It was a quilling experience for all. Percy, a porcupine puppet of prodigious proportions, emerged from her giant stump home for an audience of schoolchildren and media members at a Los Angeles park on Tuesday.
The adorable beast inspired oohs and awwws as she blinked her droopy eyes and opened her mouth to show her buck teeth. She stood nearly two stories tall with a nose the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
A joint project of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Percy was let out to celebrate next week’s opening of the zoo’s new Wildlife Explorers Basecamp.
Photo: Reuters
Six months in the planning, the puppet is modeled on the prehensile-tailed porcupine, native to South America. It has a circumference of nearly 12m and has 2,000 foam quills that it took a house-worth of paint to put stripes on.
“We’ve done some fantasy creatures a little bit bigger, but in terms of duplicating an animal it’s the biggest we’ve ever done,” said Peter Brooke, creative supervisor for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
The prehensile tail that gives the tree-dwelling, fruit-eating species its name exists in this case in the imagination only. Just the front half exists and pokes out, the rest appearing to stay safely inside the log.
“It’s essentially based on a big inflatable with the addition of a mouth, a jaw and mechanical eyes,” Brooke said.
A real prehensile-tailed porcupine was at the scene at Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. The porcupine got “lost” before emerging in her giant puppet form, after the kids brought out bunches of bananas to lure her.
“I think she’s getting close, I think I know just the thing for her,” Basecamp performer Jennifer Popagain said before bringing out a giant banana of her own.
The kids counted down, then mobbed Percy once she emerged.
After another media stop, Percy is to make her way down the coast to her permanent home at the San Diego Zoo.
The Wildlife Explorers Basecamp is a 1.3 hectare area of the zoo intended to teach families about the interactions and interdependence of humans, plants, animals and their habitats.
Featured species there are to include a tortoise, an ocelot, a caiman, an anteater known as a tamandua, and, of course, a prehensile-tailed porcupine.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
RSS