Posts tagged as:
click image to enlarge
This little guy is for my tia Leah. The wee least chipmunk is the smallest of all the chipmunks. They live throughout North America, and they build different summer and winter houses. They hibernate, but not too deeply, and they wake up frequently for midnight snacks.
{ 1 comment }
click image to enlarge
Hello from Orange, Texas, and the Holiday Inn Express. Here is a drawing of not one, not two, but count ‘em, five dormice. And not only are there five dormice, but get this: they’re five dormice of different species. (Yes, this is a strategy to speed up the drawing of the 2,000 or so rodents in the world.) Please be advised that they would not ordinarily be all together in a nest like this, living as they do in different areas and such. But you would be likely to find any one of the five sleeping if you found them at all: they’re nocturnal, spending most of the day in a state of torpor and hibernating half the year.
Clockwise from the top left: Dryomys nitedula (forest dormouse), Eliomys melanurus (Asian garden dormouse), Glirulus japonicus (Japanese dormouse), Myomimus personatus (masked mouse-tailed dormouse), and Muscardinus avellanarius (hazel dormouse), the species immortalized in Alice in Wonderland.
This mammal is sold. Find another one to take home with you!
{ 0 comments }
click image to enlarge
Hey, little fellow, what are you doing up and about? You should be hibernating with all your friends!
Woodland jumping mice hibernate for six months out of the year—roughly October to May—in burrows that they either dig or borrow from other little mammals. They like to eat fruit and seeds and mushrooms and insects. And lots of things like to eat them, too—bobcats, owls, rattlesnakes, skunks, wolves, etc., etc.!
You’ll notice this one’s extremely large hind legs. That’s to help him jump—woodland jumping mice can jump a meter or more! I suspect the super-long tail helps in this somehow. Maybe Lisa, who requested a woodland jumping mouse, can tell us!
Take this mammal home with you!
{ 2 comments }
The mammals are back! After a hiatus in which I bought a house, moved into it, and wrote a novel, I have returned to mammalography with a renewed commitment to reaching my goal. Thank you for your support, and please stay tuned for an announcement later this week about a special Daily Mammal event.
This fellow here is a black bear. They live throughout North America, in pretty good numbers overall, although they have declined a lot in some places. Their coloring seems to vary regionally—in northwestern North America, there are even very pale ones, almost white—and they’re larger in the east, where they don’t have to compete with brown bears.
Black bears don’t truly hibernate because their heart rates don’t slow down that much, but they do “enter a state of lethargy” in autumn, according to my Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Mammals.
Another thing I learned this week is that contrary to all the pro-New Mexico propaganda I’ve cheerfully taken in over the years, the character of Smokey Bear actually came before the real-life Smokey Bear, the black bear cub who lost his mother in a forest fire in Lincoln National Forest in 1950 (and whose first name was Hotfoot Teddy). The fictional character of Smokey debuted in 1944 and was named for a heroic New York firefighter called Smokey Joe Martin. Finally, it should be noted, his correct name is Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear.
See you tomorrow!
{ 3 comments }
Get smart with the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIY Themes.
