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squirrel

World Cup: Group E

by JR Kinyak on June 29, 2010

in Carnivores, Marine Mammals, Primates, Rodents, Theme Weeks

European otter (click image to enlarge)

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Hi, mammals! I think I’ll be on track to finish the Mammals of the World Cup on schedule with the actual World Cup if I post all of Group E today and then get back to once-a-day tomorrow. (Whether I will succeed is still unknown, as life has been pretty stressful around here. But I’m trying!) Also, I’m really not doing my best work lately, so dumping four mammals on you at once might distract you from that fact.

Our first mammal is the European otter (Lutra lutra), who is representing the Netherlands, where its numbers had decreased to almost nothing but it has been reintroduced. The Netherlands beat Slovakia (where the Yak part of my name comes from) in the Round of 16 and will be playing Brazil in the quarterfinals on Friday.

Orca (click image to enlarge)

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The orca or killer whale (Orcinus orca) is playing for Denmark tonight. Did you know that orcas in groups have been known to take down blue whales? It’s unlikely, I think, that anyone is going to beat the orca in this World Cup. Denmark, on the other hand, didn’t make it out of the group stage.

Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (click image to enlarge)

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From Japan, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga), which is also known as the momonga! It’s just too cute to be believed, really, and is also represented on one of my favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, seen below. (I’m very into Yu-Gi-Oh! now. It comes with the 14-year-old son. I have a beast deck. Besides the Nimble Momonga, I also have a Tree Otter, a Sea Koala, a Kangaroo Champ, a Green Baboon Defender of the Forest, and a Rescue Cat.)

A very handy Yu-Gi-Oh! card (click image to enlarge)

Japan made it to the Round of 16 but lost to Paraguay today. After the group stage, they don’t allow ties anymore. First, they have 30 minutes of overtime, and if there’s still a draw, they take turns taking penalty kicks, which are kicks from a spot 12 yards from the goal. Five players from each team try that, and if there’s still a draw after the penalty kicks, they play sudden death. After the 30 minutes of extra time, the Japan-Paraguay game was tied 0-0, and Paraguay won in penalty kicks.

Allen's swamp monkey (click image to enlarge)

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This is Allen’s swamp monkey (Allenopithecus nigroviridis), and it’s from Cameroon (as well as Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Its scientific name means “Allen’s ape, black and green,” and it is indeed kind of black-and-green colored. Cameroon didn’t get out of the group stage at the World Cup.

Group E Results

Well, the killer whale is the killer whale, and none of these guys stand a chance against that apex predator. It moves on to the next round, and I think our mustelid friend in this group, the European otter, could do some damage to the swamp monkey, and obviously the momonga is adorable and tiny and hopeless against any of the other three. So the two mammals continuing on to the Round of 16 from Group E are:

Orca (Denmark)
and
European Otter (Netherlands)

Tagged as: monkey, otter, squirrel, whale, World Cup

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World Cup: Mexican Gray Squirrel (Sciurus aureogaster)

by JR Kinyak on June 14, 2010

in Rodents, Theme Weeks

Mexican gray squirrel (click image to enlarge)


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To celebrate the World Cup, I’m drawing one mammal from each of the 32 competing countries. Today’s is the Mexican gray squirrel, also called the Mexican red-bellied squirrel, a busy little guy who is native to the treetops of both Mexico and Guatemala. (Guatemala’s national soccer team has never qualified for the World Cup.) The Mexican gray squirrel, like all other squirrels, I imagine, likes to eat nuts and seeds, but it also occasionally treats itself to a raid on a mango or cacao plantation. The species is widespread and not threatened (hooray! cue vuvuzelas!).

Mexico, whose national team is nicknamed El Tri for the country’s tricolor flag, is in the World Cup’s Group A, a tough bunch of contenders, as we discussed yesterday. In Friday’s opening game of the tournament, Mexico just managed to tie South Africa 1–1. Of course a win would have made either team happy, but the level of competition in their group is such that neither is out of the running yet. (If you missed the game, here’s the Guardian’s live blog of it.) Next, South Africa takes on Uruguay on Wednesday and Mexico faces France on Thursday.

Mexico is the USA’s major rival in soccer/fútbol, which makes life hard for some Mexican-Americans at World Cup time. Mexico has hosted the World Cup twice, and both times the team made it to the quarterfinals, but El Tri has never made it any further than that.

Tagged as: squirrel, World Cup

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Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris)

by JR Kinyak on June 11, 2010

in Rodents

Red squirrel (click image to enlarge)

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This pretty red squirrel species lives in Europe and Asia. In Italian, its name is scoiattolo comune, in German it’s Eichhörnchen, in French it’s ecureuil roux, in Swedish it’s ekorre, in Danish it’s egern, and in Spanish it’s ardilla roja.

Earlier this week, our friends visited, and one of their kids, nine-year-old Nicola, drew some mammals with Coco and me. Here are Coco’s and Nicola’s squirrels, which are a different species from the red squirrel I drew, but fit here anyhow.

Sleeping squirrel by Coco, age 11


Hungry squirrel by Nicola, age 9

Tagged as: coco, names, nicola, sleeping, squirrel, words

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Indian Giant Squirrel (Ratufa indica)

by JR Kinyak on May 6, 2009

in Rodents

Indian giant squirrel (click to enlarge)

Indian giant squirrel (click to enlarge)

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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.

Tagged as: squirrel

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Scientific Names Week: Indian Palm Squirrel (Funambulus palmarum)

by JR Kinyak on May 5, 2009

in Rodents, Theme Weeks

Indian palm squirrel (click image to enlarge

Indian palm squirrel (click image to enlarge)

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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.

Tagged as: humans, names, squirrel, words

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Mammal News Roundup

by JR Kinyak on January 2, 2009

in Mammal News

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.

Tagged as: monkey, squirrel

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Mammals of Iraq: Caucasian Squirrel (Sciurus anomalus)

by JR Kinyak on July 20, 2008

in Rodents, Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge

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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.

Consecutive days of mammals: 1
Record: 16

Tagged as: about drawing, Add new tag, squirrel

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