WHAT A DISRACEFUL SIGHT - MATTHEWS HAS BECOME A HIPPIE

Either that or he is trying to destabilise trees.

FLEUR FULCHER: Fleur's Internship Diary Weeks Four and Five

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. She is spending the summer as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. This is her story.......

It has been a hectic two weeks both at work and at home, so I can only apologise for the missing week from my internship diary.

Last week started with me in Launceston; I had wanted to be allowed to help the curators to see how they work. Tony Eccles, the curator of Ethnography let me help him take down an exhibition about the great plant collectors of the Veitch nurseries. They had by the outbreak of World War one introduced 1281 plants to the west, including over 200 orchids and the Pocket Handkerchief tree we have one of in our garden.

The rest of the week was taken up with more shells including the prettiest ones yet and more herbarium. On the Friday I was again helping Tony, we took some rather ace objects to be photographed. My favourite was a Tongan club.

This week we have been doing a variety of things, yet more shells, even more herbarium action and condition checking the Cuvier's Beaked whale skeleton which is being remounted.

On being told that there was a Moa skeleton in the stores, I found it whilst looking for a whale rib and took a few pictures. On Friday I also saw a specimen of Passenger Pigeon, a bird whose story I'm sure you're all familiar with. It looked ordinary; not being an ornithologist I wouldn't have thought it unusual if it appeared in my garden. But nonetheless seeing it in such close proximity was quite emotional, it was on a table, between a pair of hummingbirds and the shell of a small turtle.

Friday afternoon found Catherine crawling around finding bits of bamboo under a tiger (one of 39 shot in 10 days by George V, the git), and found me checking pest traps as we had found a couple of live booklice, in one of them were two odd looking insects I couldn't identify, on asking some of my superiors they couldn't identify it either although the Assistant Natural History curator thought it was a type of winged Psocid (booklouse) however we were unsure if he was right and may send photographs of it to an expert. It was a rather long legged, bristly winged beastie of about 2 or 3 mm in length. Maybe I shall include a pic of it next week if I can.

So all in all I am still loving my work placement and hope that I can get a job in a museum like the one I'm working at now.

Fleur's bosses at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum have been kind enough to allow her to write this blog, even though it is not usually their policy to allow such things. We would like to thank them for this, and to point out that all pictures of museum specimens are copyright to the RAMM

CFZ PEOPLE: My Second Mum is in hospital

Regular bloggo readers will have heard me talk about Marjorie Braund, grandmother to Dave and Rossi B-P, and mum to Kaye over at the Hilltop Tails blog.

From 1971 to 1980 and intermittently ever since she has been like a second mother to me, and when Corinna and I got married in 2007 it was her, together with Corinna's Mum who acted as witnesses and signed the marriage certificate.

She is very unwell at the moment and was taken into hospital last night.

I love her very much and my thoughts and prayers are with her and the rest of the family.

Please remember her in your prayers to whichever deity you believe in. She is a lovely lady, and if it hadn't been for her my life would have been very different...

JAN EDWARDS EMULATES TED NUGENT

A few weeks back dear Jan sent us this:


"These are all pictures of the same bird. It’s a fledgling, as you can see from the beak. It’s kind-of-brown. I know what it is, but do you? "


I was beginning to worry, but because she works in animal rescue, and this is a spectacularly busy time of year I left her to it.


However, yesterday she wrote to me, saying that it was a baby starling, and that she had been ill.


Back in the summer of 1977, the year of the two sevens clash, I was a sophisticated young punk who listened to the artier side of punk rock, a smattering of reggae and Frank Zappa, and was secretly in love with Animals by Pink Floyd. However, some of my other friends were less tasteful, and a chap who I shall not name (bnecause I still see him occasionally) was obsessed with a particularly unlovely album Cat Scratch Fever by the particularly unlovely Ted Nugent.

Now I had just finished typing that paragraph when my lovely wife came in, saw the LP cover and said "Oooh I've got that album!" So its a good job I hadn't typed out that I always thought it was a disingenuous load of sexist tosh (sample lyric:

"Wang Dang Sweet Poontang Wang dang, what a sweet poontanga shakin' my thang as a rang-a-dang-dang in the bell She's so sweet when she yanks on my meat Down on the street you know she can't be beat What the hell Wang Dang Sweet Poontang"

But what is the point of this ramble through (thankfully) largely forgotten guitar noise? Well, basically, until yesterday I never realised that Cat Scratch Fever was a disease, and I only found out about it because Jan told me that she had contracted it.

