About Animals

Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
kpjayan said:
Boris Pilnyak's 'Tales of Wilderness' has 2 stories with Animals/birds as the characters.
Perunal Murugan's Poonachi / Story of a Goat is another I can think of.
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Thanks, Jayan. If I am not mistaken, Tales of Wilderness is available as free eBook from Gutenberg.
 
Morbid Swither

Morbid Swither

Well-known member
Liam said:
I just realized that we don't have a separate thread for nature writing (fiction and nonfiction both), so perhaps we ought to start one.

While we're on the subject of animals though: what are some of your favorite books/films (or individual stories) about animals?

I read a lot about animals when I was a kid and even dreamed of becoming a zoologist :)

Gerald Durrell (brother of Lawrence) was an early favorite; I adored his Corfu books but also just anything he ever wrote about his travels to Africa, South America, etc. He is definitely dated, and hasn't aged well, providing some unnecessary and deeply insensitive comments about the peoples of those places (though it's always presented as a joke), but that should not detract from his observations about wildlife as such.

The Australian writer Leslie Rees was another childhood favorite: somehow he managed to produce these short, beautiful stories about the birds and animals of his continent that were both anthropomorphic but also not so. In other words, the creatures are imbued with certain humanlike traits, and occasionally he does slip into the "he thought/she thought" nonsense, but at least they're not talking to each other like they do in fairy-tales!

Out of all the books Rees produced (and he produced many) my favorites were probably these three: The Story of Sarli the Barrier Reef Turtle (1947), Two Thumbs: The Story of a Koala (1953), and The Story of Karrawingi the Emu (1946). I still dream of an omnibus edition of his collected children's fiction: most of these books are out of print and I SO want to return to them. I don't know what happened to all of my childhood books but I only have ONE remaining (the one about the turtle).

There was also James Oliver Curwood, whose protracted chronicles about the Alaskan and Canadian wildlife were a real pleasure to read at the time. The ones I remember most vividly were the grizzly books, I think one of them was called Nomads of the North, or something like that.
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Thank you for this post, Liam!
 
Morbid Swither

Morbid Swither

Well-known member
A book that I don’t often see mentioned or discussed is SWEET WILLIAM: A MEMOIR OF OLD HORSE by American author John Hawkes, best known for his noirish and somewhat surreal postmodern novels. This one is told from the perspective of a “retired” horse and really blew me away!

Another recommendations is ANIMALS by Hebe Uhart, a criminally neglected author from Argentina who passed in 2018. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/09/listen-to-hebe-uhart-now-that-shes-gone/

I’m also curious if any readers here have read GIRAFFE by J.M. Ledgard? I own a copy but have never read it, and I’m interested if anone here would recommend it and/or shine some light on the experience of reading it. Frankly, I’m scared to, and furthermore not sure if it’s horrible or a masterpiece, as it’s very divisive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe_(novel)
 
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Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Morbid Swither said:
A book that I don’t often see mentioned or discussed is SWEET WILLIAM: A MEMOIR OF OLD HORSE by American author John Hawkes, best known for his noirish and somewhat surreal postmodern novels. This one is told from the perspective of a “retired” horse and really blew me away!

Another recommendations is ANIMALS by Hebe Uhart, a criminally neglected author from Argentina who passed in 2018. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/09/listen-to-hebe-uhart-now-that-shes-gone/

I’m also curious if any readers here have read GIRAFFE by J.M. Ledgard? I own a copy but have never read it, and I’m interested if anone here would recommend it and/or shine some light on the experience of reading it. Frankly, I’m scared too and furthermore not sure if it’s horrible or a masterpiece, as it’s very divisive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe_(novel)
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Thanks for your suggestions Morb.
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
To my glad surprise I found out that Brehm´s animal stories of 1895 have been translated to English. It´s an old book, but the stories are often very touching and it can be downloaded from this link from archive.org:
archive.org

Brehm's Life of animals : a complete natural history for popular home instruction and for the use of schools : Brehm, Alfred Edmund, 1829-1884 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Translation of: Brehms Tierleben. Bd. 1-3, Die Setiere. 1890-1893
archive.org
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
If you are interested not only in reading about animals, but also in having a go in flash fiction there is this curious site:
carrotranch.com

Carrot Ranch Literary Community

Growing through literary art 99 words at a time!
carrotranch.com carrotranch.com
Charli Mills is an adventurous lady that moves around with her dogs through some very cold parts of US in a trailer, commanding the site Carrot Ranch from there.
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Amanací and Apoena

Just summing up the story told in this video:
The female Jaguar Amanací with her burned paws became a world wide symbol of Brazil´s burning forests. Fortunately she was taken in and saved by Instituto Nex, but her situation was considered too precarious for her to be returned to the wilderness. But maybe this wasn´t the only reason for her being retained at the wildlife station. Amanací had the company of 24 more onças and in due time met Guaraní, a stately, bulky rescued male. They clicked and 110 protocolary days later Amanací gave birth to the male oncinho Apoena. His sister unfortunately died shortly after birth, but the idea is to prepare the young jaguar to rejoin the wilderness, in three years. But he doesn´t know of the plans for his future. By now he is enjoying the company of his zealous mother and drinking buckets of mother milk.
g1.globo.com

Veterinário descobre que filhote de onça que se tornou símbolo do incêndio no Pantanal é macho; vídeo

Oncinha foi batizada de Apoena, que em Tupi-guarani quer dizer 'aquele que enxerga longe'. Assim que ele tiver condições de se virar sozinho, será solto no Pantanal.
g1.globo.com g1.globo.com
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Lion cubs born 28. 11, 2022 with their mother in the maternity of the Zoo in São Paulo.
The texts are in Portuguese , but I think that can be ignored:
www.bol.uol.com.br

Vídeo: Filhotes de leão nascem no zoológico de São Paulo

Dois filhotes de leão nasceram no Zoo SP, em São Paulo, após uma análise da árvore genealógica dos pais —Amira, que nasceu no zoológico em 2018, e Django, que chegou do zoo de Copenhague (Dinamarca) em 2016.Os animais vieram ao mundo em 28
www.bol.uol.com.br www.bol.uol.com.br
 
Leseratte

Leseratte

Well-known member
Kitten rescue:

(Please, can any one tell this friendly human that we are hungry and want the milk very much but that bowl is much to big. We were used to the tits of our mother.)
 
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