DIDN'T WE DO WELL!

Just a quick pause to blow our own trumpet. Yesterday the Newsblog posted its 6,000th item. Well done to everyone involved, especially Corinna and Gavin LW.

WELL DONE GAVIN

Over on the News Blog Gavin L-W has racked up an incredible 5,000 postings. Well done mate :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GAVIN

Gavin is the unsung hero of the blog, having done the newsblog now for about two years. Thanks mate, and happy birthday.

GAVIN LLOYD WILSON: The Cardigan Cardigan

Hi Jon

On the local news last Wednesday there was an item about how the people of the town of Cardigan in Ceredigion had got together to knit a giant cardigan in honour of the town's 900th Anniversary. As I was in Cardigan the next day I popped into the Guild Hall to have a look for myself.

The the whole town and outlying countryside is depicted on the body of the garment as you can see on my attached photos.

What I was interested in, however, was the four-legged creature picked out in black wool on the left arm. It could have been a cow, but I thought it would be more than likely that someone would illustrate a cow as being black and white. I asked one of the women who had been involved in the making of the cardigan and she told me it was supposed to be a big cat. "A leopard?" I asked, and she replied "Yes."

Such is the fame of our local ABCs that one made its way onto the Cardigan cardigan.

I was quite impressed that this phenomenon had caught the local imagination and was considered important enough to be included.

As well as there having been panther sightings in these parts, I personally have spoken to someone who told me of a creature he had seen that fitted the description of a lynx, and he also showed me where he'd seen it just outside the town of Crymych. A similar creature was described in the recent sightings in Pembrokeshire at the end of last year. I'm going to try to keep abreast of the local big cat news as and when I hear of it.

Gavin

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

On this day in 2009 Jon's blog 'Still On The Track' evolved into the blog you see today. We're still going from strength to strength and special thanks are due to all our fantastic blog writers over the years.

And now, the news, brought to us by Gavin Wilson over on the CFZ news blog:

Mystery of mass animal death epidemic deepens afte...
Nazi fury at Hitler the paw-raising dog

Tenuous link but in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark there is a scene where a monkey does a similar thing to the dog. Here's what the film might have looked like if made in the 1950s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUPDuQq9GsM

THANK YOU TO OLL, GAVIN AND CORINNA

Every day that I am here, and well enough, I post seven items or more to the bloggo. In my absence Lizzy and/or Graham do a magnificent job filling in for me. But while every time they do this I thank them on the blog, I seldom thank the people who work on it every day. This is terribly remiss of me.

So, many thanks to Oll Lewis who writes `Yesterday's News Today` day in and day out, Gavin Lloyd Wilson who oversees the newsblog, and my darling wife Corinna who during Gavin's leave-of-absence is doing the newsblog daily, and at other times bustles around wherever she is needed, as well as writing her own blogs. Thank you, my dears!

CONGRATULATIONS!

Corinna is in charge of the news blog whilst Gavin Lloyd Wilson is having a brief house-moving-related sabbatical. Whilst under her tutelage yesterday, the 4000th news story was posted. Haven't they done well?

JON DOWNES: Why Black Rabbits may be more important than you might otherwise think..

I read Gavin Lloyd Wilson's article about black rabbits with particular interest. It has been a subject that has been lurking at the back of my cryptozoological consciousness for some years. According to accepted wisdom, although rabbits were once native to Britain in the middle Pleistocene - as written by Sir Christopher Lever in his latest edition of The Naturalized Animals of Britain and Ireland (2009) - and although they were kept in Roman times when they were well known as a (somewhat revolting) delicacy called laurices, they were not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and appear not to have been released into the wild in this country until some time after the Norman Conquest.

Some years ago a friend of mine - the late Jane Bradley, the original CFZ art director who was tragically killed in 1995 - showed me a book on Cornish legends that had belonged to an elderly relative. In it was a claim that the rabbit had been a sacred animal to the Cornish tin miners and that like so much else of their lore it had been directly inherited from the Phoenician tin traders who plied their trade between their homeland in the Middle East and the south-western peninsular of these islands. Jane told me that her father had made somewhat of a study of such things and believed that the Phoenicians had brought wild rabbits from their homeland and introduced them to the UK at least 1,000 years before they were introduced by the Normans. He went on to say that the rabbits in the wilds of Cornwall were smaller and darker than those elsewhere in the country.

Mr Bradley is also long dead, I cannot remember the name of the folklore book and although over the years I have thought vaguely about this conundrum, I would be lying to say that I had given it any serious thought whatsoever.

Some years ago when Corinna and I went to Jersey on a sacred pilgrimage to Les Augres Manor we found a Channel Islands guidebook that claimed that the rabbits of one of the islands (I think Alderney, but as I can't find the guidebook now it is only a supposition) tend to be smaller and darker than those on the mainland, but whether there are any significant links between the Channel Islands and the Phoenician tin traders of the first millenium I know not.

