Animeme

Well, folks, on the recommendation of two readers I’ve immersed myself in War and Peace. I may be a while and blogging may be sporadic.

Rana tagged me for this one a while ago, sorry to delay. To tell the truth I haven’t been very inspired by it. But here’s a go.

An interesting animal I had

Not so many interesting animals. The usual budgie, dog, cat, hamster, guinea-pig. But Numenius and I do name all kinds of critters that live near us (many of these names are on our ketubah, forming two domes over our marriage vows). I suppose the most interesting was a pair of hooded orioles that nested in a banana tree in the cabin we lived in above Santa Barbara. We called them Horace and Sally.

An interesting animal I ate

A goose. Not just any goose, a goose that had been force-fed and whose liver had been engorged to the point of bursting and was then served as a delicacy on New Year’s Eve in Paris. For the nth time, the collected French guests deplored this barbarity and then tucked in with gusto. I became a vegetarian that night.

An interesting animal in the Museum

Oh, without question, the Labrador ducks at the Museum of Natural History in New York. They have over half the specimens known to exist anywhere.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

I buried a sparrow. Alive. I was four. It still haunts me. I became a birder that day.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

The male wild boar that surprised me as I was crouching behind a bush in the shadow of a moorish castle in Spain. “Natural habitat” is stretching it a bit, but then it often is. There are lots of animals I could insert here but this one was especially memorable…

Next up? Anyone who’d like to be…