Yesterday I clean forgot that in December last year they found out that the giant Canarian lizard, Gallotia auaritae, isn’t extinct after all. José Antonio Mateo, a reptile expert, only found the one, but he believes there must be a colony within a kilometre of the one he found. In this case, “giant” means 30 cm (one foot) long. Extinct specimens are larger. Twenty-five years ago, they thought Gallotia…
Today we have an orange weather alert, and it’s poured pretty much non-stop. So a number of things I’d planned have been postponed. But I did meet Helen, Theresa and Norma in town for a coffee, and then Helen helped mecollect my cat Inky from the vet – she went in yesterday to have her teeth cleaned (I wish she’d learn to use a toothbrush like the rest of the…
We have two kinds of lizards here, both of which grow to about 15 cm long. The top shot is the blue-throated lizard, and the lower one the brown lizard. Like lizards everywhere, they’re cold-blooded, so they like to sun themselves first thing in the morning. After that, they move really fast, particularly when you point a camera at them. Even so, they’re a favourite snack for cats.
For those of you who’ve spent the last three months off the planet, the Hollywood writers have been on strike. They wanted to be paid for internet distributions. After all, the studio get paid and the actors get paid, and i thinkthe camera men get paid too. They won most of what they demanded. Hurrah! It really annoys me the number of places that don’t pay writers. I once had…
This is the Barranco de las Angustias the Ravine of Anguish. The name comes from the conquest of the island, back at the end of the fifteenth century. Most of the tribes on the island took one look at the heavily-armed Spanish, and gave up without a fight. Four tribes fought briefly, but soon surrendered. After all, the original inhabitants, the Benhoaristas, had only stick and stones to fight against…
The heart of the island is the Caldera de Taburiente. Caldera is a technical geological term for the crater at the top of a volcano. In fact the term comes from La Palma: all the volcanic calderas in the world were named after ours. So it’s really a pity that, since then, the scientists have found out that the Caldera de Taburiete isn’t a caldera. It was actually formed by…