CFZ PEOPLE: Congratulations Dr Blake

MAX FOUND THIS RATHER CUTE BIT OF NONSENSE

The next stage in the evolution of adorable bunny rabbits is marked by the appearance of the Monolith. Will they bludgeon each other with stray femurs, or build a galaxy-spanning civilization that will live on until the heat death of the universe? Only time will tell. 

But they'll probably just do the bludgeoning thing. (Bludgeoning has a visceral quality to it that civilization building just can't match.) 

http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=GOAT-MONOLITH&Category_Code=GOAT

CFZ ON TV - Go Max!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Max Blake, once described by you know who as "the one redeeming feature of the CFZ" is on BBC 1 tonight at 7:00 as a guest on the One Show. He will be talking about mystery cats in the UK...

Check it out

INAPPROPRIATE CORNER: Dinosaur porn

Most of the stories which appear on this section of the bloggo come from Richard Freeman who is a self-appointed seeker after inappropriateness in all its forms.

However, this one comes from Max:

"As these things happen, it's come to the planet's attention that a pair of Texas college students has been self-publishing a not-unsuccessful series of dinosaur-on-girl porno novellas on Amazon. Given that the Internet requires elaborate sex fantasies involving The Price Is Right and the Muppets to even maintain an erection, dino porn seems quasi-puritanical. But these books sport outright hilarious art, which juxtaposes a blase stock photo model with a confused CG dinosaur. Here are the 10 best covers."

Read on..."

MAX IDENTIFIES MYSTERY ANIMAL

This picture has been doing the rounds of The Internet, and has been described as: "a tiger prawn, crab and scorpion combined when he was in the jungle to collect palm leaves".

I wrote to Max...

Max Blake I initially dismissed it as a fake, thanks to the poor photo which showed very little about the animal. However, after looking into it, it turns out it is a mud lobster, one of the Thalassina species, but with the tail stretched out. There is a lot of forced perspective, but comparing it to the hand shows it's around 25-30cm maybe, which is at the large end of the size range of Thalassina.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassina
http://layersofdelite.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/ngoang.html

Thalassina - Wikipedia, the free en

CFZ PEOPLE: Max Blake

Happy Birthday, my dear boy. And well done for being accepted onto the PhD programme. We are so very proud of you....

CFZ PEOPLE: Max the hippy

Photographed a week before flying to Cyprus. Could he have been hanging out with Jon too long?

JON'S JOURNAL: On golden frogs and matching moles (A visit to Kennerland)

Kennerland is another of those places where I used to go as a boy because the range of natural history was particularly pleasing.

It would probably be called a suburb of Woolsery if it wasn't for the fact that nobody actually lives there. I always used to go there every spring because of the tadpoles.

It is a particularly soggy neighbourhood (if I may steal a phrase from one of my favourite children's authors) and once was all marshes. As you can see, much of it has now been drained to make it more suitable for agricultural purposes, but the rushes remain (and so does quite a lot of the water).

Prudence made a New Year's Resolution to get more excercise, so each afternoon now she takes Corinna and me for a walk. I cannot walk very fast, and even slow ambling is painful, so I take my mind off it all by wielding a camera, and going in search of the natural world.

For some reason Kennerland - or to be more specific, the ditches along the road at Kennerland Cross - has always been a desirable residence for the local frog population. Each spring I used to visit the area and go tadpole spotting.

I was always amazed at the vast divergence of sizes, colours and shapes of the tadpoles there, and when, years later, I started becoming interested in the golden frogs of the West Country I often wondered whether these fantastically multicoloured tadpoles (some were certainly yellow, although I never saw any golden ones) could provide a clue to the aetiology of the fabulous golden ones.

I am still wondering, and it was one of the things not too far from the front of my mind as we drove up to Kennerland on Sunday afternoon.


As you can see, there was no shortage of frog spawn and although the nuclei of each egg seems to be black, it always did, and the tadpoles seemed not to change colour until they got considerably bigger. We are going to monitor these ditches (which have survived the passage of the years far better than those at Huddisford) and see what happens.

Frogs seem to be creatures of habit: they come back here to breed year after year, and I am always reminded of a sad little story my father told me. We used to have a pond at the bottom of the garden and every spring the garden frogs spawned there.

When my brother and his wife had children my parents had the pond filled in lest the little ones would fall in and do themself a mischief. But the frogs didn't seem to realise and every spring for the next few years they would lay their eggs on the lawn where the pond used to be, even though there was no water.

My mother used to collect the spawn in a bucket and take it up to a friend's pond to release it, so all ended well. That was in 1997/8 and that particular generation of frogs must have lived out their alloted span (or learned their lesson) because by the time we came here in 2005 it didn't happen anymore.

