Guys, we get it. As another esteemed journalistic enterprise once said: It only Tuesday.
It could be the meetings. The impossible co-workers. The equally impossible children, if you've got them, whingeing from the backseat as you arrive at the grocery store to find the checkout lines already snaking out the door. Whatever it is, time has somehow stretched, accordionlike, until enough mundane frustrations to fill a year have wedged themselves into less (!) than two days.
So here, have a video of two lynxes — noble felines whose grace is matched only by their physical majesty — wailing at each other like petulant kids. (Turn up the sound.)
Edward Trist told Canada's Global News that he had been on a fishing trip with his girlfriend, Nicole Lewis, and their daughter when they happened upon the pair of loud lynxes along a country road.
"As we approached, they didn't move, which was really odd. We got out and started filming it," he told the newspaper of the encounter with the animals, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers a threatened species. "What we caught on camera is very, very rare to catch."
That said, it's not unheard of ... as anyone who has heard those sounds and had them seared deep into their ear cavities would probably tell you.
Another video surfaced in 2010, depicting two lynxes confronting each other with all the auditory menace of a toddler with a toothache. And in that case — a standoff that appears similar to the one heard above — endangered species biologist Mark McCollough told National Geographic the scene was likely a territorial dispute.
Trist and Lewis posted their recordings on their respective Facebook pages on Friday evening, at which point they began racking up views at an alarming rate. As of this writing, Lewis' version has been viewed nearly 8 million times, and Trist's version (seen here) isn't far behind at nearly 5.5 million views.
"People were saying online, 'Well it sounded like it was dubbed,' but that's what they actually sound like," Trist said. "It's almost comical if you watch it. It sounds like a couple kids narrating in the background but it was all live and we caught it."
As Robert Krulwich once pointed out on NPR, the writer Mara Grunbaum put the matter rather elegantly in her book WTF Evolution!?
"Oh, evolution," she wrote. "You were doing so well with the lynx. You made it a fierce and graceful hunter, you gave it a luxurious spotted coat, you gave it pretty yellow eyes and tufted ears — and then you made it sound like this."
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