From Evernote: |
the south american connectionClipped from: |
silliness 2.6 - a degu for the squeen
This month I'm being silly. Or, more correctly, I'm taking part in silliness.
But enough of that, I'll explain more in a later post.
Through being silly, I've learned something about myself. I'm somewhat obsessed with South American mammals.
First were my portraits of the alpacas and llamas at the Pacific National Exhibition. I mean, they weren't just snaps, or casual "look mum, I saw this today" bagging. They were full-on character study portraits trying to capture the exact essence of haughty llama (risking being spat on) and winsome alpaca. I have talked tantalisingly about my llama farm idea and visitors to my other blog will know of my love for beautifully feltable alpaca fibre.
Other frequent flyers to the blog will know that I am 'mum' to two gorgeous guinea pigs (one of whom looks like George Clooney), received from freecycle two years ago.
Then this week as part of the online silliness course one of the projects included drawing a new pet for the course organiser. What to draw, what to draw?
Then I remembered reading someone's query about a degu and what it looked like. I knew they were vaguely gerbil-ly type creatures but beyond that nada (oh the benefit of a veterinary education). Google images and then Wikipedia came up trumps and my knowledge gap was no longer.
For example, did you know that degus are related to guinea pigs and also come from South America? Unlike guinea pigs (llamas and alpacas) they can use their front paws to hold food while eating. They are strict herbivores and fibre fiends (they indulge in coprophagy), so strict that a relatively small excess of free sugar turns them diabetic.
They are the only known rodent species to sequentially stack objects in decreasing order of size .... which I guess picks them out for research into OCD as well as insulin metabolism and hand/eye coordination studies (unlike the llama, alpaca and guinea pig).
So for the next silliness assignment I drew a guinea pig.
Obsessed? Somewhat.
:)
PS: this blog post has been written using Evernote and posted via Posterous - a first and a very mobile first :)
PPS: photo credit http://www.parks.or.jp/sczoo/cards/mammal/degu.jpg thank you
