The Jackalope Koan

If you think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For there is no such thing.

And if you don't think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For it clearly does.


(Extrapolated from versions of a teaching found in three sutras [Surangama, Platform, and Lankavatara], in which the Buddha or an Ancestor is said to have referred to a horned rabbit.)

(Graphic courtesy of MaxPixel.com and a generous contributor.)

Found Poem: Bigfoot

I think Bigfoot is blurry
That's the problem
It's not the photographer's fault

Mitch Hedberg


(Graphic courtesy of Steve Baxter and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Extraterrestrial squid monster

(A whole patch of these boiled to the surface this week. I forgot to put something in the photo to give scale, but they're huge; this one is the size of a grapefruit. They're Astraeus pteridis, the bracken, or giant hygroscopic, earthstar. First I've encountered them.)

WW: Mountain beaver den

(When I was a kid, the forest floor in my neck of the woods was full of big ragged holes like this one. When I asked the grups what made them, they said "mountain beaver".

I never saw the actual animal, and couldn't find mountain beaver in any book. My teachers – few of whom were of Old Settler stock – were no better help.

I concluded that "mountain beaver" was a cryptid, if not an outright jackalope, and wrote it off. But I still wondered what made those holes.

It would take the advent of Google to solve the mystery at last.

Aplodontia rufa – the mountain beaver – is an ancient proto-rodent, with multiple features missing from modern mammals. Last of its genus, the remaining Aplodontia have for the last 10,000 years been confined to the small stretch of the North Coast where I grew up. Hence the silence of the guidebooks, which never covered our stuff back in the day, and the ignorance of my teachers, who had been educated in the same imperialistic Eastern curriculum.

I've since laid eyes on a few of the little guys, which is ironic given that their habitat is vanishing fast and taking them with it. When I was surrounded by them, on ground long since scraped flat for housing estates, they never showed their faces.

I took the above shot last summer, on a cruise through another forest not far from my childhood home. It turned out to be rife with irregular holes scratched out under low vegetation, surrounded by heaps of glacial spoil. Just as I remember.

So I guess there are a few holdouts. Remains to be seen for how much longer. )

WW: Pterodactyl invasion

Straight From the Tahre Pits

Weird US Navy CH54 flew low up the beach this afternoon, exactly window-height at my house on the bluff. Reminds me of some giant prehistoric crane fly. Maybe that's why they call it a Sky Crane.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia and the US government. It's an Army helo, but you can't have everything; where would you put it?)

Sea Monster

I'm reading Journey by Junk by Willard Price. It's an old discard from the San Diego Public Library, unearthed in a used book store in Olympia, Washington. (Library discards are a favourite of mine. You get the rarest, most interesting reads there.)

The book is the interesting account of a summer Price and his wife spent gunkholing Japan's Inland Sea shortly after the Second World War. But what caught my attention last night was the following passage:

Leaving Nushima, we sailed straight across an arm of the incoming Pacific with nothing between us and America -- except some five thousand miles of salt water. Sleek black porpoises played around the ship. Far out we saw the spout of a whale. But the most astonishing spectacle was the sea serpent.

What it could actually have been I have no idea and I have a fair acquaintance with the denizens of the deep. It swam with its head well out of water (sic) and its tail licking the surface some ten feet behind. Its head was irregular and crested like that of a mythical dragon or giant iguana. It was not the streamlined head of a sea snake or moray eel or conger eel. It never went down during the twenty minutes we watched it. Evidently it was a land creature, quite without gills, yet it was many miles from shore and headed straight out to sea. It did not swim with speed of a fish, but slowly and with effort as if propelled by the wriggling of the body rather than by fins. It showed no fear of the ship, even when we sailed within a few yards of it, and when we turned aside to make port it calmly continued on its course towards San Francisco.

As Price notes, he was an experienced naturalist, and wrote among other things a long sheet of children's books on exotic fauna that were required reading for boys in the post-war period. What the hell was this thing? A Google search didn't even net a mention of the mystery, let alone a resolution. None of the usual suspects are in the dock; Price makes it clear this was no fish, so oarfish, squid, whale sharks, rays, and the like are out. It also was apparently not mammalian, or even aquatic. One wishes Price could have been more specific. Colour? Order? Body type? What's ten feet long, lives in Japan, and occasionally swims to San Francisco?

Ideas welcome.


(Graphic courtesy of Sebastian Münster and Wikimedia Commons.)