Bird’s Eye: OK, I hear you ask. Do you mean resistance, as in politics? Or resistance as in wind resistance? Or get out of my way resistance? Or merely physical friction type resistance? Which is it? Well, we have them all! Aren’t you lucky….
* May Day Around the World In Focus – The Atlantic
* Ways of the Wind The Big Picture
* Truck Meets Bus at Hairpin Curve Youtube
* Skating The Big Picture
Bird’s Eye: Our usual mixed bag, from the fascinating, past the cute, to the terrifying. Dig in.
* Animals in the News In Focus
* Beautiful Bird Huddles Buzzfeed
* Out for a Walk with 42 St Barnards Youtube
* Jumping Goat Presurfer
* Jumping Spiders National Geographic
* Tigers National Geographic
Bird’s Eye: We offer a set of images that will amaze, and hopefully delight, you. All of these have in common is that you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing, at first. Enjoy.
* Gravity-Defying Land Art Cornelia Konrads (Thanks, Gabe!)
* Cucumbers Encumber Man Boing Boing
* The Happy Rizzi House ~ Kuriositas
* Austrian Alpacas Show Shear Delight The Guardian
* Aye Eyes
Bird’s Eye: Roses are red, / Jade-vines are green, / We’ve got flowers here / Like you’ve never seen. (“Waits for applause…not a sausage” Bluebottle, the Goons)
* The Hidden Beauty Of PollinationLouie Schwartzberg Video on TED (Thanks Don!)
* 10 Amazing Treetop Walkways Around the World The World Geography
* Top 10 Rarest Flowers In The World Most Rare Flowers
(Editor’s note: Well, 10 rare flowers with interesting stories anyway.)
* Sossusvlei, Namibia Desert Tree Eyewitness, The Guardian
Bird’s Eye: We follow last week’s “Isolated Cultures” with a companion piece on landscapes.
* Beautiful & Unusual Desert Images World Geography
* Alien Landscapes Daily Mail
* Icelandic Landscapes National Geographic Magazine
* K2 National Geographic Magazine
Bird’s Eye: Tikkunista runs lots of Eyecandy of Easter, and Christmas, and other well-known and well photographed festivals. Here are some possibly less familiar to our readers, (though once again Holi, the most photogenic of festivals, squeezed its way in. When you see the film, you’ll understand.)
* The Kukeri Ritual: Bulgaria’s Sinister Day of Monsters
* Holi Festival of Colors movie Slate
* Eleven Obscure Festivals Style Bungalow
…Now in its eleventh year, the Chester Cheese Rolling Competition sees competitors push blocks of local cheese around obstacles which include bales of hay and slopes.
Bird’s Eye: But for most of us, it’s not obscure festivals in remote landscapes inhabited by isolated cultures. It’s just life, and it’s still photogenic.
* Daily life: April 2012 – The Big Picture
* Images of Earth From Above – In Focus
* Visions of Earth National Geographic Magazine
* A Collection of Kisses – In Focus
… A woman kisses a fish after catching it during an ice fishing competition at the Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival in South Korea….
Bird’s Eye: More horrible (though not surprising) news of the long term effects of corexit, the BP oil dispersant on the fisheries that once lived in the Gulf. Some glorious photos of tropical fish, and a marvellous BBC video of an osprey on the hunt.
* Gulf Seafood Deformities Alarm Scientists Al Jazeera
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“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.” …Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster. Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause. Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp. “At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp. According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.” |
* The Most Beautiful Fish In The World Buzzfield
* The Osprey – The Ultimate Fisher The Presurfer
Bird’s Eye: See cultures you don’t normally get a chance to. Two of them look like appealing places to travel, don’t they?
*The Nenets of Siberia In Focus
In arctic northern Russia, industrialized resource extraction and climate change are presenting a double threat to the Nenets, an indigenous people native to Siberia. The Nenets depend heavily on their reindeer herds, using them for food, clothing, tools, transportation, and more as they migrate more than a thousand kilometers across the tundra every year
* Mustang: Nepal’s former Kingdom of Lo The Big Picture
Mustang, or the former Kingdom of Lo, is hidden in the rain shadow of the Himalaya in one of the most remote corners of Nepal. Hemmed in by the world’s highest mountain range to the south and an occupied and shuttered Tibet to the north, this tiny Tibetan kingdom has remained virtually unchanged since the 15th century. Today, Mustang is arguably the best-preserved example of traditional Tibetan life in the world.
* Glimpses of Humanity in Choreographed North Korea In Focus
Bird’s Eye: It’s spring, clearly the time to celebrate the energy of youth. (I have the heart of a young child, myself. I keep it in a jar on my desk.) Here are some fine samples of the species.
* Helmetcam Video Of 9-Year-Old Psyching Herself Up For A Ski-Jump Boing Boing
Here’s a POV video of a fourth grade girl psyching herself up for her first run down an intimidating ski-jump. The tension mounts as she narrates her anxieties and checks in with her instructor for comfort, and the payoff — a successful run and delighted cheering — is all the better for it.
* Decorah Eagles Live Cam on Mother and Chicks (Thanks Susie!)
* Baby Pygmy Hippo Takes Her First Swim The Presurfer
* New Born Deer The Presurfer
Bird’s Eye: Three fascinating look at three different versions of daily life. The last two are removed by time or place from where you are (I don’t think we have any Chinese readers, do we?). The first encompasses all of us, in theory at any rate.
* Daily life: March 2012 The Big Picture
In the frantic pace of modern life, it is often easy to forget what life was once like for those who built the world we now live in.
These fascinating black and white pictures taken by photographer John Thompson show the reality of existence in the 1800s when photography was in its infancy.
* Daily Life: China 2012 In Focus
