CNN reports on cougar sightings in the town of Blackstone, Virginia, a bit southwest of Richmond. The official line goes that since mountain lions (Felis concolor) were wiped out along the eastern seaboard in the early 1900s, they haven't been found anywhere except for a relict population in the Florida Everglades (where they are called "panthers"). But this one little town in the Virginia Piedmont has had more than the average number of sightings. I think it would be great if mountain lions reestablished themselves in the hills of the Old Dominion. Our deer population is out of control, and while it's unsettling to not be at the top of the food chain, ecosystem coherence takes a higher priority in my mind. Along similar lines, in 2004 it was reported that coyotes had moved back into Rock Creek Park, the large national park that runs through the heart of northwest Washington, DC. Park officials have suggested they wouldn't be surprised if black bears moved back in too.

Labels: critters, dc, florida, mammals, virginia

Over the past couple of weeks, I've watched a number of videos that readers of this blog may be interested in. Yesterday, I blogged about A Private Universe and Minds of Our Own. Let me mention a few others today.

The Life of Mammals is a BBC production by the great David Attenborough, who also made Life of Birds, Life in the Freezer, Trials of Life, etc. etc. etc. (Attenborough has been making nature documentaries for the BBC since the late Miocene.) If you're into geology as part of a larger natural system, or if you happen to be a mammal yourself, this is a series well worth watching. Attenborough has a signature style involving showing up in different corners of the Earth, and carrying on a continuous narration the whole time. One moment he's in Tasmania, the next in Brazil, but his thought process is uninterrupted. The discussion is of the highest quality, without being too technical. He's got a real gift for this business. Five stars.

I also watched Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, from the Discovery Channel. It's about past creatures; Cenozoic mammals and birds. Because the animals it describes are extinct, it can't have footage of the narrator (Kenneth Branagh) strolling amongst the entelodonts or Andrewsarchus. Instead, they've used puppets and lots of computer generated animation to depict their subject. They're pretty clever about this, using "film" techniques that give it the flavor or an actual nature documentary: They mimic night-vision footage, for instance, as well as "handheld" camera shakiness, herds fleeing an overhead "helicopter" perspective, and the subjects nosing up to the "camera lens." While the animals they describe are quite interesting, I found the production to be a bit on the bombastic side, with pounding music intended to raise the viewers' adrenaline levels during a hunt scene, and so on. All told, the content wasn't as good as Life of Mammals, but I appreciated the way they handled the production, so I'd give it 3.5 stars.

Labels: critters, fossils, mammals, movies, teaching, tv

A new study in Current Biology looks at mitochondrial DNA evidence from 160 woolly mammoth fossils on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge, and finds that the beasts trooped east from Asia into North America, and then marched back again 40,000 years ago, at which point the Asian mammoths slid into decline and extinction. The interpretation by the study's authors is that the North American prodigal mammoths returned to the mother country and possibly wiped out their Asian cousins.

The original article on the Current Biology* site. *Link wasn't working quite right this morning...
Scientific American's treatment of the story.
An article in the New York Times reviewing the study.

Labels: alaska, critters, fossils, mammals, pleistocene, russia

I swear, this is from Reuters, not the Onion:

Putin saves TV crew from Siberian tiger

Crazy! Putin guns down a wild tiger! WTF?

Labels: critters, news, russia

I used to do a lot of woodcuts. Woodcuts are a kind of block printing, where you start with wood (usually basswood, or something else of medium hardness) and then carve away everything that you want to be white in the final print, leaving behind everything you want to appear black. Once the carving is done, ink your print and press it to a piece of paper, and you get a cool looking block print. The same thing can be done with linoleum, styrofoam, or potatoes.

Based on Googling my personal website, a design firm in Seattle recently contacted me to do a new series of woodcuts. Their client, a housing development in Washington state, wanted a squirrel mascot. So over the course of the past week, in addition to preparing for the fall semester, I busted out the chisels and ink roller. Here's the squirrel that I prepared for them:

But carving the squirrel reawakened this particular creative urge in me. I like doing woodcuts! And I like thinking up my own material to carve. So in my spare time, I started this fellow, finishing him up yesterday afternoon as the sun dipped low in the western sky:

He's sort of a juvenile, freaked-out, overweight, embryonic, stressy tyrannosaur. With an overbite. I like him because, artistically, he combines my interest in cartoons with my interest in block printing. (And of course, my interest in geology!)

Labels: art, critters, dinosaurs

Now that I'm back in DC, I can actually start downloading the photos I took all summer. Here's some from the first two days of my summer's travels, in Kentucky at Mammoth Cave.

There was a big cicada emergence happening there. This insect is 17 years old!


Cicadas weren't the only wildlife. I also saw a Tyrannosaurus rex in the trees near Cave City.


On the Wild Cave tour, we entered Mammoth Cave in a roomy passage, but were soon crawling through very small tunnels...


Caving attire: tres chic.


Fossil coral weathering out of the roof of the cave...


"Snowball" concretions on the ceiling of the Snowball Room, where there is a subterranean cafe. I had a bowl of soup and a Snickers bar from their extensive menu.


