This is a chicken. Its long-ago ancestors were the dinosaurs we now depict as cheap plastic children’s toys in a futile attempt to downplay their ferociousness. The chicken traded those gnashing teeth for a beak, but it still has its forebears’ claws for ripping and disemboweling.
Also for dust-bathing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Whole Foods, your terminology is incorrect.
Baby panda bears have paws. Dinosaurs do not.
Watch me disembowel this hay.
Every park has at least one weird duck. It’s the wrong colors—all white, or patchy white; its bill bright storybook orange or its face weirdly red and lumpy. Next to the other ducks it looks oversized and bulky, like a linebacker in a crowd of quarterbacks.
How new species form, and what determines whether they last, is one of the major topics in evolutionary biology; and much of this topic is embodied by that one weird duck.
Male Common Yellowthroat, a frequent visitor at the banding station.
Unusually heavy rains have put much of the banding station underwater for the past three months. One side effect of this is that, on the days when the area is sufficiently dried out for us to squelch out in our rubber boots and band birds, the mud shows the tracks of everyone else who has been out there before us.
Usually the denizens of the banding station of whom I am aware are the birds we catch in the nets and band. These tend to be small- to medium-sized songbirds. The mud reveals an entirely different set of creatures living in the area.
Raccoon hand prints near a human bootprint.
Tough Little Birds 