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Crow rides an eagle

Animals Around the World Keep Riding Each Other and it’s Starting to Freak Me Out

By Gregon

What’s this? Oh nothing, just a crow riding an eagle…

Photographer Phoo Chan took the extraordinary photo above last spring while shooting near Kitsap, Washington. Surely such a strange thing has never been seen before?

Except perhaps for just a few months ago when a weasel was photographed riding on a woodpecker?

Weasel riding a woodpecker

Well that’s just freaky. But it’s hardly as if every creature out there is teaming up, like some sort of animal uprising is underway against humanity, right? Oh that’s right, a couple of weeks ago someone photographed A RACCOON RIDING AN ALLIGATOR!

Raccoon riding an alligator

Okay, that’s it…I’m heading for the bunker. Come get me when the animal-pocalypse is over…

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Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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13 Comments

  1. ridin’ da wave
    Maybe it’s just that we are noticing it more since the weasel and woodpecker. Either that, or these animals are daring their friends to play chicken with their natural enemies knowing that we are taking photos and trying to get on the internet. I wouldn’t put it past the raven. For anything that raven pulled out an iPhone and took a selfie right after that photo was shot and posted it to Instagram 😛

  2. Animals . . .
    Duh. It’s called “cooperation”, something that Homo sapiens appear to have forgotten how to do in the New Millennium. At least it survives in the rest of the animal kingdom.

    1. Chu Chu
      As a kid I had a pet rhesus monkey (a lab monkey washout) who liked to ride jockey fashion atop our Labrador retriever. His “reigns” were the dog collar and one dog ear. The two were not really friends – it was more like a professional relationship. For the dog it was a slightly irritating chore he had to put up with because retrievers aim to please their masters. For Chu Chu the rhesus it was intensely gratifying because there would often be children flocking around, and he loved to make sudden alarming faces and utterances at them and see them squeal and bolt. The neighborhood found it charming to see them gallivanting around like cracked royalty out for a tour of the estate. However, if the retriever went into full gallop Chu Chu would bail and revert to looking like a crazy ass monkey scaling a tree. He preferred a more stately dog ride as befitted his dignity as a performer, artiste, and amateur archaeologist.

      If Chu Chu spied something interesting on the ground passing by beneath he would swoop down still holding the dog collar, scoop the artifact up, and then swing back to saddle position like a Buffalo Bill trick rider. After a perambulation through the neighborhood, he had a fascinating collection of things stuffed into his cheeks where rhesus monkeys keep their spare edibles and worldly belongings of the moment. This was the 1960’s in the South way before there was any general consciousness about cluttering up the environment – a time when people would absently fling detritus like gum wrappers, bottle tops, and just any pocket trash to the ground – a paradise for a rhesus.

      Chu Chu’s most memorable prize find was a used, discarded condom spotted on a cruise through a local park, and I had a hell of time prying it loose from his cheek stash. That was the only instance I can remember of Chu Chu ever biting me, and he was immediately apologetic and contrite, but he never forgot his all time most special find, and on excursions through that park thereafter he would grow excited and chatty with lip smackings, blushings, and other rhesus-ish facial contortions.

      Chu Chu would very occasionally share one of his Purina Monkey Chow biscuits with the dog – just enough to sustain the value of a rider to its steed. In return, the Labrador provided protection to Chu Chu from rambling dogs and other at-large savages made hysterical and unseemly by the sight of what appeared to be a hairy, big eared elf riding a dog.

      Chu Chu was a smart monkey – sometimes a good monkey, and sometimes a very bad monkey – (there was the incident when he ripped the strings and bridge off a sort of valuable classical guitar, and the time he willfully and maliciously defecated in the lap of a visiting house guest who would not let him closely examine and likely dissect a most interesting hat she wore on her head) but he was pure monkey – comfortable in his own skin, and conveying somehow without seriously offending me that he wished we would all just f***k off, get out of his way, and let him do his monkey thing. I miss him even now these decades later like an implausible, goofy, riveting brother whom I loved and will never see again.