We also saw large numbers of molehills, proving (as if any proof were needed) that the local population of Talpa europea is doing fine and dandy....

And why Matching Mole in the title? Cop a load of this (particularly you, Max)....

MAX SENT THIS

A picture of three beautiful young women holding chickens. It had the cryptic caption "Saw this, knew who to send it to..."

Damn right, dear boy.

CFZ PEOPLE: Max Blake

Max is a young man who has become part of our extended family. Corinna and I are both very fond of him and he is :

21
TODAY

And 'Auntie' says...

MAX BLAKE: Swarming ants

I was reading the local paper and came across this note about a major story printed 50 years ago (1.09.1961):

'Residents of parts of Blagdon were shocked on Sunday to be suddenly infested by a plague of large flying ants.

The ants became thicker in the afternoon, when, for a time, even the strong sun was obscured. Householders who had been outside rushed indoors and fastened windows and doors. One resident described the scene as 'terrific'. Nothing like this had been seen in the village before.'

Just another instance of swarming insects!

Max.

This seems appropriate:

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WEIRD WEEKEND 2011: Max Blake and Dr. Darren Naish

MAX SENT THIS SERIOUS CLIMATE CHANGE VIDEO

WEIRD WEEKEND 2011: One of our Dinosaurs is missing

Well, it wasn't actually a dinosaur; it was Ronan, and he's not actually missing anymore, but you get the point.

Ronan's flight was severely delayed due to mechanical problems, and for a while we had lost track of him completely. Max was due to collect him at Bristol airport but couldn't find him, and for a while there was a weeping and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth.

But now he is found, and the intrepid duo are on their way down the M5 to buy cake.

All is well.

MAX MEETS MACAWS IN CUMBRIA

Hey dude,

I am in Cumbria at the moment, so I am away from Lever. Anyway, I was chatting to my friend's dad last night and he mentioned that in a tiny town called Kirkby Steven in East Cumbria there were a population of parrots of various species living wild. Long story short: this seems to be a Northern speciality. We went there today, and saw a blue and gold macaw, and we heard a couple of others. Anyway, the links below should be of interest to you.

Max.

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/archive/2002/04/09/The+North+East+Archive/7078225.Exotic_birds_add_colour_to_town_s_daily_life/
http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk/forums/british-birds/8953-kirkby-stephen-parrots.html

This fantastic image, btw, is by Luc Viatour

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VERY INTERESTING VIDEO - Thank You to Max Blake for sending it...

BROOKLYN SEA MONSTER: "Much ado about Nothing," says Max

In fact he wrote something far less printable. However, I agree - of course its a sturgeon. How could any idiot think otherwise? However, in our increasingly urbanized society people are less and less in touch with the natural world. A few years ago a neighbour came to us in a state of high excitement because "one of our animals had escaped" and she would call the police if we didn't come and collect it now!

It was a large elephant hawk moth caterpillar.


http://americanmonsters.com/site/2011/05/scaly-sea-monster-found-under-brooklyn-bridge/

THE BIG BUTTERFLY HUNT

Regular readers will remember that the other day Graham and I went in search of orange tips - a butterfly species that I hadn't seen in Woolsery for over thirty years. The only specimens that we found were males, and so yesterday Max and I went to see if we could redress the balance. As you can see by the image above left, we did. By the way, all butterflies were released after we filmed/photographed them.

But there was more excitement in store. There were two other species that I had seen in Woolsery as a child, but that were apparently missing when I returned as an adult. These were the Brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni) and the Small Copper (Lycaena phlaeas). In one afternoon we saw both species. I had last seen G.rhamni in Woolsery in 1972 and L.phlaeas in 1981.

I am not claiming that any of these three species have not appeared in Woolsery in the interim, but only that I have not seen them, and that they have not been reported to me by any of my Natural History spies, like the Rev. Gerald Smith (Retd) who is a tireless photographer of all things great and small in the village and the surrounding areas.

In all, Max and I saw at least 11 species (there were two others that we were not able to identify) in the village yesterday, which considering there have only been 23 species recorded by us since 1971, is not too bad at all. This year is shaping up to be a very exciting one butterfly-wise.

NB: Richard Muirhead writes: 'The relevant sentence in today`s Guardian Country Diary from St Dominic, Tamar Valley is; “Orange-tip butterflies flit across sweet vernal, the coarser grasses, nettles, flowering plantains and patches of lady`s smock…” This is at Sullens Wood.' It seems a bumper year for orange tips everywhere.

MAX BLAKE AND A 16th CENTURY SEA MONSTER

http://maxzoo.blogspot.com/2011/03/novel-sea-monster-report-or-not.html

TAXONOMY FAIL: The last one from Maxy for a while