Stephen's Untold Stories

Beautiful video!

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world (Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

I took a little trip up to Berry College with some friends on Sunday and got some pretty good photos.

Click each one for a larger version.

See the complete set here.

Simply amazing!

Ruby-throated Hummingbird Eating From My Hand (Part One) from Russ Thompson on Vimeo.

Some great shots of animals who just want a drink.

See the full gallery here.

If you haven’t been up to Fannin County lately, I highly recommend it!

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No, I didn’t take them. I wish I had!

Click here for the entire gallery.

See the entire set here.

Saw a bunch of them on Springer Mountain. Please leave a comment if you know.

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I am not a global warming alarmist, but I found this to be a bit disturbing.

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.

Link to article

Now that’s some good camouflage.

Larger version here

I took a drive over to Rome today and got some nice shots of this hawk.

Click each photo for a larger version.

Pretty cool illustration.

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Some nice photos of a baby giraffe in Britain.

Here is the link to the entire gallery.

This is one of my new favorite blogs.

Charlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my doorstep this past April after both his parents were shot for killing sheep. Whatever reservations I had about raising a wild animal simply didn’t matter – couldn’t matter – when I realized his survival, at least in the short term, depended on me.

At the time I write this, Charlie is nearly six months old. I don’t think of him as “my pet,” even though he sleeps curled against me every night (every night except the nights around a full moon), and happily rides in my truck, and adores my cat. I don’t wish to own him, just to live together in harmony. And that we do.

The Daily Coyote

Now I want to do some traveling to see these.

The mysterious “Relámpago del Catatumbo” (Catatumbo lightning) is a unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency. The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages.

Here is the entire list.

Amazing stuff here.

Link to gallery

I actually have a couple of good ones I took myself in San Francisco if you’d like to use one of them.

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It looks like some spiders have been busy in Texas. (Click image for larger version)

Link to story

I haven’t posted anything from National Geographic in a while, but I had to get this one up.

A Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. (See a map of Russia and its remote Siberian regions.)

On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.

The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.

“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.

At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.

Link to article

I first thought that this had to be photoshopped, but a little research has proven its validity.

Larger version here

The photo appeared in an edition of Africa Geographic in 2005, and even Snopes found it necessary to assure it.