I LOL’ed so hard at this my three year thought his daddy had finally cracked.
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We recently posted this on FB too, we’d love for you to post your pretty photos over there too!
My best friend in high school always rebuked the appeals of vegetarians by asking, if we weren’t meant to eat them, why were they created out of meat?
I find it very difficult to embrace bacon since I know it is out of my calorie price range. But call it pancetta and put it in my pasta sauce and I have no problem with it. We only make bacon for breakfast one day a year and that is on Christmas morning. Good to know that choice is scripturally sound.
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Like many I don’t have one specific favorite species of animal. My favorite animals are my three cats lol. But I know that’s not whats being asked.
For animals there are a few species I really like though and think of quite often and look for.
One would be the family formicidae. The ants. As a kid I was amazed by how they would travel in these long lines searching for food and water. Use to put sugar on the counter and wait for the sugar ants to march around. I also thought it was cool that they dug up the earth and made their mounds revealing the types of soil underneath. Use to go to the sandy area where there was pockets of clay and loamy even and see how the ant hills would often be mixed of their soil shades. As I got older and found out they farmed and milked certain insects and fungi and had complex societies where there was even ants whose job was to bury other ants and spray a hormone or something on them. I read a book, a fictional Japanese folklore book that contained one of my favorite short stories. “ The Dream of Akinosuke“ which was based on The Governor of Nanke a Chinese tale.
I also really like Golden Silk Orb weavers. Their website are just so neat and their strawberry banana colored bodies too.
Someone mentioned the giant sloths of North America and they are neat. Read that they may have been one of the main species in south eastern USA to to help spread pawpaws and gopher apples.
This is a golden silk orb weaver I found.
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A gorgeous spider! Thanks for sharing your photo.
I’m also a big fan of the formicidae. I currently have a budding Formica rubra (European Red Ant) colony in my study at the moment. They are hibernating at the moment so there is very little activity from them. However, I’m expecting a population explosion in early spring when they wake up. Its been fascinating watching them interact by sharing food and chemical signals.
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Rather than start a new thread for our second favorite animal perhaps we should just have a second round here?
Hummingbirds are a big favorite of mine but this one is not my photo. Anna’s (Calypso anna) are the ones we see most often. Quite common here, even over wintering in my garden. Most years they nest somewhere in the garden, often very reasonably at the ends of tree branches. But one year they built a next about knee high in the first forking of Euphorbia lambii. I worried about them but I suppose my dogs and I are in the garden often enough to keep cats out and the squirrels didn’t find them. This gave me a chance to take pictures up close. I wish I could have gotten some of them when they’re really young and look like little fuzz balls with X’s for eyes.
I’ve read a number of interesting factoids about them. One is that they can reverse directions going full speed in just a fifth of a second. I haven’t been able to find confirmation for that one. But they sure can move fast and seemingly hover effortlessly. They can also slow down their metabolism on cold nights. They’re very territorial and for good reason. They establish a sequence of plants at which they nectar timed for efficient fuel intake for fuel used. If they visited flowers in some random way or allowed other hummers to visit ‘their’ flowers, that would pose a problem since their flight does require enormous amounts of fuel for their size. They don’t exactly get tame but they do become accustomed to me moving around in their range. Occasionally when I’m watering with a hose one will take the opportunity to take a shower. When I was very young and my family had gone to the San Diego zoo I had my first up close experience with a hummer. I was standing in an aviary of hummers when a zoo keeper passing through had me put my hand out palm up and placed a couple meal worms on it. They weigh very little.
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For me the giant dragonfly during the Carboniferous period, can you imagine the horror and terror if these things buzzed around today?
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Yeah she was beautiful. I found a juvenile girl around the same time and it’s actually my favorite picture of one but you can’t see it as clearly as the one in the other pic.
