From my Animal Photos blog (now merged)
From my Tapirgal's Daily Image blog
Outside there was the usual stuff. I liked the neon fish in the window. We've been eating healthy food lately, and, sadly, there wasn't much of that around. We went next door and had German sausage (more like a hotdog) and saurkraut. It tasted good, and I threw away most of the bun, so it wasn't so junky after all. I didn't get bloated.
Here's the fish. There are a lot of fish themes locally. I like that about living on the river.
Indoors, there were displays of food, hand-made clothing, art, photography, and some nice quilts. I liked these two especially. There were sooooooooo many blue ribbons around.
And then we went to see the animals. Here's a friendly pig. Lee and I were being nuzzled and licked. Later one nibbled at my knee.
Almost every sheep was shorn already. Some wore colorful get-up, apparently to keep warm.
More colors. I didn't enjoy looking at the rabbits and chickens so much. I like the animals, but it was hard to see them through the narrow wire cages.
Here's nice duck. It's the only one that would hold still enough for me in the low light of the barn.
This has to be one of the stupidest looking animals you'd want to see - a poodle-cut llama (or related animal) with an orange lei around its neck. I'm sure it was a nice llama, but hey. . . .
Here the two winners had just shaken hands. I missed that shot by a second, but they were smiling and happy. I had never noticed before that sheep and goats are handled without bridles, but merely held by the head and they follow. Try that with a tapir. I don't think so!
I've always liked cow faces, and not to mention, they remind me of my Lab-chow mix, wonderful Leila, who I had for awhile in Colorado.
This was another nice pig. Posing. You can see it's sitting like a dog. After I pointed out to Lee that cows and sheep stand up and "sit" down with the front legs going up or down first, and that tapirs, horses, and rhinos are opposite, I couldn't remember how pigs performed this feat, so we went back and looked at the pigs, who were happy to oblige by standing and sitting just as we arrived back at their pens.
We'd been talking about how pigs were supposed to be smart, and this one obliged us by demonstrating why its owners had wired the latch shut. Piggy seems to have figured it out.
This pig, on the left, had no food in its stall and wanted the neighbor's dish.
Don't ask me why, but I have a thing about animal tongues. This pretty horse kept sticking its tongue out, but in 6 or 7 shots, did I ever get one with the tongue extended? No, I didn't. I tried to anticipate, but it didn't work. My camera is pretty fast, but it still has that microsecond of a lag between the shutter button and the click.
Nice horses. The winners are prancing out of line toward the judge.
This is one part of the fair I never bother with, but I took the photo just to complete the theme.
I took the photo of the young babirusa above on February 16, 2008, when we visited the Oregon Zoo in Portland. Click the "babirusas" label in the shaded green box below for more posts on the two babirusas in Portland. Meanwhile, here is a link to another bit of babirusa news from England.
I'm starting with two portraits. The one above is my favorite, because of the wonderfully expressive eye and the telltale dirt on its nose. (Please click on the picture for a better view, then use your Back button to return.) But the next pig portrait is more resplendent, showing the gorgeous mane. Too bad I didn't get the top picture framed as nicely as the bottom one.
Follow this link to the stuffed version of these pigs. It's a beautiful animal. Althought the coloring is inexplicably different from live warty pigs, it is totally charming and artistic. The red coloring is luscious, and the ivory-colored tusk is the icing on the cake.
If you like these pigs (and who wouldn't), please come see the babirusas on this blog.
Photos by Sheryl Todd
We thought we were out of luck when the day, predicted to be warm and sunny, was instead overcast and cold. We thought the babirusas would stay in their warm den, but one of the zoo guides told us they'd been out a few minutes before, so we stuck around. Sure enough, they emerged. First one of the two young brothers came out and strode through the yard and returned to shelter. Then they both emerged, ready for play. They chased each other back and around, one pinned the other on the ground in something like a wrestling move, and then both trotted into the water and climbed back out. They went inside their den, re-emerged, and started again. The pigs seemd affectionate and playful, and were a joy to watch. We felt ourselves lucky. They of course reminded me of tapirs, to which they are not closely related except that all have hooves. Still, their movements were reminiscent. Unlike most pigs, babirusas do not root, but eat leaves, like tapirs.
Signs at the zoo show the tusks of an adult babirusa and show their origin on the island of Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) in Indonesia. As with so many wild animals, babirusas are under threat from humans. Check them out on Google's search. There are a number of excellent sites with photos and descriptions. Until today I didn't know babirusas were so interesting or CUTE (unlike the drawing below, which makes them look like something deformed from outer space - sorry, but I don't think the picture does them justice!).
