I recently learned about binturongs, ridiculous animals which look like a hybrid of roughly five different cute critters, galumph about the place, and smell suspiciously like popcorn1. Thank you to the algorithmic Youtube overlords for blessing me with the above video.
More on binturongs:
Washington1, a town in urban County Durham long since incorporated into Sunderland, is not a place where one expects much nature. The palatinate’s chirping woods and rolling Pennine moors are not so far away, and the path i took to get to today’s attraction led not through winding country roads but broad, grey industrial arteries, designed to ferry thousands to and from Nissan’s immense factory.
But at the end of the road, down by the river Wear, there lies a wee patch of idyll: the Washington Wetland Centre.
I’d come on a good day for it, clearly, as the first thing i saw coming out of reception was the staff corralling all the ducks together for their annual vaccination, by means of a ramshackle assemblage of mesh fences. (Crowd control for birds!) The littlest one kept trying to escape his jab like an ornithological Bobby Kennedy.
Most fabulous of all creatures of the air on offer are the eiders, the diva-est ducks in the world, emitting a chorus of sassy coos as they revel in their status as undisputed kings of the pond. (You’ll have to take my word for it, as i neglected to take a video, erring towards the side of it being better to live in the moment than through a phone camera. I was yet to realise what good blog-fodder the visit would make.)
On the other side of the preserve a viewing area juts out to overlook the Wear — still salty and tidal this close to the sea — and an artificial saline lagoon, built to provide a home for those creatures who prefer a more brackish milieu. The signs tell me that, rare as they historically have been, more and more European otters have made their home along the wear, and the lucky visitor might hope to see one… if only the centre were open at dawn or at dusk, when they come out.
Not to worry, for the centre are also very proud of their main mammal enclosure: a family of utterly2 adorable Asian small-clawed otters. They’re a lot less squeaky than the ones at Northumberland Zoo, and wondering why, two theories popped into my head.
First, that it’s the Northumbrians’ fault. Their northern sibs were greater in number, a family of four to Durham’s two, and they were, by all accounts, masters of putting on a show. They appeared in an orderly fashion when their circadian rhythms told them it was feeding time, pipped and squeaked incessantly at the keeper until they got their fish, performed some cuteness, and then went back inside when their bellies were full. They knew exactly what they were doing, methinks.
Second, that the Washingtonian otters were grieving. I said there were two, the younger Buster and the elder Musa, and you might be hard-pressed to call that a family. But until this month, there were three. Mimi, the clan’s matriarch and a scamp who bonked so much they had to give her a lutrine IUD, passed of old age at fourteen (a good innings by her species’ standards, no doubt). When she went, they had to put her corpse back in the enclosure so the others would understand.
They were still otters. Still playful. But something about them seemed… morose. Maybe, in between the fish and the scampering and the puzzle feeders, they were still thinking about her.
On the way out, i passed a tiny observatory, cleverly named “Cygnus” for the constellation of the swan, used by night for the Sunderland Astronomical Society. I don’t know if it’s of much use this far into the zone of light pollution, but they certainly seem to enjoy it, so perhaps my relatively sky-privileged Northumbrian self shouldn’t play the lecturer. Perhaps that fateful night that Mimi died, a star in the sky began to twinkle a little brighter.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation is nominally a horror film.1 Team of scientists goes into an evil forest, gets picked off one by one with cool body horror effects, blonde final girl makes it out and is irreversibly traumatised, movie ends, many such cases.2 But i’ve never seen it that way.
Might i just be a contrarian? Certainly, the biosphere our characters enter is cruel, but i think it’s a useful exercise to consider the situation from its perspective. The government is on their Gods-know-how-manyth expedition into the Shimmer at this point, and up until now, it’s all been military men. Cripes, if i were a sentient self-regulating ecosystem and all these feds started probing around my internals because they want to kill me, i’d develop an immune response too.
The world beyond the Shimmer is beautiful beyond description. It is a place where the sky glistens in iridescent3 waves, where every sort of plant grows from every sort of bush and beast, and where death is just one step in a beautiful cycle of life and rebirth.4 It blurs the line between not just the species but kingdoms of life — flora, fauna, and funga all mingling and merging together equally under one roof. Barring the terrifying human–bear hybrids, that’s a world i’d like to live in.
Plus, it seems willing to learn. In the ending “fight” (cue the noise), allegorical for the obvious as the visuals may be, the alien throws not a single punch. It’s learning by doing, mimicking every move Lena makes, enough to turn into a rudimentary facsimile of her — and even after its destruction, the ending glimmer in her and her husband’s eyes makes clear a part of the Shimmer’s essence is here to say. I say that’s for the better.