"Its not just caused by a scratch. You can get it from simply stroking a kitten and rubbing your eyes. Apparently most vets and vet nurses have had it, and they are amazed I haven’t had it before now."

So when Nugent wrote:

"The first time that I got it I was just ten years old I got it from some kitty next foor I went and see the Dr. and He gave me the cure I think I got it some more They give me cat scratch fever Cat scratch fever"

Get better soon honey. I'm going off to listen to something wholesome, probably Throbbing Gristle...

GLEN VAUDREY: The Peruvian "Giant Snake"

Glen is one of the newer additions to the bloggo family. He wrote to me out of the blue last year to ask wherther we wanted a Western Isles volume in our Mystery Animals of Britain series. We argeed that we did indeed want one, and commissioned him. What we were not expecting was such a bloody good writer and all round nice guy, who - by the way - is writing several other volumes for us, and he is even going to be speaking at the Weird Weekend. Wayhay!!

Jon,

I just thought I should add a few comments to the ongoing giant snake saga. Having looked at the this mornings pictures I couldn’t honestly tell you if I thought it was a giant snake or a sandbank to me both points of view hold water and are of equal merit. Certainly I have great difficulty imagining a snake of such size being in existence and yet undiscovered by science but then who am I to judge on Greg and Mike’s opinion, after all I like to think that Stellar’s sea cow is going to be rediscovered in the next year and it’s only a question of time before the great auk appears in our northern waters.

I can also see that the picture could be nothing more than a simulacrum, just nature playing tricks with sand, water and trees. But without being an expert on the geography of the region I question, I can not discount the possibility of the image indeed being a very large snake.

It all makes a good conundrum just enough information to tease, without the obvious fakery that some other recent mystery animal sighting have been plagued with.

I for one want to thank Greg and Mike for sharing this information with the CFZ family and hope that there pursuit of this giant one day yield the goal that may of us long for the discovery of a new mystery animal.

It goes without saying I wish them the best of luck in their continued searching for evidence.



Glen

SCOTTIE WESTFALL: All because I lost my router

Jon,

I lost a router last week, and I was without internet access.

However, if I had internet access, I would have noticed an unusual cat story in my local daily news website. Amazingly, for a small county in very rural West Virginia, we have a daily internet news site.

This cat was captured in a cage trap. And no one knew what it was. It was like a domestic cat with rounder ears and lots of spots.

After perusing the photos on the news story, I instantly thought "Bengal!" Bengals are a hybrid between domestic cats and the Asian leopard cat. They are widely marketed as pets in the US, although they are usually backcrosses with domestic cats. The F1's are often too much for the average person.

It turns out that a local cat breeder had purchased an F1 Bengal for breeding purposes. Somehow, the cat got out.

It was then trapped in the cage trap. The owners of the trap didn't know what it was. So they called the local authorities-- who didn't know what it was either!

And here's the kicker: instead of doing some research on what the animal was or even trying to find its owner, they took the cat to a remote area AND RELEASED IT!

Now, the cat's owner is looking for her. And local authorities look like total fools.

This has now made statewide news. It's not quite to the level of the supposed African lion that was running loose in the southeastern part of the state, but it's pretty bad.

Now, if I had been able to access the internet on Monday, I would have known what it was. I know the owner of the news website, and he would have received a response from me. He then would have passed this along to the authorities, and I'm sure the authorities would have at least performed a google search. And then they probably wouldn't have been as cavalier about turning such an animal loose.

And then a woman might have been reunited with her cat.

And all of this because my last router stopped working.

I've done a full story on it here: http://wildlifemysteries.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/strange-cat-captured-and-then-released/

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday’s News Today

Yesterday’s News Today
http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/

Along with the cryptozoology news from the CFZ daily cryptozoology news blog and the bad pun, on Saturdays I post my song of the week. This week it’s American Pie by Don McLean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6uEjifqTaI
And now, the news:

The Snakes Are Winning!
Georgia: Another lion sighting reported
Mass. yellow lobster is a 1 in 30 million rarity
Florida woman rescues good ol' boys from gators
That’s quite ‘whisky’, anyone would think she way ‘rye’ing to get hurt.