Squamous!

Paris was absolutely lovely, but I am very happy to be back at home with two funny cats and a real computer (the technology conspired against "real" blogging - there is a very complex and roundabout way to post pictures taken on my iPad in entries here, but the device kept crashing and I gave up and posted to Facebook instead - will put some of that stuff up here later on at a quiet moment, though life re-entry is now slightly daunting).

I really might have to read this book, though it's a minor splurge (and too new to be available yet at the library) - have pasted in the bizarrely steampunk (of course colonialism really did produce this kind of effect, it's not a novel observation) photograph of a nineteenth-century New Zealander with pet tuatara.

Jonathan Losos' Anole Annals blog is one of my great internet pleasures. I cannot really say that in another life I am an anole specialist, as really I do not have the eye or temperament for a natural historian (in a near alternate life, I am writing about Melville and Dickinson, and in a further-away but still plausible one I am an epidemiologist!), but I do really love 'em, and I like the styles of looking and writing on display here - makes me think of another book I very much liked, Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1.

My morning's first meeting has been rescheduled from 10:45 to 12:45, buying me an extra hour before I need to be on campus at 11:30: that is good, I must just now try not to waste it all delightfully on the internet....

Eaten from below, eaten from above

It's not easy being an anole in South Florida!

Regeneration

I have a secret passion for the group blog Anole Annals - anoles are one of the critters I most enjoy watching in Cayman - but the pictures at this post are particularly appealing!

"this dot, here, this one"

Closing tabs:

Kathryn Schulz on five of the best punctuation marks in literature.

More on indexing. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

Mr. Chicken! (I have ordered the book.)

NB many fewer chickens hereabouts than when I was in Cayman in August. B.'s theory: inverse relationship to invasive green iguana population; iguanas like to eat eggs! Fewer of certain other birds, too; I like how the populations are always shifting (much higher proportion of various anoles to northern curly-tailed lizards, also, compared to five years ago, but this sort of thing really concerns micro-environments - geckos are abundant at Regal Beach half a mile down the road, but we don't see many here at the Grandview, though one occasionally makes its way indoors, leading to presence of a plastic cup and piece of paper in the kitchen cupboards with pertinent label "gecko trapper" - that particular discrepancy probably has to do with how well the gecko can camouflage itself against a sand-colored wall versus a light blue one).

Rattus rattus

A natural history of the little-known Anolis blanquillanus.

(Reading this has made me think longingly of Cayman, where multitudinous anoles are one of the most delightful regular sights - terrestrial herpetofauna! I will be there January 2-20, but am now rather wishing I had arranged a pre-Xmas trip as well....)

Not an action shot

Contrary to any impression the picture may create, turtles and caiman were wholly peacefully coexisting!

Basilisks

a.k.a. Jesus Christ lizards!

Lizard love

A singularly handsome iguana.

The crocodile room

The primal feeling of hunting with a hawk (FT site registration required).

Also at the FT, a fabulous piece by William Leith on the 200 million animals that pass through Heathrow every year:

Bradfield hands me a face mask. “To filter out fecal dust,” he says. We walk into a rank-smelling room containing several black-throated monitors – lizards the size of terriers. Their feet are like the wizened hands of Egyptian mummies. They have crinkly necks with dry, shedding skin, like Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective. Tongues shoot out of their mouths like party tricks. When Bradfield gets too close to one of these lizards, the tail, which is getting on for a yard long, whips against a crate.