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I have friends who were Bible translators in Indonesia. When they arrived at the place they worked, the leaders told them they were a Christian people. They asked how the gospel had come to the island. They were told that at one point in history the government told all the indigenous people groups they had to register their group as either Christian or Muslim. So the leaders got together and one said, “We really need our fetishes. If we register as Christians, we will have to give them up.” But then another elder said, “But we like pork. If we register as Muslim, we will have to give up pig roasts.” That ended the discussion. The men took a vote and it was unanimous that they would have to take a chance on angering the spirits, because life is not worth living without pig roasts.
If the tree of knowledge of good and evil grew bacon, I have a feeling it wouldn’t have been Eve forever saddling her sex with recriminations about being gullible and weak.
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Favorite would be Tasmanian giant crab, and I have no idea why. I saw one on tv as a kid, and it just stuck in my head as the best thing ever. That crab played a role in why I had to go to Australia, and it was better, and bigger, in real life. After that would be colossal squid, Leviathan, Behemoth, and reem.
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One of the rules we try to enforce in sermons if our kids want to stay in church rather than go to junior church is they either have to write notes or draw pictures relating to the sermon…or Bible. The most popular sketch is Leviathan or some dragon from Revelation or Daniel…and the sketches get more bizarre by the week despite our requests to be a bit more relevant. Oh well…what can you expect…imagination is awesome for 11 and 9 year old boys.
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My granddaughter goes to preschool at the zoo in Oklahoma City, and they visit the animals regularly. She was asked what her favorite animal was, and replied, “Meerkat.” They are pretty cool.
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Apparently they’re good eating too … though not cheap. This Japanese guy pays $1,500 to buy, cook and eat this enormous specimen. I imagine he is a cooking celebrity there. You can also find videos of it in the ocean but it is hard to appreciate he size of it the same way. If it isn’t endangered, I’d try it. But I suspect I’d prefer our local Dungeness crab.
True story?
BTW, does Islam approve of fetishes?
True story. I do not think they had a very complete understanding of either religion, obviously, nor did anyone actually convert because a form was submitted to the government.
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No, it does not, though there is unofficial syncretism with animism and fetishes in many regions, just as there is with Christianity. Also, magic and djinns play a big part of Islamic culture. There was a myth that the first Muslim missionary arrived to middle Niger on a flying carpet. I am pretty certain mainstream Islam would not propagate that, but it reminds me of the stories of saints in the Middle Ages.
Sorry @Christy…I realized I umped in here like a rude person…you know the story better; and sorry @Reggie_O_Donoghue…I will stand back and enjoy watching. 
I’m from the east coast originally, but now we live smack in the middle of the country. Back east (here, if you say ‘back east’, Chicago qualifies 
), mockingbirds were a favorite. We are a little west of their range, but we have the true mockingbird, the brown thrasher – it has a similar silhouette, but it is somewhat larger and is a rich brown that photos do not do it justice. The mockingbird imitates the cardinal’s several simple calls excellently, for instance, and takes itself seriously. The brown thrasher has an extensive repertoire of little ditties that it strings together that are fun and even funny to listen to, especially if you consider that it is poking fun at the mockingbird. 
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Just read this in BBC about the extinct, sole US parakeet/parrot. It is quite sad, but very interesting about how they deduced that the parakeet had gone extinct suddenly, from Human expansion, rather than a prolonged decline from environmental factors other than human
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We are fortunate, the hunting has been regulated for some time now, and no harvesting during the season when females are above ground. What they will do is bury themselves during egg production, so only males and females that can not reproduce are above ground. Before they go under the sea floor, they will carry enough to populate four complete cycles of eggs. Basically every male could be taken, and each female will reproduce four more times. I talked to Professor Gardner at the University of Tasmania, he knows those crabs better than anyone, he was like a kid at Christmas talking about them. When I went to the Sydney Fish Market, a crab that size was about a hundred dollars back in 1997. Well that was American dollars, it was a great time for the exchange back then. I would have taken it, but I had no clue how to get it back to the states. That fish market is amazing, looks like a mall where each store either sells or cooks something from the ocean. A tiny lady had to get a ladder to reach in a tank to pull it out, she was braver than me.
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