Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Wolves of Ellesmere Island

I've been following an interesting blog lately that tracks the movements of a pack of 23-25 wolves on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, located in the Canadian High Arctic. The research team, lead by Dave Mech and Dean Cluff,was able to place a GPS/ARGOS radio tracking collar on Brutus, the leader of the pack, in July 2009, making following the pack much easier, particularly during the long winter. Tracking data is stored in the collar and Emailed to the project team every four days.

The packs home area is centered on Eureka, where there is a weather station. They feed primarily on musk-oxen, caribou, and arctic hares.

Here is the "Wolves of the High Arctic" blog

http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/

An article by Dave Mech on arctic wolves:

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_mech.html



Here's a photo taken of Brutus at the wolves den.




This photo , and many others taken by the expedition can be found here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/intlwolfcenter/

Brutus exhibits dominant behavior towards an offspring.



Summertime on Ellesmere Island.




I'm not sure if this is this is Brutus's pack.

Monday, January 18, 2010

A few linguistic treats

Here's another short blog post with some interesting links.

The all too infrequently updated blog "grow-a-brain" has some interesting links to unusual language sites.

http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/languages/

Here are three particularly interesting links.

"One Sentence" posts true stories, concisely told. Many of the best ones seem more like the opening line of really intriguing story.

http://www.onesentence.org/


Here's a collection of sixteenth-century jokes:

http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/jokes.html

This is great collection of "shaggy dog" stories and Feghoots. The name "Feghoot" comes from "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot", a series of short-short stories that appeared regularly in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" from the 1950's into the 1970's. They all end with painful puns, similar to those in "The Adventures of Peabody and
Sherman" episodes on "Rocky and Bullwinkle".

http://www.awpi.com/Combs/Shaggy/

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Great and Odd Photos

I'm going to slowly start blogging again.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of my favorite blogs is PCL Link Dump.

http://easydreamer.blogspot.com/

Through a link there I discovered a great photo blog, Black and WTF.

http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/

Here are three photos. Check the blog for many more great ones