Bunny

Easter




Animaux De Nuit




Blue Hour




The Rising




Shadow Bunny



colline étoilée




I spent almost everyday with my step grandmother from about 5 to 9 years old... She was a devout Catholic and brought me to services every week , unbeknownst to my very secular mother. My experience was entirely aesthetic instead of ''religious'' and i loved the ritual too. But the secular/folk traditions and catholic melded together in my young imagination. For years i believed the Easter bunny was resurrected in a graveyard at dawn, eventually forming fur only to then set out to distribute eggs and chocolate, then returning at midnight. This is my ''Easter'' Series.

-Darla Teagarden

Amass The Tears...

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds

by Debora MacKenzie
A species of moth drinks tears from the eyes of sleeping birds using a fearsome proboscis shaped like a harpoon, scientists have revealed. The new discovery - spied in Madagascar - is the first time moths have been seen feeding on the tears of birds.

Roland Hilgartner at the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, Germany, and Mamisolo Raoilison Hilgartner at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, witnessed the apparently unique sight in the island state's Kirindy forest.

Tear-feeding moths and butterflies are known to exist elsewhere in Africa, Asia and South America, but they mainly feed on large, placid animals, such as deer, antelope or crocodiles, which cannot readily brush them away. But there are no such large animals on Madagascar. The main mammals - lemurs and mongoose - have paws capable of shooing the moths. Birds can fly away.

But not when they are sleeping. The Madagascan moths were observed on the necks of sleeping magpie robins and Newtonia birds, with the tip of their proboscises inserted under the bird's eyelid, drinking avidly (scroll down for images). This was during the wet season, so the scientists think the insects wanted salt, as the local soils are low in sodium.

But sleeping birds have two eyelids, both closed. So instead of the soft, straw-like mouthparts found on tear-drinking moths elsewhere, the Madagascan moth has a proboscis with hooks and barbs "shaped like an ancient harpoon", Hilgartner says.

This can be inserted under the bird's eyelids, where the barbs anchor it, apparently without disturbing the bird. The team does not yet know whether the insect spits out an anaesthetic to dull the irritation. They also want to investigate whether, like their counterparts elsewhere, the Madagascan tear-drinkers are all males who get most of their nutrition from the tears.











Via

...Defective Flowers...

Dread, decay, disease; androgyny, artifice, anomie…Rachilde′s 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus seethes with Decadent enchantments, as the opening passage makes clear:

Mlle de Vénérande was groping for a door in the narrow passage that the concierge had pointed out.

This seventh floor was not lit at all, and she began to be afraid at suddenly finding herself in the midst of a hovel of ill repute, when she remembered her cigarette case, which contained the wherewithal to shed some light. By the glow of the match she discovered number 10 and read this sign:

Marie Silvert, flower maker, designer.

Then, as the key was in the door, she entered, but the smell of apples cooking choked her and stopped her short on the threshold. No smell was more odious to her than that of apples, and so it was with a shiver of disgust that she examined the garret before revealing her presence.

Seated at a table on which a lamp was smoking on a greasy pan, a man, apparently absorbed in very intricate work, sat with his back to the door. Around his body, over his loose smock, ran a spiraling garland of roses, very big roses of fleshy satin with velvety grenadine tracings. They slipped between his legs, threaded their way right up to his shoulders, and came curling around his neck. On his right stood a spray of wallflowers, and on his left a tuft of violets.

On a disorderly pallet in a corner of the room, paper lilies were piled up.

Some branches of defective flowers and some dirty plates, topped by an empty bottle, were strewn between two chairs with broken straw seats. A small cracked stove sent its pipe into a pane of a hinged skylight, and brooded over the apples spread before it, with one red eye.

The man felt the cold that the open door had let in; he pulled up the shade of the lamp and turned around.

“Am I mistaken, Monsieur?” asked the woman visitor, disagreeably surprised. “Marie Silvert, please?”

“You’re at the right place, Madame, and for the time being, I’m Marie Silvert…”

Raoule could not help smiling; coming from a male-sounding voice, this answer had something grotesque about it, something that the embarrassed pose of the boy, his roses in his hand, did nothing to change.

“You make flowers, you make them like a real flower maker?”

“Of course! I have to. My sister is ill. See, over there in that bed, she’s sleeping…Poor girl! Yes, very ill. A high fever that makes her fingers shake. She can’t supply anything decent…Me, I know how to paint, but I said to myself that if I worked in her place I’d make a better living than if I drew animals or copied photographs. Orders are not exactly pouring in,” he added by way of conclusion, “but I still manage to get through the month.”

He stretched his neck to check on the sleep of the sick woman. Nothing moved under the lilies. He offered the young woman one of the chairs. Raoule drew her seal-skin coat around her and sat down with the greatest repugnance. She was no longer smiling.

“Madame wishes…?”

Translati0n by Melanie Hawthorne; illustration by Majeska found at Gentress Myrrh-murings

Toy Joy