Warm

It's freezing out here, but who cares? She's got a cozy fur coat:

Shetland Pony? (I thnk.)

If I were a horse,
And a little horse, too,
I shouldn't much care
If it froze or snew;
I shouldn't much mind
If it snowed or friz--
I'd be all fur-lined
With a coat like his!
...
(With apologies to A.A. Milne for his "Furry Bear" Now we are Six)

Seen on a farm at Sayward Junction.

Colt at sunset

I took this photo without flash, hand-held, in the semi-dark as the crowd filed out of Cavalia. Two colts had been left to roam alone freely on the stage after the show ended.

Except for resizing, the photo has been left as it came out of the camera.

Getting muddy. Or not.

Along the highway leading into the Boundary Bay beach area, a sign warns of extreme high tides.  (Checking the tide tables, I see what they mean; across the bay from us, high tide was 13 feet. On the other side of the peninsula, it was just under 16 feet. That means the water comes right up to the walls that protect the community's back yards.)

We were lucky, though; we stopped at the inner end, the Mud Bay end, but we got there as the tide was going out.

Looks good. But it's slippery, soggy, mushy, sticky mud. Goopy mud.

Logs, mud, and watery mud.

Did I mention that we were on the Mud Bay end? Until it's been dry for a while, you can't walk there without good boots. Unless you're a horse with big, floppy feet:

Splash, splosh, plop.

Hope they like being groomed. They're going to need it.

My boots are in the bathtub, getting dry enough to clean. At least they're waterproof up to the zipper at the ankle. Laurie's shoes were not.

But the view was worth it.

Mount Baker, from a back yard. Not ours, unfortunately.

North Shore mountains, with a flight of sandpipers.

We brought home a few pale pink macoma clam shells* that had been tossed up alongside the walls. In one of them, I found a tiny flatworm (1/4 inch long), the palest, cleanest, almost transparent green; its miniature ruffled pharynx gleams whitely from its middle. How it stays that clean in sticky mud is a mystery.

*I didn't know this about macomas:

"Macomas are mud-dwelling clams which differ from most other bivalves in their mode of feeding. Most clams are filter-feeders. They draw water into a siphon, filter out nutrients and exhale the filtered water through another siphon. Macomas are deposit feeders. The inhalent siphon is very long and and sweeps over the mud, acting like a vacuum cleaner." From MBL (Woods Hole)

The Animeme

This has been going the rounds for a couple of weeks; Bora, at Blog around the Clock, started it off.

We are supposed to blog about interesting animals in our lives, under 5 headings. I already filled in one of them in the comments on Creek Running North; I'll cut and paste that here, under the appropriate heading.

1. An interesting animal I had:
   
2. An interesting animal I ate:
3. An interesting animal in the Museum:
4. An interesting thing I did with or to an animal:
5. An interesting animal in its natural habitat:

1. An interesting animal I had. Jellybean, the cat who chased bears. She is always the first animal to come to mind. It's a long story, which I wrote about on my website: you can find it here.

2. An interesting animal I ate. That would probably be the pan-fried grasshoppers (recipe) I bought in an open-air stand in a Mexican market. (Toluca) Spread in a fresh, warm corn tortilla, sprinkled with lime juice and garnished with a sprig or two of cilantro: Yummy! I wouldn't say the same for the Philipine delicacy I downed; at the time, I still had a cast-iron stomach. Half-developed chicken, still in the shell, hard-boiled. With feathers. Passable, if you don't look at it.

3. An interesting animal in the museum. The feathered serpent of the Aztecs.

Photo from Crystallinks.

4. An interesting thing I did with or to an animal. This was my comment on Creek Running North:

The year I lived in Oklahoma, I kept noticing box turtles on the roads. I would carefully steer around them, but not everybody did. I found a fair number damaged or killed by traffic, and started rescuing those that could survive, releasing them when they seemed healthy again.

At one time, we had around a dozen wandering around the rec. room.

One turtle had been hit on the head and had a large wound over one eye. After a few days, checking him over, I noticed a maggot crawling out of it. I sat down with him and tweezers and pulled out, one by one, a wiggling mass of maggots. The hole left behind must have been a half-inch deep into the flesh, and beyond the broken bone into the brain.

The turtle survived. In mid-summer, I was able to release him.

5. An interesting animal in its natural habitat. Grizzly bear. And that is another post all on its own. Sometime this week.

And a bonus: an animal I loved: Sancho Panza, the horse. Bear Bait: another story from my website. Warning: this is not a tale for the squeamish!