Animal Alphabet: F is for Frigate Bird

I'm hoping that this will be the last "punt" for me on the Animal Alphabet project. This week, in the midst of grading final papers, I got caught without even a preliminary set of doodles. All I could manage was to pop out a quick brush-pen drawing and put some very quick color on it.

So: F is for frigate bird.



That tomato-colored balloon on the front of that guy is an inflated part of his throat, which is used for display during mating season. If you've never seen one of these guys in action, then you can catch them toward the beginning of this episode of The Life of Birds.

They're not the only birds who can puff up their throats like bullfrogs. You might also want to take a peek at the greater sage grouse, if only for the bizarre wobbly sounds it makes.

Where My Brain Goes: Henry David Thor

I'm not sure what happened here. One minute I was sitting at my kitchen table, winding down for the night, and the next minute I had drawn this.



"Verily," saith Henry David Thor, "I went into Midgard to live deliberately."

To my credit, the Thor details and the Thoreau details are all from memory, and I think they're more or less persuasive.

Blame the hype for the upcoming movie, or blame the supermassive Walt Simonson Thor Omnibus that I got in the mail the other day.

It's not the first time we've had a goof with the first line of a classic book, and not the first time I've done something dorky with classic Marvel heroes and nineteenth-century literature.

Good night.

Animal Alphabet: E is for Echidna

The grading hasn't gone away yet, so I'm going to have to punt (more or less) for this week's Animal Alphabet, too. I was planning to do a real drawing, and even started the pencils for it, but they didn't go well, and I ran out of time. I'm going to have to fall back on my preliminary doodles again.

Here they are:



You will probably be more familiar with the platypus than with the echidna, the other monotreme. (Monotremes are the mainly-Australian mammals that lay eggs, though three of the four echidna species live on New Guinea and not Australia.) As you can see, they're spiny little guys, and they come in a few different shapes:



The short-nosed version, as I note above, is a sort of mega-hedgehog in its initial appearance. Of course, if you look at them for more than a split second, it's easy to tell a hedgehog from an echidna, especially the babies, since newly hatched echidnas (which are also called puggles, for all you people busily scribbling Harry Potter doggerel) are unformed little blobby things with nary a hair, unlike baby hedgehogs, which are seriously among the cutest things that nature creates.

Meanwhile, in an example of convergent evolution, the long-nosed echidna really looks sort of like a kiwi. Is kiwilike a word? Is there a kiwilikewiki I can consult for an answer to that question, please?

Also, there is apparently a Kokonino Ekidna.

Animal Alphabet: D is for Dobsonfly

I could have predicted this would happen. I'm so swamped with grading this week that I pretty much have to punt on the Animal Alphabet. Before I could even properly decide between dung beetle and dobsonfly, the deadline is passing...

Fortunately, I have a preliminary sketch-doodle that I can post.



A dobsonfly, in case you don't know, is what a hellgrammite grows up into. The thing that's missing from the preliminary sketch is a sense of scale: for insects, dobsonflies are large, and those pincers the males have are pretty impressive.

And as I was scanning that doodle, I thought, "Where have I seen that before?"

It turns out that my notebook for Spring 1996, early in my grad-school days, is full of drawings of dobsonflies and hellgrammites.



I was working on a poem then, eventually drafted too much under the influence of Hart Crane I think, about water insects.



The diagram of the three arrows represented the three worlds I wanted to describe: the water-strider's transit across the surface of the pond, the metamorphosis of insects like the hellgrammite and the dragonfly, and the hand of the human collector passing down into the underwater world. Or at least that's how I read it now, fifteen years later.



Like most of my old creative efforts, it's a little embarrassing to look at: yet another old failure. But maybe there's something I could learn from those fifteen-year-old notebooks (scribbled by a twenty-four-year-old) if I had a little more tranquillity in which to recollect them. Today, however, I'm back to the grading piles. Poetry (and drawing) is for another day.

Animal Alphabet: C is for Coati

For this week's entry in the Animal Alphabet, I picked out a creature I knew by another name.

Did you know there's actually no such thing as a coatimundi? Apparently people at some stage were confused by the differing habits of the solitary male and the extremely social female, and construed them as belonging to separate species; really, they're all coatis.

I plan to take my correction in stride. In fact, I've been happy to discover that the gangs formed by mama coatis and their kits are super cute. You should see them in the BBC Life episode about mammals: super cute, I say. (And, like many social animals, they can apparently be raised by people as pets.)

Anyway, C is for COATI.



Do you recognize what I'm swiping there? Do you want a prize for recognizing it, or just bonus points?

And if I said coati, koala, coati, koala, coati, koala long enough, would I get one of those critters for my very own? (Alas, I'm sure neither would thrive in Vermont.)

Animal Alphabet: B is for Birds of Paradise

MY POKEMANS. LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.



For this week's letter in the Animal Alphabet, I give you five of the most peculiarly adorned creatures in the animal kingdom, all close relatives from the islands of New Guinea. From top to bottom, they are:

The King of Saxony Bird of Paradise

Wallace's Standardwing Bird of Paradise

The King Bird of Paradise

Wilson's Bird of Paradise

The Western Parotia

Although they are a trip to draw and a marvel of color, the best way to see the birds of paradise is in action, so I encourage you to check the video links I've put behind their names. If you've never seen them before, there's a decent chance your mind will be blown.

Animal Alphabet: A is for Anglerfish

Leave it to our cartoonist pal Ben Towle to light a fire under me and get me posting here on the blog again. Today he announced a new project that he and Rob Ullman are undertaking, to post weekly alphabetical animal cartoons. (Ben did an alpaca today, and Rob did an aardvark.)

I'm going to try to keep up. And since I know lots of peculiar creatures, I'm going to try to stick to the more bizarre corners of the bestiary.



Her tail's like a comb, and her teeth are a tangle;
She married a leech who does little but dangle;
She's a fish with a lure, and she'll teach you to angle.

If you don't know about the marital habits of the male anglerfish, you may not believe your eyes.

Here's to fifty-one twenty-five more weeks of weird animalia.