Coming down the homestretch, less than a week to go.

Had the last of my wildlife tracking sessions today. Sad to see it end. I enjoyed it so much.

Before we went out tracking we listened to a talk about the mammalian morphology of feet – the way the structure of the bones in the feet (paws and hooves) affects how an animal walks and therefore what its tracks will look like.

I love the words:

Phalanges, carpals and metacarpals. Pentadactyl homologies. (Same or similar relative positions of feet with five toes.)

There are three types of foot positions on the ground: plantigrade – whole foot on the ground (i.e. bear, raccoons, skunks, humans); digitigrade- only toes on the ground (i.e. felines and canines) and unguligrades -hoofed animals like deer, moose, etc.

Then there are bats – They have five “fingers“ and five toes like humans. I find bat skeletons incredibly delicate and beautiful:

Here’s my visual riff on bat skeletons:

One time I took a workshop (remember I’m the workshop queen!) in New York. How I found this workshop I don’t know but it was “right up my alley” as my mother used to say. It was a workshop on making an assemblage with a bat skeleton in a bell jar. Like whoever heard of such a weird concept for a workshop! Only in New York where you can find anything. Here’s what I made minus the bell jar because the reflection on the glass made it too hard to photograph.

I’ll leave you with a bat quote:

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams. – Claude Debussy