Is this all just a tissue of nonsense that I got at third-hand from a long dead alcoholic, or could there actually be some small grain of truth? I give this story to you of the bloggo readership as it stands; one of those mildly intriguing little stories that has been floating around the intersteces of my mental filing cabinet for the last 20-odd years. Make of it what you will, and if anyone out there has anything to add to this story please do not hesitate to get in touch.

GAVIN LLOYD WILSON: Black Bunnies

Black bunnies - melanistic black rabbits in the wild

Each night last week BBC1's early evening magazine programme The One Show featured a segment filmed at Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. During the report on Wednesday's programme we were shown an orphaned wild baby rabbit that just happened to be jet-black in colour. The reporter, Mike Dilger, claimed that such melanistic rabbits were "one in a million".

Well, for the past 10 years or so I have been seeing wild black rabbits in and around Didcot, Oxfordshire, where I live. At first I thought it was the same individual I was seeing over and over, but then I started seeing them in other locations locally. I have on occasion seen two or three at the same time, and have sighted both adults and babies with this condition. I estimate that in total I have seen between 20 and 30 such individuals over the last 10 years.

So, if such black bunnies are really "one in a million", does that mean they are all concentrated into this one small area of Oxfordshire? Somehow I very much doubt it. I would like to throw this question open to the readers of the CFZ bloggo and ask for black rabbit sightings from around the country, just to get a more realistic idea of how widespread this phenomenon is.

Are these black rabbits becoming more commonplace? Does anyone remember seeing such rabbits in the wild 20, 30 or more years ago?

I attach two photographs I took of a black rabbit in a field in East Hagbourne, near Didcot, on 20 July 2010.

Gavin

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday's News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

On this day in 1831 Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction.
And now, the news with a bumper crop of stories from Gavin Ll. Wilson today:

Mountain lion sighted in Red Bluff, California
UN warns alien species are threatening biodiversit...
Researchers blame sea acidity for killing species
Guinea pig saved from escaped snake
Black bear sighted in Edmonton
Report of man with snake slows Boston train line
Shark sighting a practical joke, but Massachusetts...
A novel method for collecting dolphin DNA (via Cha...
Nessie nominated for tourism award (via Lindsay Se...
22 Komodo dragons hatch this month at Los Angeles ...
Scientists Bring New Species of Turtle Out of Its ...
Genomes of Two Separate Ant Species Sequenced
Chinese bear poses for pictures with tourists
Kayaker forced out of race by aerial fish
Mystery boa constrictor left on woman's doorstep
Panda-keeper contest attracts thousands

And because everyone likes cute baby animals, here’s a video of baby pandas generally lolloping about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4dMnAPZu70&feature=related

WEIRD WEEKEND SCRAPBOOK: Parties and rumours

The Weird Weekend cocktail party took place yesterday evening and in contrast with last year's event, which got a little out of hand with too much noise and 120 high spirited drunks bouncing around my garden, it was a jolly and well behaved event.

About 35 people were there, which was a little disappointing; it would have been nice to have a few more, but it was great fun, and - just like the old days - Olivia, Ivan, Max, Richard F, Dave Baldwin, Gavin L-W, Corinna and I sat around in my kitchen with Biggles, and chewed the fat until the wee small hours.

First up this morning was Olivia, followed by Biggles and me. Only Ivan looked at all worse for wear.

When I was a young punk a band whose name I completely forget issued a press release stating that the lead singer categorically denied that he had been having an affair with Farrah Fawcett. It was a particularly tawdry publicity stunt and worked so well that I can't remember who they were.

A peculiar rumour seems to have been doing the rounds.
Apparently someone on Facebook has been claiming that the special guest we have advertised on Saturday afternoon is Stephen Spielberg. The world famous director dude is currently filming on Dartmoor, but has NOT been booked to appear at the WW and I think that it is monumentally unlikely that he has even heard of the CFZ, let alone planning to visit us.

I am mildly annoyed about this because I would hate anyone to think that we would stoop to planting false stories in the press and on the internet in order to boost ticket sales.

We leave that sort of chicanery to other people.

TWO MORE LANDMARKS

Over on the news blog Gavin has racked up 3,000 news items. I don't want to appear patronising but I am massively proud of him. He has achieved a remarkable feat of tenacity and I think he deserves congratulations. There is another milestone looming: if today goes the way that I think it will, we will clock up a million hits on this blog. Of course that does not equate to a million different visitors, just a million visits. But it is still a pretty impressive milestone and it is nice that it happens on the fifth anniversary of the founding of the new CFZ.

GAVIN'S HEDGEHOG EROTICA

The other night in Reading Gavin L-W, our tireless newsblogger, told us that he had recently videoed something very strange - hedhehogs mating face to face. This is very rare in nature and there are only a very few species (most notably us) that do it. This would, we believe, be unprecedented. And yes, the video certainly looks like it.

