Miniaturist Penny Thomson makes figures, dioramas and mechanical miniatures using card, paper pulp and wires.
This is an impressive mechanical owl
I had a very strange encounter the other day, and since it has a happy ending, I’d like to share it with you!
I went out to one of my favorite spots for birdwatching, and as I was walking along a boardwalk over water I spotted something odd in the distance; a turtle whose shell was sitting very high up in the water. Changes in buoyancy can be indicative of illness in aquatic turtles so I started heading over to try and get a look. It wasn’t until I took this photo from a distance and looked at it on my camera that I realized something was extremely wrong here. Can you tell from the photo what made my stomach drop?
Yep, you guessed it; this is not an aquatic turtle at all but in fact a gopher tortoise! Gopher tortoises are 100% terrestrial and should NOT be floating in a little pond like this one was. I immediately ran over and hauled this gal out of the water to do a physical exam on her and make sure she was okay.
Though she seemed perfectly active and responsive, and her respiratory rate was normal, I was a little reluctant to just pop her back on land as I didn’t know how long she’d been floating there. Just to be safe, I took this tortoise in to the veterinary hospital and had the zoo med resident check her out and monitor her for a few hours to make sure she was okay. Here she is trying to dig her way out of a stainless steel cage because that’s just how gopher tortoises are 😆
After the all-clear from the vets who see more gopher tortoises than anyone, this tortoise was ready to go back to the wild. Gopher tortoises have an extremely strong homing instinct and must always be returned as close to their original location as possible. In this case, I released the tort in a grassy field quite near the little pond where I found her. What a happy ending!
Although I don’t know how she ended up in the water in the first place, there are a few possibilities. I think it is most likely that she just wandered onto the boardwalk and tumbled over the edge into the water. However, there is always the possibility that a (probably well-intentioned) human put her in the water. My mentor told me he once treated a gopher tortoise that had been thrown into the ocean because a citizen thought they were rescuing a sea turtle.
This might seem like common sense to a lot of us in the zoology/veterinary field but please always remember that not all turtley looking animals can survive in the water. The general public isn’t always the best at identifying reptiles (my own mother asked me if a pond turtle was a gopher tortoise last week) so I always advocate against ANY turtle being released directly into water. It’s always better to place a turtle next to water and allow them to enter on their own, rather than just throwing or dropping them into water. I once saw a viral video of a person throwing a box turtle (another terrestrial species) into a lake because they thought it was an aquatic turtle, and it ruined my whole week. Educating the public about turtle safety is the best way to prevent that kind of situation! I have become really passionate about turtle medicine over the course of vet school and teaching people about how to help our shelled friends is so important to me.
Blue-cheeked Jacamar (Galbula cyanicollis), male, family Galbulidae, Brazil
photograph by Hector Bottai
Since it's watermelon season!
My grandfather used to grow watermelons, among other things, and he told me about most of this, especially the orange spot. Those are the absolute best!
i have been given nothing but shiny elongated watermelons with small webbings and white spots. and they make me wanna kill myself
picked some hibiscus flowers for the slugs as a treat. I tried to get it to look cute but they just look like weird hors d'oeuvres
ALT
ALT
ALTroman theatre in orange, france
three stories tall & considered the best-preserved roman theatre in all of europe
its crazy how the world is so big you can go your whole life not knowing there’s a creature that exists and it turns out there’s a fuckton of them
I thought you might like these moss-filled pawprints in concrete which I saw earlier. :-)
Left by the Creature of Gentle Moss
whitehinagiku