We recently got back from Duckon. There were some very entertaining activities at the Con such as the singing Tesla coils and a birds of prey presentation. The eagle owl was very impressive, and big. As for the singing Tesla coils
here is a video from last year when they only had one. This year there were two and a guy in a metal suit.
On a weird note I also had my first theft/very discounted sale at the show. From what I can tell someone hit the booth at night while the dealers room was closed and left with most of my cute cast stone vampire bats. The same person or perhaps someone else left $10 in one of my small boxes. They may have also taken a platypus. I didn't really notice until this morning when one of my roommates wanted one of the brown bats for watching the cat, and I could not find any of them. So, I did inventory and noticed an odd pattern.
The dragon had an accident involving a cat and a hot room. I'm going to have to perform surgery to get the armature back into place, fortunately I did not lose or damage the head. I should be posting about the small cast animals and other new things soon. Also, I will be attempting to do the Convergence (the small sci fi con not the giant goth con) artshow. I'm also entering the lottery for the Windycon dealers room. Grace will not be doing Convergence.
This weekend Stuart and I went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Terra Haute IN. I highly recommend it if you like big cats. These cats seem much happier and more active then other captive cats I have seen. The admission is 10 dollars and well worth it. They have about 200 cats onsite, most of them are tigers and lions, and a little over half of them are in the area visitors are allowed in. The bobcat pictured above was very interested in people and followed us around the outside of the cage for quite a while.
I would have like to have gotten some better puma pictures but most of the pumas were crashed out in their boxes or eating at the time. I did hear one purring loudly though. I'm thinking of sculpting one soon, so it would have been nice to get some reference shots.
The center actually runs on very small budget around 300,000 a year. It was kind of amazing what they could do with it. I suspect they spend a lot of time scavenging materials given all of the large enclosures they had built.
They had quite a few groups of lions, apparently motorcycles trick lions into roaring. Every time a motorcycle passed the place several of the prides would start roaring. We had it happen twice while we were there.
This tiger may be Herman, before he was fed he was pissy and charged at us. I can say it was the first time I'd ever been charged by a 600 lb tiger. It is hard to get an idea of scale but that thing he is eating I'm reasonably sure was a front quarter of a cow if that gives you an idea. 