The Snowball Cafe featured a bathroom, too. I was struck by the contrast between the modern tile and ceramic fixtures and the looming limestone ceiling...


The group of folks (not one of whom I knew) after we got out of the cave and back into the sultry Kentucky summer air.

Labels: caves, critters, dinosaurs, kentucky, travel

Whoa! Check out this minuscule snake! Really small vertebrates catch my attention -- think of all those itty-bitty ribs and vertebrae in something this small. How big is its heart? How many red blood cells can fit through its arteries at a time? How incredible is it that vertebrates can be as small as this guy, or as large as an Apatosaurus or a fin whale?
It's from Barbados. Check out more details here.

Labels: critters, news

Back in Bozeman again after a great four day stint in Yellowstone National Park. I was up in the Lamar Valley ("Serengeti of North America"), checking out megafauna as part of my "Wildlife Ecology of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" course. The hyper-enthusiastic course instructor, Dave Willey, took us to see this amazing ecosystem, using the wolf-elk relationship as a platform for understanding ecological connections. Dave knows a lot about wolves, and showed us plenty. We mainly observed the Slough Creek Pack, but we also saw one of the Druid Pack (the 'original' pack that was reintroduced to Yellowstone in the late 1990s). We also got to observe black bears, elk, bison, grizzly bears, coyotes, bighorn sheep, and a bunch of birds-of-prey.

One bear encounter is worth recounting here: We had hiked from the Lamar Valley out to Cache Creek, where rumor had it the Druid Pack had holed up. We spent the morning "glassing the slopes" (searching with binoculars), but didn't locate any of the wolves. No one had seen them in three days, and we were having the same luck. We began hiking back to the Lamar and our van. At one point, our group separated into two groups. I was at the tail end of the front group, and stopped to answer the call of nature before dropping down to the flat Lamar Valley floor. This short break to take a pee ended up preventing a major bear encounter, as it turned out. Why? It gave the front group time to get down ahead of me, so instead of staring at their backs, I was looking out over the valley. And there I saw two grizzlies heading through the sagebrush, on a direct line towards my colleagues! I called out to warn them (they couldn't see because they were on the same level as the bears, not elevated like I was). We all moved up onto the hill, so we could see the bears and the bears could see us. The tail end of our group caught up, and Dave shouted at them to get up to the high ground. Then we noticed another group of hikers, heading in on the trail. Through the binoculars, we could see that they were oblivious of the bears. We shouted to them too, and they moved up towards us. At that point, the lead bear huffed up and started galloping! "Oh shit," Dave said, "Who's got the bear spray?" When your wildlife ecology professor says "Oh shit," it's time to start worrying. Fortunately the bear's gallop lasted only twenty feet or so (a mock charge?) and then the pair resumed their amble through the sage. They crossed the trail a few feet from where the other group of hikers had been, and headed up a small wooded valley.

We all breathed a sigh of relief, and ventured down off the hill and onto the trail again, keeping a wary eye on the wooded valley. Safely past it, we relaxed and began hiking normally again, at which point we got a great look at a big black wolf trying to cross the Lamar River to our left! It was definitely the closest we had been to a wolf all week! The wolf got spooked by some fishermen, however, and retreated up the hillside on the other side of the road. Pretty cool stuff to see. The Yellowstone Ecosystem appears to be alive and well, even with wolves being "delisted" as threatened species in March, and then reinstated as "endangered" yesterday.

Also, while we were there, a man was attacked by a (probable) grizzly in his tent two campsites up the road. Pretty scary stuff, no longer being at the top of the food chain. These animals will eat you! For me, it was really insightful to get to experience some of that firsthand. This trip was the first time I had camped in the park (in spite of numerous visits over the years), and I really enjoyed the early morning and late evening wildlife viewing: that's the time to be out there!

Labels: critters, fossils, msse, national parks, yellowstone

Yesterday, I went up to Delaware Bay to help the Nature Conservancy count spawning horseshoe crabs. I carpooled with my student Efrain and his friend Dennis. We did some birding at Cape Henlopen State Park, then had dinner and a few crafty craft beers at the Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth Beach (I had crabcake, natch.), and then headed out to Big Stone Beach for the main event: the spring tide and the new moon mean spawning horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) by the thousands. We were helping the Nature Conservancy tally up the numbers of male and female crabs. You can learn more about horseshoe crabs at this excellent website. Or you can just look at these images:



























...You get the idea. Other images on the Flickr photostream. Joining a couple of medical doctors from Delaware (well, originally from Virginia, but stationed in Delaware), we surveyed the beach using TNC's rope and square-meter protocol. The weather turned cold and rainy, but we kept it up, and saw a lot of crabs. I estimate that altogether, we saw somewhere around 5,000 crabs. Pretty cool: one of the great wildlife concentrations in the world, and it's only 2.5 hours from DC. Next up: sandhill cranes on the Platte River in Nebraska, or maybe polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba...

Labels: critters, delaware, environmental, field trips, travel