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Indian giant squirrel (click to enlarge)
While I was researching yesterday’s Indian palm squirrel, I ran across this gorgeous species. I was going to save him to draw later because he’s so colorful with such crazy ears, but then today, it got late and I was going to just go to bed but then I thought, no, I have three days in a row, need to keep it going, so I decided to draw somebody really fun, and thus, your Indian giant squirrel.
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Indian palm squirrel (click image to enlarge)
The Indian palm squirrel is a funambulist of the palms! Thinking of the words somnambulist or ambulatory, you can almost come close to figuring out what that means: a fun walker! Sort of. A funambulist is a tightrope walker (funis is Latin for rope; the word fun, on the other hand, comes from the Middle English fon, meaning fool, and this squirrel is no fool).
Indian palm squirrels are endemic to India and Sri Lanka. In a Hindu legend, the god Ram was searching for his beloved wife Sita, who had been kidnapped by a demon. At one point in the epic that tells his story, he must build a bridge across a sea, and he is aided by an army of monkeys and bears. But monkeys and bears aren’t the only animals that help him. This is from a version of the story on the India Times website:
The entire army of monkeys promptly got to work, under the supervision of Hanuman and Jamvant. Ram sat under a tree thinking of Sita and the days ahead.
After a while, he noticed something that moved him to tears. A little squirrel, who had been watching the monkeys carry huge boulders and rocks to build the bridge, began to do her bit to help the Lord. She began carrying little pebbles in her mouth and her tiny hands from a little mound near the tree to the site of construction.
A much amused and pleased Ram picked up the squirrel and petted her, running his fingers from her head down to her tail. The squirrel was blessed and forever marked with stripes—the mark of Lord Ram and a trophy of love.
A while back, a commenter suggested that the Daily Mammal could function as a sort of horoscope, where your personality can be compared to characteristics of the mammal I draw on your birthday. So if you, like me, were born on May 4, you resemble an Indian palm squirrel: you’re agile, fearless, hardworking, and willing to wreak minor destruction to get what you want.
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Hi, Mammals!
For the new year, let’s get this show back on the road. I want to draw all these critters before I’m 50, after all. I’m going out of town for the weekend, but when I get back, I resolve to draw my little heart out, and I hope you’ll look at my drawings.
Here are some mammal stories from the past few weeks.
The Washington Post, in “Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop,” reports that acorns are disappearing from the northeastern United States! Seriously, they’re just not there, where they should be. Some botanists are freaking out—and so are squirrels. “Crazy,” “skinny” squirrels are getting into garbage, “demolishing pumpkins,” and getting themselves killed in starving desperation. The epicenter of the acorn mystery seems to be northern Virginia, but reports of missing acorns have also been filed from Maryland and Pennsylvania and as far away as Kansas and Nova Scotia. While this probably won’t be a big problem for the oak trees themselves, it’s a serious issue for our mammal friends the squirrels.
One of the selections in the New York Times Magazine’s “8th Annual Year in Ideas” issue was “Eat Kangaroos to Fight Global Warming.” You see, cows produce methane, which is a greenhouse gas and a significant contributor to global warming. Kangaroos don’t produce methane because of the enzymes in their digestive systems. I’ve previously read that some scientists are trying to graft those enzymes, somehow, into cows’ systems, and I don’t know how that’s going, but a simpler solution, at least in Australia, is to wean people off of cattle and get ‘em eating more kangaroo meat. (Even better, maybe, would be vegetarianism…)
In Sizhou, China, a man who trained some monkeys to ride bicycles at a market gave one of the monkeys a beating after it didn’t do what he wanted. Well, the other monkeys turned it around on him, beating him over the head with his own cane. “They may have built up some feelings of hatred toward me,” the man says, according to an article in the Daily Mail.
A stranded sea lion was wandering around near the runways at the Oakland International Airport, looking at people kind of odd, according to an airport manager quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle’s story on the incident. The sea lion didn’t interfere with airport operations, and it was taken to the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands.
Although melting sea ice is causing a disturbing number of polar bears to starve to death, a serendipitous glut of snow geese may prove golden. Polar bears can eat their eggs, which would solve two problems. (I almost said “kill two birds with one stone.”) The movement of polar bears toward land should overlap with the snow geese’s egg-laying cycle beginning in about three and a half years, so we’ll see then how the bears like their huevos rancheros. LiveScience has the story.
Kangaroos photo by Julian Robinson.