However, he later wrote: 'However, a hedgehog carer, Gill from Newbury, has burst my bubble and tells me that: "The female isn't on her back she's flattened and concaved so it looks like she's up the other way. Many of my female hogs do that to me when I'm trying to give injections. Trying to find skin under the spines is a nightmare." I'm also attaching a photo of the pair afterwards with the female curled up in a ball whilst the male nudges her wanting more (this went on for about two hours), and another photo of hedgehogs mating from earlier in the week (female very definitely not on her back here).'

CFZ AUSTRALIA: Aversion Therapy for Quolls

A couple of days ago, Gavin ran a story about quolls over on the CFZ Newsblog. By happenstance, the next day, Ruby and Mike from CFZ Australia sent us a similar, but markedly different story, which we are posting here partly because the differences in the story make it of mildly Fortean interest (file under Chinese Whispers) and partly because we are completely anal and obsessive compulsive....

Scientists from the University of Sydney have trained a group of quolls to associate cane toads with feeling sick - a process called 'conditioned taste aversion.'

Before releasing the quolls into the wild, Professor Rick Shine, Stephanie O'Donnell and Dr Jonathan Webb fed each marsupial a small dead cane toad, not large enough to kill the quolls, but they were laced with a chemical that made the quolls feel nauseous. Dr Webb said the quolls quickly learned to avoid eating toads.

Posted By CFZ Australia to Centre for Fortean Zoology Australia at 4/13/2010 04:31:00 PM

NEWSBLOG WOES

Gavin emailed me yesterday to tell us how his laptop is `fried` and his other computer is less than communicative. As a result of that it appears that he may be out of action (partially, at least) for the next few days. Together with Corinna, I shall be wading into the breach, and would just ask for any news stories that you may feel to be of interest to be sent to jon@eclipse.co.uk


That being said, Gavin has posted a couple today already, and so somehow normal service will be maintained....

GAVIN LLOYD-WILSON: Llandrindod Wells Lake Monster

Gavin Lloyd-Wilson sent in this fantastic picture he took on Saturday and comments:

"Funny how it's still enough for the seagulls to be perched on it. Probably one to file under 'crypto gardens'."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOOOOOOO

A year ago Gavin Lloyd Wilson started the CFZ Newsblog. 365 days and 2345 posts later we are still going. Thank you Gavin. You have worked like a Trojan and I am personally (and the CFZ is collectively) very grateful for all your hard work...



Corinna says: http://cryptochick.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-year-old-today.html

CFZ PEOPLE: Gavin Lloyd Wilson

Very happy birthday to our dear Newsblog Editor, but for whom there would be no newsblog. And with no newsblog, there would be no Yesterday's News Today. And with No Yesterday's News Today, Oll would not have a legitimate outlet for his puns. And without a legitimate outlet for his puns, he would probably just be forced to try them out on Jon. And if he were to try out bad puns on Jon each day, Jon would probably go into a psychotic rage and rend him limb from limb. And if Jon were to rend Oll limb from limb he would probably end up in Broadmoor and there would be no CFZ. So in a very real sense Gavin has saved the life of a fellow Welshman and saved the CFZ. So Happy Birthday!

DIRECTOR'S DIARY: Hoorah - the Newsblog's back

After an absence of several weeks, the CFZ Newsblog is back thanks to the intervention of those jolly nice folks in the Google/Blogger help department.

From what I can gather this sort of thing happens quite often, and so from now on each day we make back-ups of all the blogs, and so if this ever happens again we can just import the backed up version into a new blog and start again.


Hopefully, however, we shall be flagged with the computer that originally sent out the spiderbots as being bona fide and it won't happen again.

I am particularly pleased for Gavin Lloyd Wilson who has worked so hard keeping the thing going. It must have been particularly galling to think of all that work - 2173 posts - going to waste. But it hasn't and with the daily back-ups it won't, so all's well that ends well.

However, whilst on the subject of prolific CFZ bloggers, can I recommend Graham Inglis's blog. He has just posted a post about Hawkwind nearly a year after his previous posting (which was to apologise for not having posted anything for the previous two years!) Nice One Dude.

http://grahaminglis.blogspot.com/

MORE SNOW PRINTS - now it is Gavin's turn

GAVIN LLOYD WILSON: Since you started this game, can I join in too?

What makes tracks like these? (See attached photos). The tracks comprise of a group of three indentations - each indentation being approx 1 1/2" long and each group of three approx 15 - 18" apart.

These photos were taken in the graveyard behind the chapel in Glandwr, Pembrokeshire on the morning of the 2nd January 2010.

It's probably something very ordinary, but I can't imagine what.

Gavin

The one thing that I want to know is what was Gavin doing poking about in a graveyard in the middle of the winter? It sounds a bit goth-y to me. Surely one `Gothic Cryptozoologist` on the team is enough?