I have found a flying animal.
I held it in my cupped hands for maybe an hour.
They have no fear of humans, although we have found a thing that predates on them. They are about the length of my arm, and they look like a fiddlehead fern that unrolls and rerolls as it wishes.
They are nesting on our habitat roof now.
We landed on an area covered in the shortest flowers possible. We’ve already nicknamed the planet Flora, even though Gerj has been pointing out that just means “plants” to anyone who listens.
The question we’ve got is, if there’s all this flora (you’re welcome, Gerj), where are the fauna?
We’ve found some insects – nothing that seems to like the taste of us, but one that gets in your face like nothing & another that stings – but nothing bigger than that, yet.
If there’s no animals on this planet, it’s going to be a long five years.
We found animals!
The problem was, we’d thought they were flowers at first.
They are small, no bigger than the palm of my hand, and they are covered in fur whose patterns match the flowers they live in.
With that in mind, we’re going to do a more thorough exploration for fauna.
I’m a little bit worried what we might find right under our feet, to be honest.
After observation that consisted of sitting very, very still for many hours, we’ve been able to identify five animal species.
Three of them have egg-based birth, one live birth, and one is something similar to a marsupial.
None of them appear to be flight-capable, although three live in the tree-flowers. None are bigger than my two hands together.
And one, a ground-dweller, makes the most lovely songs when it thinks it is alone.
I love this planet.
There were theories that the farther from Earth we went in any given section, the less likely we’d be to find habitable life.
Those theories aren’t holding true.
This planet would be warm for most humans, but were it not already inhabited by a lizard-like race of bipeds, it would be a very nice place to settle.
Their technology is fast approaching space-faring. We sent down a greeting probe and took quite a few recordings of their transmissions.
It appears, if translations are correct, that they enjoy soap operas.
I didn’t want to send down a team to this planet.
It’s not like me to let aesthetics get in the way of the mission, but this planet is lovely.
Flowers cover almost every cm of the surface – water flowers, land flowers, even what looks like flowered ground cover on the mountains. They sway in meadows and make thick, flowered forest-like copses.
We did send down a team, with a suggestion to tread very carefully and, perhaps, bring the boss a bouquet on retrieval.
We thought our lenses were broken when we first looked at this planet.
There are several civilizations growing up on this large planet – on the high side of what we’d consider livable – but I doubt they’ve encountered each other yet.
There is, among other things, a hundred-mile forest and a mountain range separating the two closest.
The trees are only 2m at the highest, and the sentient lifeforms range from 15-30cm.
We could settle on an empty continent, feel like giants against their fauna & flora, & never see the natives.
We moved on instead.