Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The featured bird is very tiny, very hardy.
“His” valley’s sparsely vegetated floor – the “low ground”, locally – all sits within 200 metres either side of 4000 metres above sea level.
If transplanted to the Tibetan Plateau, New Zealand’s highest peak would fail to reach this valley’s lowest point.
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…what does he/it look like?
The featured image offers a Tibetan Plateau answer.
In the White House – depending on one’s particular perspective – the result is “entirely different”, or, in essence, “much the same”…
3 CommentsMeet Ochotona gloveri – Glover’s pika.
This mostly-solitary herbivore is a high altitude specialist, to whom temperatures north of 26 Celsius could prove fatal.
Glover’s pikas live on and near to the Tibetan Plateau, mostly on/in steep rockfaces.
Comments closedI took the photo on a glorious autumn morning almost exactly one year ago – 10.26 am, 29 October 2019, Labahe, Sichuan, China.
In Scotland, more than half a century earlier, Robin Williamson wrote my favourite autumn song.
Allegedly, October Song was the first song he ever wrote, as a teenager.
One CommentAsia’s wild asses are different from Africa’s, and larger too.
All but one kind are generally reckoned subspecies of Equus hemionus, the Asiatic wild ass or onager.
Pictured above and below is the khur or Indian wild ass, Equus hemionus khur.
Once widespread, in large numbers, khur now only number several thousand individuals, most of them in the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, western India.
Comments closedInarguably, much of it is perplexing.
Arguably, however, it often reveals the actual nature of what is now routinely described – by those not under its yoke – as an “authoritarian” regime.
”Totalitarian” is, I think, a more accurate descriptor.
Comments closed…or just a “wicked” sense of humour from a graffitist on the “roof of the world”?
Comments closedRed Pandas are their genus’s only (two) species; further, they are the only living members of their family, Ailuridae.
They are only very distantly related to Giant Pandas.
Giant Pandas are bears, members of the Ursidae family.
Red Pandas are more closely related to weasels, skunks and raccoons, as fellow members of the superfamily, Musteloidea.
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It is a great pleasure to encounter a non-gloating, happy person – one who appears comfortable in their own skin, who requires “no particular reason” to be happy, who radiates contentment, is fully alive, and not “on guard”.
Such encounters do not require a common language, nor any words to be spoken.
Typically, no commercial transaction is involved, no contest, no “big event”…
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Pikas are the Tibetan Plateau’s most numerous mammals.
The pictured individual was still alive, just…
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