Gordon Grice's Blog, page 21

Black Bears Caught on Wildlife Cam

 

California Sunsets

Photography by Dee Puett

Wolf Q&A

Wayne T. Allison
From a Q&A I did with the Wall Street Journal a few years back, celebrating the release of a crappy movie called The Grey. 


About this new Liam Neeson movie: Do wolves really hunt you down with Terminator-like resolve if you invade their territory?Not so much.
When do they attack people?In rural areas of Europe and Asia, they sometimes eat the guy left behind to tend the sheep. Also, when a lot of people are lying around dead or helpless, from war or plague, wolves clean the place up. If a wolf gets rabies, it will attack everything in its path. One rabid wolf killed fifteen people and bit dozens of others in a single rampage.
Do they ever make a habit of eating people?Yes. In central France in the 1760s, something called The Beast of Gevaudan  killed at least five dozen people, mostly farm workers and travelers. The case was so famous (and so preposterously exaggerated) that it drew the attention of King Louis XV. “No one dared go out any more after nightfall,” wrote Guy de Maupassant in his thinly fictionalized account. “The darkness seemed haunted by the image of the beast.” Similar cases have happened in India.
Why don’t they usually eat people in North America? Because here, people can afford guns. Wolves are smart; they figure out that we’ll hurt them and they teach their cubs to fear us.
But attacks do happen here?Yes, usually when the wolves get habituated to people. If they eat garbage or pets and find out there’s no penalty, we’re in trouble. That’s apparently what happened in 2010 near Chignik Lake, Alaska. A very athletic young school teacher who had trained in kickboxing was out for a jog when she was killed by wolves. Authorities said they found “signs of predation.” Another schoolteacher was killed by wolves in Saskatchewan in 2005.
What’s the most gruesome attack you’ve heard of?In Belarus in the mid-1990s, a teacher kept a nine-year-old girl after school. She had to walk home in the dark. When she didn’t show up at home, her father went looking. He found her severed head surrounded by wolf tracks on a bloody patch of snow. Later, he killed the teacher. (That makes three dead teachers in one article, in case anybody’s counting.)
Have you ever had an encounter with a wolf?Several, none tragic. I once went to talk with a guy who owned wolves. His prize pet, a 75-pound pure white male, rushed up to me and took my hand in its mouth. I felt my wedding band clink against its teeth. “He won’t hurt you,” the guy said. “He’s just being friendly.” So I stood there until the wolf got done holding my hand.

Birds of Prey

Photos by Dee Puett

Wildlife of the Prairie

Some things we saw on the Prairie Preserve last summer. Wouldn't mind seeing them again just about now. . . 



Skink eggs inside a rotting tree trunk









Photos by Parker Grice. 

A Valentine's Day Treat: Mantis Mating

As described in The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, here's the mating of mantids:



Not shown here is the delightful bit where the male sometimes gets a burst of energy from being decapitated. 

Alligator Abuse

Here’s a weird, supposedly true tale of alligator abuse from Cleveland Moffett, who interviewed underwater salvage men for a book on dangerous careers, circa 1898.
*
"The Dutchman got me to help him catch an alligator one day. He said he could bring him up North and get a big price for him. Well, we noosed one after a whole lot of chasing in a lagoon, and kept him four or five weeks, but he wouldn't eat, and the boys all gave us the laugh. So the Dutchman got up a scheme to paint him white and put him back in the lagoon. His idea was that this white alligator would scare out all the other alligators, and then we'd capture mebbe twenty or thirty on the banks, and make our fortune."
He paused a moment with a twinkling eye, and Hansen snickered.
"Well, we done it. We painted that alligator white, and put him back in the lagoon, and you can shoot me if those other alligators didn't eat him. Yes, sir; they chewed him clean up before we'd hardly got the ropes off him."
"What did the Dutchman say?" asked Hansen, shaking with mirth.
"He stuck to it his idea was all right, but it was the blamed alligator's fault for being too weak with fasting to fight the ones as weren't painted, and he wanted somebody to help him catch another, but nobody would."

Painting the Dodo

The Dodo
We've all seen images of the dodo, though it was extinct before any of us were born. Our image of it comes largely from the Dutch Renaissance painter Roelant Savery, who painted the bird at least ten times. Above is his most famous depiction of it. ("G. Edwards" was an ornithologist who owned the painting long after Savery's time.) Savery often painted images of nature. Here's a selection of his work. 
Landscape with Birds
Horses and Oxen Attacked by Wolves
Landscape with Wild Animals
Landscape with Wild Beasts
Rocky Landscape
Paradise

Brown Widow Spider Eats Snake

Hourglass marking on the belly of a brown widow (Latrodectus geometricus)
Max sent me this news article about a widow spider eating a snake in someone's office. The spider is a brown button, a common name that covers the critter known in the US as the brown widow as well as a closely related species. Folklore has it that the brownie is far deadlier than the blacker species of widow and occasionally takes a human baby. None of that is true, but it makes for some nice internet freak-outs. 


It's unusual for widows to take snakes, but many cases are on record, including rattlesnakes taken by widows in the US. The widows in general take an amazing array of creatures in their powerful webs, including mice, lizards, and tarantulas, though smaller fare is far more common. 

Spider eats snake at office in South Africa | Daily Mail Online: "Witnesses say the spider spend two days weaving a web around its kill lifting it higher off the ground and continually snacking on it."

Curse of the Black Widow

Here’s an odd TV movie from the 1970s. Sort of a werewolf movie, but instead of turning into a wolf, the cursed person becomes a giant spider. On the plus side, this is a fast-paced, energetic picture with good performances. The director is Dan Curtis, who is responsible for such delectable items as Intruders—the best UFO movie I’ve seen (not that there’s a lot of competition)—and the original Dark Shadows, which featured a giant spider or two of its own—and, by my count, three werewolves. And some vampires, some witches, some demons. . .
On the minus side, there’s the utterly inept science. I don’t mind an impossible premise, so long as the writers do a good job of making it seem possible. Make us believe the little details and we’ll follow you pretty far. That doesn’t really work out here. There’s also the nasty misogyny, which seems pretty much obligatory among pulp writers who choose the black widow as their metaphor.
Anyway, this is still fun if you can take the cheese. Enjoy.

 Part 1

Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7