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click image to enlarge
Sigh. It was so long ago that I started the Mammals of Iraq series. Then I decided to draw a jerboa…and it was really difficult…and I started putting it off…and forever passed. I decided to skip that particular jerboa species for now and just get on with it already. This squirrel, also known as the Persian squirrel, was the result. I wish his two eyes didn’t look like they belonged to two different squirrels, but oh well. One thing I really need to work on with the Daily Mammal is perfectionism. I don’t mean in the sense that I do everything perfectly, but almost the opposite: I do nothing perfectly, and I beat myself up about it, and I give up, and I spend way too much time. When your goal is to draw all 5,000 mammal species, though, perfect is the enemy of the good, as someone says. (Voltaire, actually. One interesting thing is that business writers have flipped that around to “the good is the enemy of the great,” which is the opposite meaning.)
Anyway, here are three interesting Caucasian-squirrel-related links.
“Almost 300 languages and their word for squirrel”: According to this site, there are two Kurdish words for the Persian squirrel, sihoreek and simolak.
Listen to a Persian squirrel’s chirps. When I first played this recording on my computer just now, my dog Minnie ran over to cock her head back and forth at the speakers. But she either figured it out or lost interest pretty quickly, and now she ignores it.
“My friend Fındık,” a delightful Flickr set of photographs of a pet Caucasian squirrel who lives in Turkey. Check out Fındık’s relaxed poses: you never see squirrels lounging about like that in the wild.
Edit: I shouldn’t have said you “never” see squirrels lounging about like that in the wild. I just found a new Flickr group called Squirrel Pancakes, full of photos of secure squirrels in parks and backyards.
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click image to enlarge
Here’s another order checked off the list. I think this is a goal we’ll reach, mammals! And what a mammal this one is. Have you ever heard of flying lemurs, also called colugos? There are two species, one that lives in the Philippines and one that lives in Thailand, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the like. Both species have this amazing membrane that stretches from their neck…to the tips of their fingers…to the tips of their toes…to the tip of their tail. Compare that to the flying squirrel, who has skin for gliding just between, basically, its wrists and ankles. It’s amazing, this colugo membrane.
Colugos flip their tail up, sort of inside out, when they’re on the go so it doesn’t get “soiled,” according to Walker’s Mammals of the World, or caught on a branch. They’re truly arboreal, and they freak out if they somehow end up on the ground. They can climb in “a series of lurches” and they shuttle along horizontal branches hanging the way sloths do. But their most impressive mode of locomotion is their gliding. In a single glide, they can travel upwards of 100 meters (109 yards)!
These guys eat almost nothing but greenery. Walker’s also says that “the gliding membrane of the mother can be folded into a soft, warm pouch to hold the young,” and “the mother may leave the young in a nest tree or carry it with her while foraging,” as you see this lady colugo doing. And colugos are crepuscular, a lovely word meaning “active at twilight.” I wonder if there’s an equivalent word that means “active at dawn.”
Finally, please click to enlarge this photograph of a colugo in flight, which is from Pennsylvania State University. It’s so amazing!
The Daily Telegraph: ‘Your cousin, the ‘flying lemur’”
Consecutive days of mammals: 16
Previous record: 11
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Mammals, there are only two more drawings after this one and then the “24-hour” mammalthon comes to a close! Ted requested a fox squirrel. (He actually requested a gray squirrel, but since I’d already drawn one, he let me draw a fox squirrel instead.) When Ted and his brother and sister were kids, they had either gray squirrels or fox squirrels in their backyard. They’d feed them and let the squirrels run up and down their arms and onto their heads.
Consecutive days of mammals: 10
Previous record: 11
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Please consider participating in the second 24 Mammals in 24 Hours Marathon! You get to support a great cause that helps animals and get your own custom original drawing. Look in the right-side navigation bar of this page for more information.
According to the American Society of Mammalogists, New Mexico has five species of ground squirrels in the Spermophilus genus. In my parents’ neighborhood, you can frequently see them rushing across the road, but I’m not sure which species those are. The spotted ground squirrel, like this one, likes to burrow into sandy soil. Animal Diversity Web describes the varying landscapes the spotted ground squirrel calls home in all the western states it lives in, and I like the picture the list of habitats evokes: drifted sand along rivers, creosote and blackbrush, short-grass mesas, the banks of arroyos, gravelly sand along highways, low shrubs, sand hills, sand dunes, yucca grass, sage-grass.
When they want to send an alert signal to each other, spotted ground squirrels stomp their hind feet.
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