Japanese Tree

Originally uploaded by My Starseed

Finally got my hands on the pictures taken on our snowy day last week. It started snowing around 4pm on Wednesday and continued on throughout the night. By the morning after, we had 15cm of snow. I hadn’t seen snow like this in YEARS, and thus I ended up getting out of bed at 8:30am despite having nothing in particular to do (and having gone to bed at 4:30am).

This of course surprised the ppl of the house, and declared it the end of the world. (HAR HAR) We had fun though, and I got into as warm clothing as I could to go walk outside. I didn’t find my gloves so I didn’t actually play with it, but it was still amazing. Check my flickr to see more pictures, I uploaded a total of 44.

Following links from Boing Boing today, I discovered that the CNN News has declared the Yangtze Baiji Dolphin has been declared extinct. It’s the first known cetacean to die out completely, and that was a pretty sad thing to read. Then I read some excerpts from Douglas Adams’ only Non-fiction book, Last Chance to See. He writes about many endangered animals in it, including this dolphin.

As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze I realized with the vividness of shock, that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain and fear.

[…]

At the end they said, ‘The residents in the area gain some profit – that’s natural – but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty. As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive it may go extinct if we don’t take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.’

Source

Sadly, not even the Chinese efforts were enough to save this animal, who lived it’s last years in a world of static noise and disorientation, starving to death due to inability to find food, and dying at the sharp hands of boat propellers and fish hooks. Hopefully this serves as a warning to help other similarly endangered species.

Amazingly accurate I’d say.

Hikaru took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! “Seeks success. Wants to overcome obstacles and opp…” Click here to read the rest of the results.