Scarlet Ibis

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Raymie

This is a scarlet ibis.  Shhh!  Don’t wake it up!  They get their scarlet color from eating red crabs.  They are the only red shorebird in the world.  When they are juveniles, they are brown, gray, and white, with a tiny bit of red.  As they grow up and eat more crabs, they turn red.  They are related to the American white ibis and the bare-faced ibis.  Like all ibises, they have a beak that is curved down.  They live in South America and Cuba, and some people have said that they have even seen them in Florida, but this is rare.  Usually you only see the American white ibis in Florida.

I saw the scarlet ibises in these pictures at Sea World in February 2011.

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Turtle Car

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Raymie

This my car for the Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby this year!  Its name is Speedy the Turtle.  It is supposed to be a Southern Painted Turtle.  We picked that turtle because it has a cool orange stripe down the middle of its shell, and we think it looks like a racing stripe.  My car number this year is 58.

The most fun part was going to the hobby store and picking out the paint colors.  We used leather brown, dark green, flat black, cadmium yellow, and international orange.  We used a paintbrush to paint the turtle car, instead of the spray paint that we used on last year’s flamingo car.

The race is this Friday.  Wish me luck!

 

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Giving Christmas Animals

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Raymie

There is a wonderful group called Gospel for Asia that helps people in need in Asia.  They have a really neat website where you can actually buy animals and other things, and they will give them to families in Asia that can use them to provide food and money for themselves. You can buy chickens, goats, rabbits, pigs, camels, lambs, cows, and water buffalo.

I love the idea of giving animals to people that need them, so just like last year, we bought some animals.  We bought a pair of chickens, a pair of rabbits, and a lamb.  The families that get them will have eggs, meat, milk, wool, and even be able to sell the animals’ offspring to raise money.

If this sounds like a good idea to you, think about giving the gift of animals to someone in need.

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Puppy and Kitty

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Evie

 

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Raymie’s little sister, Evie.

This is Puppy and Kitty.  Puppy is a dog, and Kitty is a cat.  They sleep in my bed with me every night.  They like to lick things.  Why do they like to lick things?  I don’t know.  Maybe because they taste yummy.  Puppy says “Woof.”  Kitty says, “Meow, meow.”  They really sleep with me and walk with me all day.  They really love me so much.  They really like to walk.  They like so much to walk.  They really love to sniff things.  They really like everything.  They sniff and walk.  They really sniff everything.  They like to watch TV with me.  They like to eat everything, like dog food and kitty food.  And they love me so much that they like to lick me.  And they love everything so much!

Now I’m going to tell you about a funny story.  I’m going to type it myself.

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Editor’s Note: Evie typed that story using a Dvorak keyboard.  Impressive, isn’t it?

 

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Boesman’s Rainbowfish

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Raymie

This is a Boesman’s rainbowfish.  It is also called a Boesmani rainbowfish, and the word Boesman is sometimes spelled Boseman or Boeseman.  They live in Papua New Guinea in streams and lakes.  They are a popular aquarium fish because of their colors.  The front half is purple, and the back half is yellow.  I saw this fish today at an aquarium at the doctor’s office at Affinity in Neenah.  They have a really cool aquarium in the lobby.  The aquarium was a freshwater warmwater tank, but it had artificial coral in it.  The fish seemed to like the coral.  They even hide in the coral.  When my dad saw the fish, he called it a Minnesota Vikings fish because of the color.  The coral was mostly Packer colors.

Boesman’s rainbowfish are not considered a beginner’s aquarium fish, but there are lots of other fish that they will get along with in a tank, including clown loaches, one pleco, one red-tailed black shark, one rainbow shark, platys, swordtails, mollies, barbs, danios, and bala sharks.

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Crested Screamers

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Raymie

This is a crested screamer, also called southern screamer.  They live in South America in the countries of Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.  They can swim like ducks and build their nests near water.  But their legs are a lot longer than ducks so they can wade around in marshes.  They also don’t have webbed toes like ducks do.  They are called crested screamers because they have a crest of feathers on their heads and their call sounds like a scream.  The chicks are light yellow with a darker yellow cap on their heads.  Crested screamers are stable and not endangered.

