#channa ovinutrix

[ironychan]

The ducks and shibas aren't the only things having babies.  Our resident Giant Bingus is apparently a female.  We have named her Patty, after the Bigfoot video.  She has a pair of twins in a nest in the woods and they are the worst creatures you can possibly imagine.  They've got a thin layer of fur through which their skin is bright pink.  Their eyes aren't open yet.  They look like all the most horrible things about newborn humans dialed up to eleven.  And if something bothers them, the little buggers scream, which brings mama thundering over.

We have been observing them through binoculars, and I got to see them nurse.  I will never recover.  I see it every time I shut my eyes.

In the river shallows we've been finding these masses of goo among the reeds.  Vandebeek described them as snakehead nests, which sounds ominous when you don't know what a snakehead is.  It turned out to be a fish.  A long, thick fish with hideously human-looking teeth that appear to be mostly used for cracking open the many types of crabs we have met, but can also be used to pulverize anything that messes with its eggs.  I think I know why we keep seeing tarasques with missing toes.

Vandebeek named these things Channa ovinutrix, which he explained means 'snakehead that cares for its eggs'.  Kelleher says he got the name from 'Dinotopia' but I don't know what that is.  The rest of us are calling it the crabcracker.  Hopefully they taste good.

It was while fishing that we dredged up this thing on the left:

I got nothing.