Click the photo to read the text
Babirusa links I especially like are: The St. Louis Zoo, Wallacea (nice photo), Wikipedia, and some videos. Especially don't miss this this video from the Oregon Zoo! Also check out Ultimate Ungulate for the babirusa's family tree. Here's another good link I just found.
Next door to the babirusas were some ultra cool Vasayan warty pigs from the Philippines. They ended up on one of my other blogs.
There's not much more to say. I love these pigs! See the post above for the full story. . . .
Yesterday morning a juvenile great blue heron (at least, I think that's what it was) found that the radio tower outside my office was a good place to catch some sun in the 31-degree morning.
You can see it there near the base of the tower with the pilot boat passing. I love the colors on the river. The heron hunkered and preened by turns. I hoped it would extend its neck in a gorgeous photogenic pose, but it preferred to conserve heat, extending as little as possible. Periodically it would throw its head one way or another to reach spots on its back and underside, but never did it give me an opportunity to catch a pose other than . . . well, scroll down and see for yourself. It was pretty interesting. The herons usually find other places to perch in Astoria, so I consider myself lucky when they come this close to home. Click photos for larger images.
Seeing this beautiful dinosaur-looking iguana was one of the highlights from our day at Miami Seaquarium on January 14, 2008. Sue and I were invited to visit Safari, Ltd., one of our vendors for the Tapir and Friends online gift shop. It was a wonderfully peaceful day at the aquarium. The weather was cool, the people were few, and the animals highly visible and for the most part seeming to enjoy themselves. I got lucky with the iguana pix. Most were in focus. This guy was in the branches of a tree only a few feet away. It was amazing to watch him (her, it) pulling branches toward his mouth with his long feet and angle the branch and/or his head for each bite. You can see how his body is completely bent around and he's attempting to eat over his left shoulder.
Was it only last weekend, or the weekend before? I spent a few hours upgrading the picture links on the personal part of my tapirback.com web site. I'd been wanting to turn the text links into picture links, re-think some categories, and reorganize folders. I finally found a format I liked, changed some color backgrounds, and . . . I like it!
Hmmm. Next time I'll find out more about blog formatting. I would have liked to have all of the pictures on the left with the text wrapping automatically as it did around the first picture. 
Add instant gratification, and it is not only addicting, it's SUCH an amazing technology. . . . Links? So simple! I once wrote an entire book wishing I could use something like LINKS from point to point in the explanations. But that was before links and web pages had been invented. More on the book some other time. That's one more project I'd like to resurrect and re-invent for the web site. Oh well, many thoughts, many projects, and it's later than I meant to stay up.
What a wonderful sight to wake up to on our first full day in Belize. This is the view from our upstairs room at the far end of one of the wings of the Radisson Fort George Hotel.
Both last night and this morning we noticed the birds gliding along the shoreline outside our hotel. You could hardly miss them. Not only were they big, but they had a sense of "otherness." "You are no longer at home," they seemed to say. They were exotic. Which is a little weird on the one hand, because of the two most prominent birds, one was a brown pelican. We have them in Oregon along the coast, and that's only 10 miles from where I live. The thing was, these were flying CLOSE. You could see more than faint shape. The more exotic bird was the frigate, found only in the tropics. The frigate bird above is from the NOAA web site. Actually, the bird in this photo looks less strange than they can appear. The forked tail is one aspect I remember, but the other is the pointed "elbows." It depends on the angle. Frigates are unique in a number of respects. (Much of the following info is paraphrased from Wikipedia.) Being sea birds, you'd think they might dive or swim, but they do neither. They don't have enough oil in their feathes to keep them afloat. They have a unique structure to their bones which allows them to glide on the warm updrafts over tropical oceans where they can signal changing weather patterns along the fronts. Besides being unable to swim, frigate birds cannot take off from a flat surface. Having the largest wingspan to body weight ratio of any bird, they are able to stay aloft for more than a week, landing only to roost or breed on trees or cliffs. They are light weight, and have the highest ratio of wing area to body mass, and the lowest wing loading of any bird.
This is again outside our hotel along a broad stretch of road that skirts the waterfront in Belize City.
Below is the beautiful currency of Belize, depicting local animals. Belizean artists often used these animals in their compositions, and we would see the tapir, toucan, and flowering plant together like this on many a piece of slate carved for tourists.
