This March my family decided to visit Kaliningrad, the most western region of Russia, including but not limited to UNESCO heritage Curonian Spit, the Dancing Forest, the Baltic Sea, Zelenogradsk, Svetlogorsk and the city itself aka as Koenigsberg.
I wanted to share three flora-fauna discoveries I made during this trip.
Firstly, while attending the Museum of the World Ocean, I encountered two unusual beings and one skeleton.
This used to be a cachalot!
Since my blog should have an educational value, I can't help writing about the famous idiomatic expression: skeleton in the closet or skeleton in the cupboard. Have you heard that the phrase appeared thanks to British doctors who would have frequently kept dead bodies in their labs, as it had been forbidden to carry out post mortem till 1832. Hence the idiom.
In the museum's aquarium I saw the prototype or the allusion or the Easter egg, if you like, to the popular Russian kid's animation movie known as Luntik. Presumably, the main character is based on axolotl. Oh my, it is even smiling in the similar way and definitely looks like an extraterrestrial being rather an earthling, don't you think?
One more amazing creature I bumped into is known as Naso Elegans in Latin = red-lipped surgeonfish. It looks as if it is wearing make-up, rather elegant, I would say.
Secondly, I saw an unusual phenomenon on most trees.
Frankly, my first thought was they were birds' nests. But they are surprisingly not. Apparently, these green mini bushes are mistletoe. Basically, it is a parasite, which lives on trees and draws from them water and nutrients. As winters in Kaliningrad are mild and above zero, these plants do not freeze to death and thus get a chance to leech off the trees.
Thirdly, in old times poor people who lived at the Baltic Sea coastline got fed up with consuming fish and wanted to have more substantial food. As a result, they actually started catching crows and eating them! They caught the birds and bit them to avoid their messy deaths and that's why they were called crowbiters.
Luckily, we haven't encountered any crow meat in Kaliningrad restaurants menus and this practice remained in the past.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for further updates!
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