As a further token of appreciation to my readers, I present… more quokka video!
This little guy came out to greet a couple of bike riders on Rottnest Island, Australia. This never happens when I ride my bike: just the odd chipmunk now and then.
We take great pleasure in God’s handiwork.
Hi, Mr. Nature here, with the shark that has a funny name.
You never hear much about the porbeagle. It looks a lot like the great white, to which it’s very closely related. It’s a really good idea to get out of the water rather than place confidence in your ability to tell the two apart. But the white shark is notorious for attacking human beings, and the porbeagle isn’t. One wonders why.
Apparently God, when He was creating sharks, used pretty much the same template to create two species with very different behavior patterns. And the more you think about that, the more you wonder.
All this video is from Rottnest Island, Australia, where people go to see quokkas. The name of the island means “Rat Nest” in Dutch: some old-time sailors mistook the quokkas for large rats. Must’ve been at sea too long.
These seem to be very lovable animals, and I hope it’s safe for them to mix so freely with humans.
True, this video is kind of long (10 minutes), and I hope you don’t find it boring. But as for me, I could feel my blood pressure going down as I watched.
Who knew fish could be so interactive with humans? Did you? God’s stuff never runs out of surprises for us.
Odd that the only pet mentioned in the Bible is a little ewe lamb that a poor man raised by hand and cuddled in his bed–only to have it taken away from him by a rich man who wanted it for dinner. When King David heard about that, he ordered the execution of the rich man: only then to learn that this was a parable that Nathan was telling him to make him understand how gravely he had sinned in order to rob Uriah the Hittite of his wife, Bathsheba. (2 Samuel, Chapter 12)
We don’t think of sheep as pets, but certainly the one in this video acts like he’s somebody’s pet. I had no idea a sheep could be so merry. A pet like this would be very easy to love.
To see how these little owls get along with people, and even with a dog, is to get a glimpse of God’s love. Love is the quintessential God’s stuff, and it works. And not just for humans, either.
One day when I was five years old, my friend and I ventured into the woods; and we hadn’t gone far when we got the scare of our lives. The noise we made disturbed an owl and flushed him out of his perch in a small tree beside the path, just four or five feet from us. Yikes! To this day I remember that owl as being a lot bigger than either of us.
But I know now that there was nothing to be afraid of.
Here’s something you don’t see every day–a rat and a cat drinking from the same dish. The rat has absolutely no fear of the cat and is, in fact, rather pushy. They must be housemates.
I’ve had cats and I’ve had rats, but never at the same time. Rats make affectionate, adaptable pets who are remarkably intelligent–at least as smart as cats or dogs. And like cats, rat siblings’ chief amusement is to beat up on each other–which ours always stopped doing, instantly, the moment I turned the light back on. You would hear thump-thump-thud-SQUEEEEK, turn on the light, and behold–nothing’s happening. Nobody here but us cozy little rat-girls, boss…
Hi, Mr. Nature here, with a thrilling tale from our kitchen.
Yesterday Mrs. Nature was making supper when she suddenly screamed. “What’s going on out there?” “It’s in my pants! It’s in my pants!”
Sure enough, it was a big bug crawling up her leg inside her pants–our cats were totally fascinated–and then it fell out on the floor. She thought it was a praying mantis at first, but it was just a harmless katydid. Relying on camouflage for protection, these move slowly and their leaf-like wings make a nice safe handle by which to pick them up and release them outdoors.
If you turn up the volume on this video, you can actually hear some katydids in the background. It’s one of the sounds of summer, katydidding away at night. It’s some of God’s stuff, and a joy to listen to.
Hi, Mr. Nature here, with more of God’s stuff.
Cats and kids love these–click beetles: the “elater,” to crossword puzzle fans. When the beetle winds up on its back, which seems to happen often, it “clicks” straight up into the air in hopes of landing on its feet. They’ll keep trying till they get it right.
Their larvae are a pest, but the adult beetles are harmless and entertaining, if you like insect acrobatics.
Just another little detail of Creation…
Hi, Mr. Nature here. And some people will do just about anything to be on youtube, including serving as a launching pad for a cicada killer wasp.
They call ’em cicada killers because that’s what they do. The woman in the video isn’t taking a chance on being stung: these wasps hardly ever sting humans. I guess if you grabbed one and abused it, it would sting you. But that’s about it.
We have one of these babies in our garden this morning. Imagine a hornet as big as a big man’s thumb, maybe even just a little bigger, and you’ve got it. They hunt cicadas as food for their larvae, and in the air, they can hover and even fly backwards.
When a female cicada killer stings a cicada to paralyze it, she’ll drag it to her burrow, if nearby. If not, she lugs the cicada up a tree because it’s too heavy to permit her to take off from the ground.
So don’t freak out if you see one of these. They mean you no harm.