Animals that are real (cute) animals.

Here is a real-life animal -- the pika:



We just wanted the pika to live through his adventures in Planet Earth, but instead he was eaten by the imaginary Tibetan fox.

If you watch this YouTube clip, you can see a few things:

1. The pika is adorable.
2. The Tibetan fox is very realistic.
3. The Tibetan fox has several types of thoughts running through his head.
4. The pika is only having feelings. Fear feelings.

Hip hip, fat fat.

These are two of the birds that flew into the bushes in front of our car when we pulled into our apartment complex. At least a dozen hipped into the branches and stared at us, but these cuties were the only ones to sit still long enough to be photographed. (The windshield of our car may not be completely clean, so it looks a tiny bit blargh.)

The first little bird:



The second little bird:



And then the giant fatty that was trying to eat a stem:



Can you tell that he's enormous? He is. And when the rest of the birds panicked at our moving to open the doors (which was right before we would have pounced on and eaten them), he just hopped farther into the bushes. A little farther. Maybe one small branch back. It doesn't matter, because he was still visible from being a giant fat little bird.

Saves the day.

At the Kensico Dam Plaza this afternoon, right in front of the bench where we were sitting and watching an approaching thunderstorm, a Japanese mother started beating her (maybe) 12-month-old son in the arm. While yelling in fear. After ten seconds or so, she switched tactics and started scraping at his arm furiously with a magazine pulled from her purse. Then they took off.

Since the kid was wearing long sleeves, and mostly just toddling along up to that moment, we figured something had attached itself to him. Sure enough, we found this little guy at the scene of the crime:



Completely undamaged. So who won this round?

Animals that are not real animals.

First, the panda is not real:



That is a man (or woman) in a panda suit. Those are human eyes.

Baby pandas are also not real:



But no person is this small. That is an animatronic creature. Watch a clip of a baby panda some time, and you'll see that it's not even very life-like. And you can see the remote control being used right behind it.

Tibetan foxes are absolutely untrue:



They have square heads and bodies. We love them very much, though. They are cute, much like --

We're trying to think of cute, imaginary animals here. Unicorns? That's not manly enough, and we are a manly duo. Baby dragons? That's geeky, and we are really erudite.

Musk oxen are incredibly hot, but clearly not real:



Those are ancient beasts that once walked the Earth. All the footage in Planet Earth is computer-generated.

Howler monkeys are similarly "real," but not so much animals:



Look carefully. That is a demon. It is having demon thoughts, not animal thoughts.