me. Those ducks hadn't done anything to him or anyone else, they weren't making noise, they were asleep or at the least resting quietly. Admitedly I'm biased. I love ducks. They have so much character, and feeding them is one of lifes greatest small pleasures. It's fun to take a loaf of cheap bread (it can cost as little as 23 pence, I mean that's nothing really, and the ducks don't care whether its the cheapie bread or top of the range bread. They go crazy for it all the same), break it up and throw it to them, watch them mass and swarm in the river, or better yet go to the weirs in Goodland Gardens and sit on the benches there and feed them at your feet, and sometimes from your hand.

I guess I don't understand wanton cruelty, I never have, even after being bullied for years at school. I've experienced more than my fair share of that cruelty which seems to be inherent in our species, but I cannot honestly say I understand it.