      1. Purina Monkey Chow and condoms
        The breakfast of champion monkeys 😛

        Well the above pictures I think can be explained as follows: Woodpecker we know was trying to escape an attack because the stout was trying to hunt him. Raccoon probably thought it was a log and then it started moving. Raven…well it’s a raven so take your pick. I think the raven was trying to impress his friends while simultaneously being a total dick LOL

      3. More!
        [quote=emlong]As a kid I had a pet rhesus monkey (a lab monkey washout) who liked to ride jockey fashion atop our Labrador retriever.

        *snipped*[/quote]

        *patiently waiting for the long-form book narrative of this, because too much goodness to fit into a few paragraphs*

        1. I had 5 different monkey
          I had 5 different monkey species at different times as a child – the stories are numerous. As long as I made straight A’s in school I could have a monkey.

          1. that is awesome
            While I usually don’t agree with having monies as pets, or chimps, this story was awesome. A college professor of mine had a gibbon who he had to give away. Years later he believed he came across him at a rescue center and always wondered if the gibbon was mad at him for giving him away. He cried every time he told that story.

          2. This was the 60’s mind you.
            This was the 60’s mind you. Nowadays, the idea of robbing monkeys from the wild is anathema to me, and it’s not legal to have such animals in the US anyway. As a member of the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund I am trying to atone for these past transgressions. When I was a professional furniture maker I stopped using tropical woods back in the mid-90’s.

            I too had a gibbon ape – the blond phase. His name was “Ghandi,” and finally grew to be too strong and dangerous, so he he was given to the gibbon ape facility at the Houston Zoo. He had a giant indoor cage with the skeleton of a large redbud tree set in concrete for him to do his gymnastics and ululation in. At the time, gibbons weren’t technically endangered, but still I shudder when I think that I had one.

            I also had a wooly monkey (fabulous companions,) a spider monkey (amazing arboreal athletes,) and a lesser spot-nosed mangabey that turned out to be blind though it didn’t much cramp his style. The monkeys pretty much lived with us and spent a lot of time indoors and out with me. They got a lot of tree time though the spider monkey was sometimes hard to call down in the evenings. Only a bunch of grapes would lure him back.

            Rhesus macaques are notoriously urban in India and don’t seem to be out of place anywhere really – kind of like deer invading the suburbs and fitting right in.

          3. See monkey
            [quote=emlong]I had 5 different monkey species at different times as a child – the stories are numerous. As long as I made straight A’s in school I could have a monkey.[/quote]
            Sounds to me like a reverse of “Monkey see, Monkey do” lol
            I would imagine you learned great patience for primates!
            Great story BTW, Ld MAO!

          4. Cyril Connnolly’s “The
            Cyril Connnolly’s “The Unquiet Grave” was always sitting out in the open in my childhood home, and somewhere in there is a quote to the effect, “Love of animals is the honey of misanthropy.”

            Connolly’s misanthropic fetish pets were ring-tailed lemurs.

            http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/18/books/noted-with-pleasure.html

            “After twenty years I have a ring-tailed lemur again: my sixth. I still think them the most delightful of pets: it is their owner, not the breed, who has deteriorated. Yet a singular doubt has grown. Are they clockwork? How do they differ from a machine?

            I used to think of them as possessing an unearthly quality – ghosts; lemures , like their name – uncanny, primitive, remote; man’s one authentic ancestor. Their plaintive cry, their eyes of melting brown under long black lashes, the indescribably forlorn and touching quality of their expression as if dimly aware of their predicament halfway between man and beast, a terrier’s head on a furlined Pharaoh’s body, toenails as well as claws, hands that grip fruit yet cannot peel it.

            And now they remind me of Arab musicians. ”How unutterably sad,” I say of such monotonous singing. ”No – the sadness is in you,” my companion replied – and indeed the musicians were shaking with silent laughter. The lemur’s typical plaintive cry, for instance, which certainly results from loneliness, from any separation from the herd, is also automatically reproduced in answer to any sound of the same pitch – the children’s voices or the mew of a cat.”

          1. It’s possible that somewhere
            It’s possible that somewhere in my mother’s effects there are some. I have a picture of the gibbon and spider monkey somewhere here at my home. I was just looking for them. They are old instant camera Polaroids.

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