Friday photo

Wet cat. Monroeville, Indiana, August 2011.

This may be the most bizarre thing I've ever seen: a cat sitting in a puddle of water. Surely it's a sign of the apocalypse; can Republicans embracing tax hikes, or Richard Dawkins joining the Southern Baptist Convention, be far behind?

Fast squirrel

The guys on the iRacing forum post some terrific automobile-related videos. This one has a wildlife theme as well:

Friday photo

Kitten at the window. Monroeville, Indiana, Christmas 2010.

'Cause it's just too pwecious, idn't it?

A few years ago, my Mom and her neighbors were feeding three or four cats. Now there are a dozen of them, because cats aren't all that different from birds and bees. I have it on good academic authority that this cannot end well.

Friday photo

Bald Eagles, Toledo Zoo. August 2006.

Will you forgive me for including a photo taken in a zoo? Think of the eagles as a late nod to Independence Day. I'm out in the Boundary Waters this week, so if I don't drop my camera overboard, I may have something decent for next time.

Coywolves?

Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News reports on a draft research paper which finds that, in New England, a sample "coydog" hybrids doesn't contain any domestic dog DNA. Instead, they are hybrids of coyotes and eastern timber wolves (canis lycaon). Interesting stuff that I knew nothing about ....

New species before our eyes?

From Wired.com, could English birdfeeders inadvertently cause a speciation event?

Central European blackcap warblers that spend the winter in the birdfeeder-rich United Kingdom are on a different evolutionary trajectory than those that migrate to Spain. The population hasn’t yet split into two species, but it’s headed in that direction.

“This is reproductive isolation, the first step of speciation,” said Martin Schaefer, a University of Freiburg evolutionary biologist.

*snip*

About 30 percent of blackcaps from southern Germany and Austria now migrate to the United Kingdom, shaving 360 miles from their traditional, 1,000-mile Mediterranean voyage. Because they’ve less distance to travel, they tend to arrive home first in the summertime and to live in prime forest-edge spots. All this makes the U.K. migrants more likely to mate with each other than with their old-fashioned brethren.

Schaefer says he doubts that birdfeeders will be around long enough to complete the task, but it's a fascinating prospect nonetheless.

Friday photo

Coyote. Yellowstone National Park, July 1992.

This photo comes from one of my favorite moments, ever. I was hiking near Hellroaring Creek and sat down on a rock for a brief rest, when I spotted this coyote. He (or she, I didn't look that closely) began to trot straight toward me, apparently rather curious about this stranger. But not too careless, despite the curiosity - as I raised my camera to take a photo, the motion startled him and he ran off. Dang, I thought, lost a chance at a good shot.

But the critter didn't go very far and I decided to wait around and see if he would get used to my presence. For the next hour or so, I walked around, scuffed rocks, sat down, and generally did everything I could think of to convince the coyote that I had my own business to mind and that it didn't include him. Meanwhile, he amused himself trying to snatch flying insects out of the air.

Eventually, I was able to edge closer and closer, still avoiding eye contact or direct movements in his direction. It worked perfectly and the coyote lost all concern over me. In fact, he finally flopped down in the grass and closed his eyes. I had set up the camera on the tripod and, every time his eyes closed, I would scootch the camera closer and take a couple more photos, up to about eight feet away, when I decided I probably shouldn't push my luck any further.

As I began to reach the end of the roll of film (and realized I didn't have a spare, dammit), I started testing the animal's calm by scuffing the ground noisily. His head would jerk up, he'd quickly look around, then stare at me and put his head back down. That "Oh, it's just you" look is what you see in this photo.

I'm too much of a rationalist to get much into "being one with nature," but there's no denying that I usually feel more of an outsider than I wish when I encounter wildlife in their own habitat. At this moment, though, with a wild coyote that showed no hostility or fear toward me (or begged any food), but viewed me as a tolerable part of the landscape - I felt just a little less alien.

Friday Photo

Elk on Opal Terrace, September 1996

Opal Terrace is a young, but currently inactive travertine flow across the road from the main terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. I wouldn't think of it as a comfortable divan, but this handsome fellow did.

Stumbled upon

This is really weird:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Stumbled upon

What happened to the Yellowstone elk

Ever since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, elk populations have been declining and everyone had an opinion as to why. Local hunters say it's simple: wolves are voracious, Godless killing machines and they've been eating them all. Biologists don't think wolves can eat enough elk to account for this level of decline, and wolf advocates have pointed at the long drought period that began in the 1990's and hasn't really ended.

Scott Creel, a Montana State researcher believes he has the answer: it's the wolves, but not because of how many elk they eat. It's the way the elk have to behave in order to avoid being eaten. His study indicates that elk nutrition levels are low in late winter, which is reducing the reproduction rate. The calves aren't all being eaten; they're not being born in the first place.

Creel believes that without wolves, the elk could spend their winters in open meadows that supplied plenty of healthy grass. Now it's too dangerous to graze in the open, so they're spending more time higher up in the forests, where the browse is less nutritious. If this is the case, then the lower populations levels may represent a new equilibrium and even an improvement in the weather is unlikely to restore the higher elk numbers.


[via Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News]

Perils of publishing everything you do

How could I not post this, from Making Maps: DIY Cartography?
Google Maps Kills Bambi

A car making images for Google Map’s Street View wacked a fawn in upstate New York.

Wolves v. dogs

Wolves outperform dogs in following human social cues

Not as popular as pirates v. ninjas, but interesting nonetheless. Previous studies had indicated that dogs could interpret a human gesture better than wolves can, raising the possibility that millenia of domestication might have selected for better social cognition in dogs. This would be at odds with prevailing opinion, which suggests that domestication dulls the wits.

The present experiments suggest that the previous results may have been skewed by experimental bias, mainly by favoring dogs who had longer and more intimate experience with humans. The authors found some wolves that were also habituated to humans and discovered they do somewhat better than dogs. Just as suggestive, it turns out that pet dogs do pretty well at figuring out when a person is pointing at something, but dogs raised in animal shelters do not. Experience seems to count for a lot when it comes to understanding people.

Know your chimpanzee

Butts, Faces Help Chimps Identify Friends

"Many animals look at parts of the body, the voice, the hands, as separate entities and don't wholly integrate them," said study co-author Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Atlanta's Emory University.

"This study shows that they have whole body integration [because], at least if they know the individuals, they can match the faces and the behinds."

I'm a bit curious about that point. So your kitty cat knows your face, and knows your voice, but doesn't really think of them as belonging to a single entity? How would we know that?

Animal training

Operant conditioning at the NC Zoo