May 31st, 2015: Ravens vs Bear

Ravens are pissed, Bear don't care.




Arbroath has some pictures and a short video of this Alberta bear snacking on a Raven's nest.

Poor raven babies

Clearly the bear is a total hick...he didn't even bring seasonings, much less a decent recipe! If you don't know how insane hungry bears get, look up how the polar bears are ravaging bird nests all over the Arctic. The image search string "polar bear cliff" should bring up some terrifying shots.

I have it on the authority of an insane former zoo employee I once knew that corvids are not actually that bad...IF you skin them first. He also told stories about the concussion he got when an elephant crap't upon his feet while he was off balance, causing him to fall backward amid the elephant keepers' laughter. And the time the zoo's giraffe died of old age and he got permission to make a Masai shield out of part of the hide--apparently when they tested it against old African explorer stories, he shot it with a .45 from a range of less than 50 feet and the bullet did nothing more than gouge out some hair and bounce off. When I knew him, the last physical relic of that job in his home was Fred, the hat rack that was actually the mounted head of a Himalayan tahr that had also died of old age at the zoo. The man in question passed away a couple of years ago. I have no idea what became of Fred.

Thanks a lot snake. Now I need a Masai shield.

He sounds like he was a neat guy. On a tinier, albeit similar, note I once saw at the NYC doll museum a doll house that had been built over the decades by a janitor there. In front of the hearth he had made a rug out of the pelt of a chipmunk, head and all, like a bearskin rug. It was very clever.

That's a nice climb as well. The chipmunk pelt is a nice touch.