WELCOME TO THE CFZ BLOG NETWORK: COME AND JOIN THE FUN

Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Thursday, August 06, 2015

CFZ PUBLISHING: The latest CFZ bestsellers


The world's leading publishers of cryptozoology, forteana and fortean fiction, with over a hundred titles currently in print.


The latest post on the CFZ Publishing Group blog begins as follows:
Here are the cumulative Top Ten bestsellers for the three months May to July 2015 (based on sales of print copies only, not Kindle ebooks)...
Click here to read the whole article.

THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN IS IMPRESSED

The Gonzo Daily - Thursday
Finally it has stopped raining, and although a little bit cooler than I would of liked, it is a nice sunny day. So, am I going to spend the rest of the day sitting in the garden with a long, cold drink? Sadly not. Graham and I are off to Appledore to film a OAP talking about the village and what it means to him. In the meantime, Corinna is still in Staffordshire and Jessica, mother and prudence will be in charge of the ranch this afternoon.
The Gonzo Weekly #141
www.gonzoweekly.com
Rick Wakeman, Yes, Camel, Spirit, Shack, Soft Machine, Canterbury Sans Frontières, Roy Weard, Dogwatch, That Legendary Wooden Lion, Hawkwind, Jon Anderson, and Yes fans had better look out!
The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#141) is available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/. It has Rick Wakeman on the front cover together with an interview with him inside. Doug goes to the Ramblin' Man festival, he also remembers a very special gig featuring Rick Wakeman and his family, John B-G talks about Spirit, and Jon and Doug and Graham take mother down the pub. Lee remembers a band called Shack. The story of Xtul comes to an end for now at least. Thom waxes all poetical like, whilst the legendary Roy Weard continues his regular column. And there is a radio show from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and one from those jolly nice chaps at Strange Fruit, and our monthly visit to Canterbury Sans Frontières featuring an insanely rare slice of Soft Machine. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and pademelons with books to peruse (OK, nothing to do with small marsupials in a literary mood, but I got carried away with things that rhymed with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
This issue features:
Morrissey, Damon Albarn, Janis Ian, Keith Richards, Nile, Chic, Marillion, Badfinger, Steve Ignorant, Strange Fruit, Friday Night Progressive, Canterbury Sans Frontieres, Buddie Emmons, Bobbi Kristina Brown, Norbert Schwefel, Eddie Hardin, The Boomtown Rats, Karnataka, Rick Wakeman, Camel, The Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Lee Walker, Shack, John Brodie-Good, Spirit, Roy Weard, Chris Squire, Jon Anderson, Alan White, Steve Hackett, Steve Howe, Xtul, Neil Nixon, Moe Barbari, Ozy Osbourne, The Beatles, Tony Bennett, Jerry Garcia, Stormtide

Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:

All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power chaps, we have to share it!
You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/
* The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...
* The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/…/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit
* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!

* Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 55 who - together with an infantile orange cat named after a song by Frank Zappa, and a small kitten totally coincidentally named after one of the Manson Family, purely because she squeaks, puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish, and sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the infantile orange cat, and the adventurous kitten?

MUIRHEAD`S MYSTERIES: More notes on the Camberwell Beauty in the United Kingdom.

I decided to do some more research into the Camberwell Beauty in Great Britain except I am now extending my investigation into Ireland

There was a belief in the early 20th Century that there were two colour morphs (if that is the right word) of the Camberwell Beauty, the one found in England had white borders on the edges of its wings and the American or Scandinavian one was more yellowish. For example, W.S. Coleman in `British Butterflies` (1905) comments: “ it is strange that nine out of ten English specimens have pure white  borders to the wings. This is looked on by some authorities as certain proof of the specimen being British caught. This, I think, however, is an error, as some of the specimens best authenticated  as having been home caught, have a yellow border. On the Continent the yellow-bordered variety is predominant. (1). But in my (Richard`s) opinion this statement by Coleman doesn`t actually SAY very much. It doesn`t explain anything behind these two colour variations.

Coleman says prior to the quotation above :” No spot can be pointed out where one can expect to  meet with this fine insect; but it has appeared singly at intervals in the following localities among others: - Scotland, Ayrshire; Durham; Scarborough; York; Darlington; Sheffield; Manchester;  Lake District; Appleby;Coventry; Peterborough; Oxford; Burton-on-Trent; Norfolk; Lincolnshire; Suffolk; Bristol; Ely; Shrewsbury; Plymouth; Teignmouth; Kent; Ashford; Bromley; Tenterden; Ramsgate; various places in the neighbourhood of London;Epping; Hampshire; Isle of Wight; Lewes; Worthing. “(2)

H. Rowland-Brown was more concise a few years after Coleman in 1912  concerning the white-yellow debate about the Camberwell Beauty:

“ To the collector who finds himself in Camberwell nowadays, the district hardly suggests the presence of antiopa. Yet there is no reason to doubt that the old “ Aurelians” observed and captured this fine butterfly in the then secluded retreat of city merchants, though the story that the larvae were one year so destructive to the trees that the Vestry offered a reward for their destruction (emphasis my own)  must be regarded as apocryphal. For the “ Camberwell Beauty” is an immigrant – occasionally numerous, but of late years very seldom seen at the ripe fruit on the peach wall or in the orchard, where it loves to suck the sweet juices in September. The butterfly is uniformly deep chocolate on all four wings, with broad creamy borders, interiorly studded with bright blue spots, the under side, save the border, uniform black-brown; the little fiction of British “ Camberwells” having white borders to assist the collector to determine the origin of his capture, and incidentally to inflate prices in the sale-rooms, being based probably on the fact that the so-called “ Britishers” have hibernated, and lost their colour in the process. “ (3)

“There is some truth in the old belief, for Dr E.A. Cockayne has found that this scale abnormality is present in the great majority of the specimens caught in this country. He is inclined to think that it is particularly common in Scandanavia, which would account for its frequency here and for the tradition that a genuine British Camberwell Beauty may be recognized by the white borders of its wings.” (4)

Edward Newman, writing in An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths ( c. 1870) said ;” To suppose they come from the Continent is an idle conjecture; because the English specimens are easily distinguished from the others by the superior whiteness of their borders…From Ireland I have a report of one taken at Killarney in July, 1865 by W.G. Battersby. In Scotland also one was taken by the late Charles Turner, in the Ramoch district. I saw this specimen, and have no doubt of its genuineness…Mr Thomas Chapman has information of others at Paisley and Edinburgh…From the way in which Moses Harris writes of this butterfly in England we are led to suppose that in his time it was regarded as no great rarity. In his “Aurelian” he merely says that it goes through its changes and appears on the wing at the same time as the Peacock. Lewin is more explicit:- “ One of my sons found an old decoy pond of large extent, surrounded with willow and sallow trees, and a great number of these butterflies flying about and at rest on the trees; many Of Them appearing to be just out of the chrysalis, left no doubt that this was the place where they bred. In March, 1790, a number of these insects were flying and soaring about for a space of twelve or fourteen days; and then, as if with one consent, they migrated from us, and were no more seen. (5)  

A much more recent account of Irish butterflies ( The Butterflies of Ireland by Dr Norman Hicken, 1992) states regarding the Camberwell Beauty, :” Only five records of this large, handsome migrant butterfly have been recorded from Ireland, mainly along the east and south coast.” (6)
  
E.Newman also said, quoting a Mr Wailes,  “ Our fellow member, Mr William Backhouse, informed me that about the year 1820 he saw vast numbers of this species strewing the seashore at Seaton-Carew, both in a dead and living state. Now,” continues Mr Wailes, “it is  surely more reasonable to suppose that these specimens had been blown from the land than that they had crossed a sea at least three hundred miles; and a specimen in Mr. Backhouse`s collection confirms this opinion, as it has the pale whitish margin to the upper side of the wings so characteristic of our British specimens, which is replaced  by yellow in nearly all the continental and American specimens.” (7)


REFERENCES

      1.   W.S. Coleman  British Butterflies  (1905)  p. 111
2.   Ibid p. 111
3.       H. Rowland-Brown  Butterflies and Moths at Home and Abroad. (1912) p. 99.
4    E.B.Ford Butterflies (1990) p. 154.
5.   E. Newman An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies (c. 1870) p.59
6.     N.Hicken  The Butterflies of Ireland ( 1992)  p. 190.
7. E. Newman op cit. 60.


BIGFOOT NEWS IN BRIEF



Bigfoot Filmed in Backyard
Man films White Bigfoot in Backyard Posted 2/3/10 by Anonymous poster Bobywade. We [ SasquatchWatcher] spent a great deal of time on this

Bigfoot Sighting Had Man 'Absolutely Terrified'
A new Bigfoot video released by the Paranormal Review is interesting because it provides a full breakdown of the Bigfoot sighting. Unfortunately, the 

Tsiatko: The Story Of The Stick Indians
Notice the similarities the Tsiatko have to what we commonly call bigfoot. If the Tsiatko are in fact the same thing we call bigfoot, then it is painfully

Boing Boing


The Patterson–Gimlin film, shot in the late 1960s, purports to show a female Bigfoot taking a stroll through the woods near Orleans, California.

FORTEAN BIRD NEWS FROM THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES

What has Corinna's column of Fortean bird news got to do with cryptozoology?

Well, everything, actually!

In an article for the first edition of Cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans wrote that cryptozoology is the study of 'unexpected animals' and following on from that perfectly reasonable assertion, it seems to us that whereas the study of out-of-place birds may not have the glamour of the hunt for bigfoot or lake monsters, it is still a perfectly valid area for the Fortean zoologist to be interested in.

Rare Picture: Blackbird "Rides" Hawk

NEWS FROM NOWHERE - Thursday

ON THIS DAY IN 1825 - Bolivia declared independence from Peru. 
And now some more recent news from the CFZ Newsdesk


  • Space technology could be valuable tool in conserv...
  • Texas man injured as bullet ricochets off armadill...
  • Studying scavenge hunting animals remaining worldw...


  • Bonobo squeaks hint at earlier speech evolution


  • AND TO WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK... (Music that may have some relevance to items also on this page, or may just reflect my mood on the day)