T-Rex

Oh, TR!

The best of the TRs

As you prance and you bounce

Like a little kitten

Prancing

By Esther

Great Auk

Once there were millions,

Thrived in the cold latitudes:

We called them penguins.

Richard Whitmore, 1622:

"God made the innocency

Of so poor a creature

To become such an

Admirable instrument

For the sustenance of Man."

1785: George Cartwright, explorer:

(Of the slaughter)

If

A stop is not soon put

The  whole breed will be diminished

To almost nothing."

1840: Sailors on St.Kilda:

Captured, stoned to death

"Prophet-like that lone one stood"

"Maelstrom-conjuring witch."

Two centuries gone

The millions crowd the rocks

Haunt the lonely seas.

Tree Frog - Costa Rica

Its ocean swaying

High in  the misty forest

The world in a leaf

Toads are poisonous

Warty, squat, prone to orgies

Dry-skinned secretive

Insectivorous frogs

With a little less elegance -

Don't become princes. 

Tsetse Fly

This most mighty fly

Drew a line across Africa

Beyond which no Whites

Pushing  wagons North

With their exotic cattle

Could conquer, survive

Each  baby bloodsucker

Born live, a single darling

Deadly pride and joy

Emperor Scorpion

Terrifying?

In its world a predator 

To be reckoned with

It protects live young

Ancient, glows blue in UV light

Dances the night away

Luna Moth

By the time she's born

Much of life's fuss is over:

A paramount job 

Remains. Glorious

She rises, settles to lay her eggs,

Fasts for ten days, dies.  

Stag Beetles

Stag beetles jousting:

Enlarged to the human scale

Arthurian phantasms

Evolved for battle:

The romance of derring-do

Evolved, incarnate

Damselflies

Oh! the amazing

Impossibly long fuselages

Powering wings so delicafe, so perfected!

The profligate diversity, the careless rapture!

Can we still find across the world

The common blue, the narrow-winged,

And yes, the "Beautiful Demoiselle",

The Banded, the Broadwinged, the Spreadwinged

The Siberian Winter (Yes! again)

The Pond, the White-legged,

Hundreds more, finely distinguished

And into the thickets of Latin and Greek,

The Lestordeidae, the Pseudostigmata

The Deradatta the Diphlebia

The Epallage, the Jumix

The :Palademnerna Chriquita?

The grudging counters, overachieving  taxonomists

Pronounce the verdict:  2942 species

And I assert the freedom to quibble

To fervently believe that out there in the swamps

All the outlands, wetlandish realms of Gaia

The 2943rd and all its cousins

Are fluttering and settling

In the fair country beyond death 

And all the dwindling,

The diminishment of all our lives.

Barred Owls Calling

Now, young raised and flown  

Neighbours tell faithful spouses

True states of affairs

--







River Otters

The joy of living

Is perfectly on display

Mammalian quintessence 

Pouring down muddy 

Slopes - evolution at play,

Each moment perfected

 Locust

Mildly reclusive, 

A quiet green grasshopper

Chewing in the wings

Like desert flowers

Blooms profusion after rains

A sudden orgy

Plague or bonanza?

Depends on your point of view

Human or locust

Moving plenitude

Devastating whole landscapes

Only fools obstruct

A  natural cycle

Ancient, older than the Bible's

Visitation from an interfering God.

Condor

Sailing the updraughts

Sky-fingerer, mountain comber

Lord of carrion

--

Anaconda

Nothing seems beyond

The sinuous reach of a giant

Anaconda's coils

Basking in the warm

Torpor of a tropical downpour

As streams flow under

The richly festooned branches

Of the ancient rain forest

Flourishing life high into the canopy

Where light and air conspire,

Surpass the realm of snakes

Weighing five hundred pounds

 Sandhill Crane

Clan fidelity!