The crested screamers in these pictures are a mated pair that live in the Milwaukee County Zoo next to the macaques, silver pheasants, and whooping cranes, in the old Humboldt penguin exhibit.  I visited the zoo with my family in July this summer.  The screamer in the picture above is making a funny pose, because it is holding out one of its wings and hiding one of its legs.

The other screamer was sitting on some eggs in the nest.  In this picture, it stood up to check on the eggs, and you can see the eggs.  It’s hard to see the eggs, but we think there was at least 4 eggs.  Crested screamer pairs take turns sitting on the eggs, so we don’t know which one of these birds is the male and which one is the female.

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Swimmer and Hop

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Raymie

I have two pet African dwarf frogs.  Their names are Swimmer and Hop.  Swimmer is the bigger one.  Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which if they are not right next to each other, but I think the one in the picture above is Swimmer.  The frog in the pictures below is Hop.

I got them as a birthday present from my Grandma Miller.  I was really excited when I got them because I always wanted a pet animal from Africa.

The scientific name for this kind of African dwarf frog is Hymenochirus boettgeri and it is also called dwarf African frog and Congo dwarf clawed frog, but they are not the same as African clawed frogs, which are much bigger.

African dwarf frogs stay underwater almost all the time.  They have to breathe air, so they swim up to the surface to take a breath every once in a while.  All four of their tiny feet are webbed so they can swim really well.  They are brownish-greenish with dark spots on their backs, and they are white on their belly.  They are scavengers and they eat almost anything that is living or dead.  They don’t have a tongue or teeth.  They swallow their food whole.

At our house, the frogs live in a small tank by themselves.  There is a big blue rock in the middle and a piece of bamboo in the corner that they like to hide behind.

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Upside-down Jellies

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Raymie

Yesterday I went to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.  They have a special exhibit there called Jellies that has lots of jellyfish.  Most jellyfish can sting other animals.  Their bodies are mostly water.

These are upside-down jellies, also called upside-down jellyfish.  Unlike most jellyfish, the upside-down jelly sits at the bottom of the water with its bell down and its tentacles up.  In the picture above, you can see that some of the tentacles are green.  These tentacles have algae growing on them.  The algae and the jellyfish have a symbiotic relationship, which means that they help each other.  The algae attracts animals that eat algae, and then the jellyfish eats those animals before they eat the algae.

Do these look like giant raindrops about to fall?  It is actually the bell of an upside-down jellyfish.  At the exhibit, they had a tank of upside-down jellies above our heads so that we could see the bell.

Crabs sometimes crawl under an upside-down jellyfish and pick it up.  It does this for protection.

We have a short movie of the upside-down jellyfish, but it is not ready just yet.  Check back soon to see it!

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Baby Snails

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Raymie

I have some news about my gold Inca snails.  A couple of months ago, I got a new snail for my aquarium.  He’s a blue mystery snail and his name is Azul.  I’ll write another blog post about Azul soon.  We found out that our gold Inca snails, Golden and Little Golden, were female and Azul is a male.  We know this because we saw them mating.  Yesterday, we saw that Golden and Little Golden had died.  As we were getting ready to take them out of the tank, we saw a baby snail!  I named him Dotty.  He’s really small.  I measured him, and he’s about 3/8 of an inch, or about 1 centimeter long.  That’s him in the picture above.  Here’s another picture of his foot that we took while he was on the glass.

Then, we saw another baby snail!  That one was really, really small.  So we have seen at least two baby snails in our tank.  I wonder if there are any more in there?

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Northern Cardinals

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Raymie

These are northern cardinals.  Northern cardinals are also called redbirds or common cardinals.  The redder one on the ground is a male.  The browner one on the feeder is a female.  They are mates.  Cardinals mate for life, so Mr. and Mrs. Redbird in this picture will be together for the rest of their lives.

This bird feeder is in my backyard right outside our window.  I got this bird feeder for Christmas.  Mr. and Mrs. Redbird come all the time.  We also see chipping sparrows, grackels, European starlings, American goldfinches, and purple finches at our feeder.  The cardinals’ favorite feed is black oil sunflower seeds, and their favorite feeder is the fly-through feeder, which is the kind of feeder that Mrs. Redbird is sitting at in the picture.

Northern cardinals mostly live in the eastern United States, but they can be seen in Arizona and the west as well.

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