P.S. Here’s some stuff i’ve been listening to recently (sorted from “bleep bloop” to “strum strum”):
Well, i care about what my favourite dinosaur is, and it’s Diplodocus, that lumbering old fool. Allow me to be possessed by the spirit of my nine-year-old self for a little bit.
Reason number one why the diplodocus is the best dinosaur is because it is called a diplodocus. This is a very fun name to say and does not strike the same terror into the hearts of men as, say, 🤘🤘🤘 Tyrannosaurus Rex!!! 🤘🤘🤘 or 🔥🔥🔥 Velociraptor!!! 🔥🔥🔥. I like to think this is because they are, themselves, gentle creatures, being peaceable herbivores and all that. (My favourite dinosaur could beat up your favourite dinosaur, but chooses not to because it is a conscientious objector. I’m sure this taunt would have gone down great on the playground.)
Another reason diplodoci are great is how long they are, getting up to thirty metres from tip of the snout to top of the tail. Part of me thinks it would be fun to be that long, but the other part likes being able to turn around corners. There’s other dinosaurs that we think were longer, but most of them don’t have a complete skeleton to back them up, which is a skill issue if i’ve ever heard one. If my species was about to be wiped out i would simply do the smart thing and die in an area that would preserve my fossil better. Suck it, Maraapunisaurus.
That long neck isn’t just for show, either. This is the kind of thing that causes massive arguments among palæontologists, but a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Palæontology (yes i’m backing up my dinosaur preferences with a source) suggests that, because their centre of mass would lie so close to their hip socket, they could assume a bipedal stance without much effort, lifting them high up into the canopy into the land of only the most gourmet leaves. Then, when a foodie diplodocus was done with its land-based course, it could dip its neck into the riverbank and feast on some fine vegan seafood.
One last thing. After Pangæa broke up, the land where the diplodoci reigned shifted and drifted until its reached its present place, in the American southwest. The implication is clear:
Diplodoci are cowboys.
Hail, the mustelid! Greatest family of the animal kingdom, nay, the eukaryote demesne. They are nigh universally cute — a charming sausage shape — and often small, but unlike their tamèd brers and sisters in Canidæ and Felidæ, they have never succumbed to human domestication and demeaning.1
Indeed, they are deceptively mighty for their size; the least weasel, an accurate name if there ever was one, proudly squeaks as the smallest carnivore on land, and with its mighty jaw can take down a rabbit ten times its greater, or even, should you believe the ancient Greeks, a basilisk. (So goes it for the otter, too: a lutra lutra might never look like it has a single thought running through its head, but show it to a streamful of fish, and you will witness a bloodbath that would make Tamerlane blush.)
I might myself take a broader view of the term and insert an O in that mustelid, bringing us up to the dynasty Musteloidea, where not only weasels, martens, and otters roam, but the mischievous American raccoon, the adorable red panda, and the e’er-defensive skunk. But the title says “mustelids”, and i am not one to argue with my fifteen-minutes-ago self, so in our little kindred we shall remain.
A last thing to note before we return to pathetic Prīmātēs, the greatest thing in all the family, the peak of all the realm of life, the chief reason among chief reasons that mustelids are the best:
They all sound like squeaky toys.
I don’t know if it’ll come across too well in photo form. I was lying on the grass, as one does, and lo and behold, there in the sky appeared what i could only describe as a double-backwards-double-rainbow:
I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe that makes me a shut-in? I don’t know. Some quick prodding around revealed it to be not a rainbow, but a halo: a circum-zenithal arc, its iridescent colours made by the low sun’s light filtering through the icy clouds above.
The Sagrada Familia. The view from a Pennine peak. My home town from above, caught by pure chance on a flight to Turkey. The first sight of the Tyne Bridge down Grey Street. And now this. That’s the top tier — sights i’ll never forget in my life.
Kevin Kelly, ex-editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of Wired, brings us “The Big Here Quiz”, a 30(+4)-question test of how well you know your local area. I thought i’d give it a shot. Mr Kelly says he’s “extremely interested in hearing from anyone who scores a 26 or better on the quiz on their first unassisted-by-Google try”, which absolutely does not include me. You’ve got to learn these things somehow…
While i might not have got the questions 100% correct, i still found it a fascinating learning experience. How many did you get right?
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