Lucive’s Blog

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

Lives of Game Animals, Volume 3. 1927. Written and illustrated by Ernest Thompson Seton.

Mysterious Web-Footed “Ghost Dog” Caught on Camera

The elusive canids deliberately avoid humans

Deep in the Amazon rainforest lives a seldom-seen beast known as the short-eared “ghost dog.” There’s an air of mystery surrounding the wild dogs because it uses its keen sense of smell and hearing to avoid humans, which means information about them is scant—for example, there are only four museum specimens in existence. Now, new research published in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation is finally shedding some light on these cryptic canids. True to their name, the short-eared dogs (Atelocynus microtis) have small round ears, short legs, long bushy tails, and partially webbed paws (similar to other canids in the Amazon). According to previous research, they primarily feed on fish, insects, and small mammals, but have also shown a predilection for scavenging the cadavers of larger animals...

Chinese Mountain Cat (Felis bieti), family Felidae, endemic to grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau of western China

Vulnerable.

See the First-Ever Photos of Cozumel’s Mysterious Dwarf Fox

Many believed the tiny fox had gone extinct

Strange things happen to animals when they colonize islands. Some of them get larger, like the enormous rabbit Nuralagus rex of ancient Menorca, while others get smaller, like the dwarf fox of Cozumel. This mysterious species of gray fox is estimated to be only around 60 to 80 percent the size of its larger mainland brethren. Fossils indicate it first arrived on the Mexican island around 5,000 years ago, predating the arrival of humans...

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations. Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use all photos in the repository as references.

THE COUNCIL WILL NOW DECIDE YOUR FATE

my contribution to this year's Polar Lights Zine, with proceeds benefiting the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.

Yellow-footed Rock Wallabies (Petrogale xanthopus), family Macropodidae, South Australia

Colombian Red Howler (Alouatta seniculus), family Atelidae, Colombia

Bloodhound