This week’s installment is another fascinating beast, the endangered Sisserou Parrot of Dominica, which adorns the country’s flag and can be hard as hell to spot in the wild.

Here’s one, spotted completely thanks to blind, dumb luck as it flew from tree to tree.  I got exactly one good picture.  See it?

OK, it’s almost exactly the same color as the foliage.  Fortunately, I was shooting with a decent camera, so let’s zoom in a bit.  See it now?

No?  Me neither.  In fact, while processing the photo, it took me a few minutes to spot him myself, even though I knew exactly where to look.  I started worrying maybe the little fellow ducked behind some leaves just as I snapped the shutter.  Let’s zoom in some more.  How about now?

OK, so before this turns into Highlights For Children, if you still don’t have it, let’s zoom in further, one final time:

Gigantic bird, actually.  But look back at that first picture and try to spot it. 

Pure dumb luck is pretty cool sometimes.

Just imagine a version of the oil business in which you’re harvesting foodstuffs instead of petroleum, and you’re not too far off.

The universe may have more of it than anybody ever imagined, says this two-timing scientist.

Although you’re still late for your meeting.

I’m still way, way behind in posting the fun pics from the trip. Came across this one night while flipping channels in Guadeloupe:

As you can see, it’s not the mob, it’s le mur, "the wall."

The very first question I saw was in — what else? — French literature:

For those who want to play along: what literary genre made Racine famous?

While you’re mulling that, if you take a good look, you’ll notice that a bunch of the folks in le mur are in costume. (I don’t know if they do this in the American version; I’ve only seen it for a few seconds.)

In the fourth and fifth rows up on the right are ten people dressed as French chefs, complete with white toques and egg-beating whisks to wave in the air. How odd.

If you look closely at upper left, there’s also one guy dressed up as what seems to be a French stereotype of a cornpone American. (Or maybe he’s just some French dude who genuinely likes wearing yoked shirts and cowboy hats. I have no idea.)

Anyhow, of the entire mob, only one guy didn’t know that Racine wrote tragedies.  Holy crap.

And it was the cowboy. Bien sûr.

The toque-wearing cuisine-eaters then started banging their whisks proudly on the desk.

Y’know what I enjoy most about France?

It is so goddammed French, that’s what.

This week’s wee beastie is a reader contribution from a while back — a dik-dik, the supermodel of the tiny ungulate world:

Dik-diks usually look like this during summer picnics, just before the 3-legged dik-dik race.

But dik-diks wouldn’t dream of tying one of their legs to another dik-dik. It would ruin the line of their look. So instead they just sort of pull their back legs together and mince around. When one of the pudus barks "Go," the dik-diks all speed-mince toward the finish line.

The winner isn’t the one who comes first. The winner is the one who goes home with the really cute gerenuk afterward.

Then the other dik-diks gossip about how the gerenuk secretly drinks, and he can’t hold a job.