Adorable animals thread - Actual

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
So rather than adorable, I want to talk about one of the bravest creatures in the world, the lapwing. Lapwings nest on the ground and put very little effort into building a decent or secure nest, that's just not their style. Instead they plop their eggs right there on the ground, often right next to the local watering hole for convenience. This would appear to be a bad reproductive strategy, but lapwing is not a believer in defense via fixed emplacements. If anything comes too close to the nest, the lapwing warns it off and eventually attacks. People talk about and admire honey badger but but the honey badger has nothing on the lapwing when it comes to facing insurmountable odds. Honey badger at least has so natural weapons and is of a decent size compared to the things it fights. Nothing makes a lapwing back off, not warthog, not elephant, not man, nothing.



Here you get a good idea of how badass lapwings are, when a pair chases wild boars, a giant snake, crocodiles, and an eagle away from their hatchlings. But there's more.



Lapwing pair vs. Cape Buffalo. Positioned at 1:30, where the lapwing quits with the threat displays and starts actively striking at the buffalo with it's beak to drive it off. The fact that two of them are small birds and the other is well over a thousand pounds does not worry the lapwings.



A tractor drives over the nest. The lapwing stays with the nest and does not retreat from the tractor. Lapwing never retreats.

In India, ancient mythology holds that the lapwing sleeps on it's back, with it's feet held to the sky, leading to the proverb "Can the lapwing support the heavens?" Perhaps not, but the lapwing would be willing to fight the heavens if they got too close to it's nest.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
The Flat Headed Cat is an adorable, and deeply endangered, wild small cat. While the big cats get most of the attention and people ooh and aah over lions or jaguars, often the many interesting small cats get ignored.

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The Flat Headed Cat is a uniquely aquatic cat that lives in swamps and wet forests across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei, though as those swamplands keep getting smaller, we're seeing fewer Flat Headed Cats all the time. Their exact numbers are unknown and due to relatively few studies, many of their habits are unknown as well.
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Flat Headed Cats grow to between 13 and 20 inches tall. Coloration varies a bit, they are born nearly grey and take on a reddish, brownish hue when they mature at about a year old. A few have spots.

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They've been observed hunting rodents in palm plantations giving us some idea of their diets. Like a raccoon, a Flat Headed Cat will try to wash its food in water before eating it. Dissection of dead specimens have revealed stomachs containing shrimp, fish, and frogs which is fairly unsurprising for a swamp cat, though nobody has observed fishing behavior in the wild. At least one researcher, attempting to study entirely different animals, observed a Flat Headed Cat diving into the water to escape and swimming approx. 25 meters before reaching land, indicating this is a cat that uses water as both food supply and escape from predators.

Adding to the evidence of a piscivorous diet is its teeth.



Yeah, you know that adorable creature in a sci-fi flick that's just sooo cute and then it opens its jaws up and reveals its teeth are massive spikes too big to fit in its body? Flat Headed Cats are literally that.



The main threat to Flat Headed Cats are Caracals. By some unknown sorcerous mechanism, these cats are able to reduce the size of a Flat Headed Cat's ears, and increase their own in the process. Few Flat Headed Cats today have full-sized ears. Scientists do not yet know why Caracals steal Flat Headed Cat's ear size.

 
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