The family groups migrating

Stay close together

In the great tribal

Sweep of thousands over time,

Grandeurs of landscape,

Long generations

Of finely balanced kindred

Centuries in order

Saw-Whet  Owl

Tiny, ferocious

Fierce recluses of the woods

Scimitar talons

Cutting through flesh, bone

Dissecting modest creatures

Less emphatic lives

Mountain  Lion

This lion has been seen

To leap impossibly high,

A deer in its mouth

And has roamed the land

Thousands of miles West to East

Ignoring boundaries

Houses, roads, power lines

Civilization's clutter -

Died in Connecticut

Carrying its own

Vast particular wildness

Through hidden pathways

Stealthy, nocturnal,

Crepuscular, glimpsed seldom .

And what of its prey?

Fleet of foot, wide-eyed

The calculus of energy

To bone and sinew

Long, low and lean

Greyhound-shaped, fiercely enhanced -

Feline of splendours

Climbing Mouse

In the deep forest

Secretive, climbing at night

The highest branches

Burrows in tree roots

Finds its labyrinthine path

Surviving edges

Mountain Sheep

The magnificence

Of those splendid horns belies

Quite a modest creature.   

And yet on its cliffs

It has mastered gravity

To reach specks of grass  

Firelfies

It's complicated!

Bioluminescence may

Signify fireflies

But other beetles

Know the same trick, to dazzle

Their mates with glory

And show the dull world

The  brilliant constellations

Of themselves, the stars.

Puffin

Evolving penguins!

Their flight a frantic scramble

Swimming a delight

 

Northern Ghost Bat

Why so different?

Solitary, white, all others

Dark, clouds, colonies?

Life against the grain?

Deeply temperamental?

An individual?

We The Primates

How many primates

From scurriers and scampers

Swingers and clingers

In  mountains and jungles

Cloud forest denizens

Wide-eyed nocturnals

Hangers-on barely

The counts dwindling scarily

The numerable endangered

Even our order

A darkening mystery

We don’t know the half

Close or remote

Or too close for comfort

An uneven family

Whose seats at  the table

We argue the membership

We swarm of bouncers:

So:  mouse-lemurs, lemurs, aye-aye and Lorises

Tarsiers and marmosets. Tamarins, sakis,

Capuchins, ouakis, douroucouli, titis

Squirrel monkeys, howlers, spider monkeys, woolies,

Barbary apes and macaques, mangabeys, baboons, 

Mandrills and geladas, vervets and dianas

Red-bellies, talapoins

De brazzas, allen’s and parades,

Colobus, proboscis, langur, gibbon, hoolock

Siamang, orangutan, chimpanzee, gorilla

Bonobos, humans, no, wait, do we belong here,

Looking round the relatives,

Gods of decision, environmental rulers

Unable to distinguish, let alone control

In charge of the ticketing

Who clambers on the bus

The one-way express with people on the roof

Hanging on the windows, running by the side

Heading for metropolis, concrete canyons, cells in zoos

Labs of fancy DNA staffed by people with the blues ?

Hawk Moth and Orange-kneed Tarantula

Sometimes the wasp wins

Sometimes the spider: balanced

Combat for ever

Sometimes the spider dies

Sometimes the wasp nurtures all

The baby spiders

And round and round They

Dance the minuet of death

As long as the cloud forest lives, and the Earth turns.

Pampas Deer

Fleet and elegant

Suffers loss of habitat

Moves into the woods

What caused the male deer

To stay with her, and help his mate  

Protect the newborn?

Wyvern

Very challenging

To be a mid-stage dragon

When so strong and fierce

When justice rears up

On twin unbalanced pillars

Endangering the world

When change is rapid,

Heat rising sudden, intense

From calm birth at sea

Caladrius

When I am lying sick

And my loved ones are wondering

Bring me the white bird

 And see, does it turn away?

Then all the world will turn away.

Or will it face me out

And take from me death's failing breath
And rise to cleanse it in full sun
Above the clouds of Earth, in brilliant sky?