Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. In the world of
imagination, things are not all right either – first the ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’
cartoon series have ended, and secondly, so did the DC animated videos, which
had begun way back when the ‘Flashpoint Paradox’, when the Barry Allen Flash –
or some other Flash, I tend to get them all confused – broke time and created
an alternate universe, much worse than the DC mainline… Now what?
Honestly, I have no idea – as we have discussed previously,
the Disney/SW universe is still having issues, and the SW9 film had only made
them worse. The SW: CW series were a good thing, mind you, but now they are finished,
and that chapter of the SW saga has also ended.
As for the DC animated universe… I do not know. I’m not a
big fan of DC, but I tried to follow it generally, and so I’m aware that the
animated movies of that comic world have appeared relatively regularly
throughout the ages, an heir to the (original) ‘Teen Titans’ and ‘Justice
League’ cartoon series of the 90s and the early 2000s. They might be the reason
why the ‘Young Justice’ TV cartoons never got off the ground properly –
competition between similar species and all that – who knows? Now they are
gone, and DC is left mainly with live action movies, (which are a mess), as
well as live action TV series, (which are doing great). We will just have to
wait and see what will come out of this conclusion yet.
…The ‘JLD: Apocalips’ film (or whatever it is truly called) itself will be discussed at a
different time, so let’s talk about something else. How about geese?
They are waterfowl, birds from the Anatidae family, and relatives
of ducks and swans. They differ from swans by being smaller, with shorter, straighter
necks. They differ from ducks by being larger than they are, by having less
sexual dimorphism than ducks have, (in geese, the female geese and the male
ganders are colored much more similarly than the female ducks and the male
drakes are in duck species), and by being more terrestrial.
I.e., out of the three groups of waterfowl – ducks, geese
and swans, the ducks spend the most time in the water, and they find most of
their food in the water as well. Contrary to some popular old beliefs, both
swans and geese are omnivorous at most, with a strong herbivorous element –
geese in particular are quite happy to survive on plant-based food, with only
some animal-based supplements, (possibly caught in a nearby pond). The swans
are similar, and both they and geese spend quite a large period of time on
land, foraging there. They need water primarily for their young, to keep them
safe from such predators as red foxes, coyotes, and – probably – large hawks
and similar birds of prey, whereas ducks…
…Whereas ducks prefer to spend their time either in the
water or at the water’s edge. They are quite smaller than the geese, let alone
the swans, have notably shorter necks, and their legs are located further down
towards the tail end of their bodies than in case of their swan and geese
cousins, making them better swimmers, (though the grebes and the loons –
neither of which are anatid birds – are better swimmers and worse land-walkers
yet).
Moreover, there are two main groups of ducks, (by layperson
bird watchers’ standards) – the dabbling ducks and the diving ducks. The
dabbling ducks are ducks like mallards (and especially the domestic ducks):
they feed in shallower water, mostly on plant food, and they dabble – turn downside
up in the water to pick up aquatic plant material, (primarily). The diving
ducks dive outright, and they are the more carnivorous species of ducks – birds
like the mergansers. They look different from the dabbling ducks and are not
really domesticated, as their flesh is strongly fishy. So, where do the geese
come into this?
…Aside from the three genera of ‘true’ geese, (Anser, Branta & Chen, or the grey,
the black, and the white geese), there are also quite a few species of birds
that are also called ‘geese’, but are not considered to be geese at all. Some
of them, like the northern gannet/’Solan goose’, (a bird more closely related
to the anhinga and the cormorant, FYI), don’t even look like geese at all, but
most of them are anatid birds that look more like geese than ducks – only they
are ducks instead, shelducks! More precisely, they are waterfowl of the Tadorna genus, and they are large,
semi-terrestrial birds, somewhat in the middle between the ducks and the geese,
an intermediate link of sorts. They behave more as how the geese do, but they
have sexual dimorphism as the ducks do instead.
On the other end of the spectrum, we got the Coscoroba swan,
a waterfowl endemic of the South America, which looks and acts like a ‘true’
swan, but is genetically more closely related to the so-called Cape Barren
goose of south-east Australia and Tasmania instead. The mapping of the genetic
relationships of various birds can get pretty weird, sometimes…
…Well, this is it for now, though. See you all soon!
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