Gordon Grice's Blog, page 70

10 Wacky Animal Stories of 2011

Kevin Deacon/Creative Commons

Live Science has this very entertaining write-up about the bizarre animal discoveries of the past year. The quote below may remind readers of the slow loris, whose toxic strategies I mentioned here a while back.
10 Wacky Animal Stories of 2011 | LiveScience:

"By utilizing the same plants that African tribesmen use to poison their arrows, the furry fury known as the African crested rat can incapacitate and even kill predators many times its size, research published in August found. The rat chews poisonous bark and spits the poison onto its furt coat, which has specialized hairs with pores to absorb the animal's poisonous spit, which protects them against predators like dogs."

Vultures Take Cattle

(Dellex/Creative Commons)

Yet another unexpected effect of exterminating wildlife: From Spain comes the news that vultures are taking cattle. The vultures are no match for healthy adult cattle, but they take calves and, in the case reported in the news story linked below, a cow weakened by giving birth.
Scientists are attributing this behavior to the lack of easier meals--the dead animals, wild and domestic, the vultures would prefer. My correspondent Croconut, who alerted me to this story, tells me the vultures are protected, but there's been some success setting up feeding spots for them so they won't attack livestock.
Like the predatory kea parrots of New Zealand, the vultures simply begin to eat the livestock alive. The keas are known to take flesh from the vulnerable backs of sheep. The sheep often survive the attack, only to die of infection later.

Keas (klaasmer/Creative Commons)
The news story doesn't say which species of vulture is involved. I suspect it's the large and abundant griffon vulture, which can weigh over 15 pounds. Much rarer, and thus probably not the culprit here, is the cinereous vulture (pictured), by some accounts the largest bird of prey in the world. It can reach twice that weight, and its wings can span ten feet.
The article is in Spanish. English-speaking readers may get a hoot, but probably not much information, from Google's bizarre translation of it; I provide a sample below.
The vultures are finished with a cow and a newborn calf Pascualcobo. elnortedecastilla.es: "The vulture, scavenger, has no ability to directly kill cattle, unlike the wolf," he said from the agricultural organization, stressing that the fresh cow, unable to lift, "it was easy to start devour, peck peck on the back, in soft, just whence the calf. "


Thus, the cow had eaten the back "no kill", thus "great suffering" for the animal, while the calf started eating the eyes and the soft parts, "until the animal died of suffering and bled."

Cheetah the Chimp Dies?

None of these is the same Cheetah who may have just died.

This chimpanzee supposedly played in Tarzan movies of the 1930s and has just now died at age 80. That would be a phenomenal age for a chimp.
Chimp from 1930s US 'Tarzan' films dead at 80 - Yahoo! News:
"The Florida chimpanzee -- which reportedly arrived at the sanctuary in 1960 -- loved finger-painting and watching football, and was soothed by Christian music, the sanctuary's outreach director Debbie Cobb told the Tampa Tribune.


Ron Priest, a sanctuary volunteer, told the Tribune that Cheetah stood out because he could walk upright with a straight back like a human. "When he didn't like somebody or something that was going on, he would pick up some poop and throw it at them. He could get you at 30 feet with bars in between," Priest said."

Wasp

Photography by D'Arcy Allison-Teasley

The White Cat

I don't usually run fiction here, but what the heck, let's do something different. This short story originally appeared in Vestal Review. It's read here by James Addison Conrad. Not for the faint of heart.

The Book of Deadly Animals on Ever So Strange

Some nice (and funny) words for The Book of Deadly Animals the other day on Ever So Strange.

A Description of Water

I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble, reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled about the bluff Boreal, which seemed to move as if careful not to bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds of the peach.  

Text by M. P. Shiel
Photograph by Parker Grice

Wild Boar Attacks Woman in Ohio

Wild Pig Attacks Woman in Lawrence County, Ohio: "The complaint, filed by Sgt. Randy Goodall states, "I observed some type of animal jump up and attack (Scott) around the neck and shoulders."


It goes on to state Goodall "fired two shots into the animal from atop the edge of the roadway at a distance of approximately 20 feet. The animal attempted to approach the couple and then turned and tried to run toward me. I fired an additional shot into the animal, killing it as it rolled down the hill."


Scott was bitten several times on her legs and hands.


"I don't care what people say," she says. "They're dangerous.""

Revisiting Dingo Attack on Baby

The video summarizes the case made famous in a Meryl Streep movie: A dingo took a human baby from a tent, and the mother was blamed for it. As described in The Book of Deadly Animals, the evidence against Lindy Chamberlain was never credible, while the reasons for doubting a wild dog would prey on a human child were wishful thinking. A new study, mentioned in the link below, confirms that dingoes sometimes take large prey. This should be no surprise if we recall that they belong to the same species as wolves and dogs. The most telling evidence, however, is that other children have been killed by dingoes in the years since this case made news. 


Evidence growing for Azaria dingo attack: "A 2011 study of dingo scats showed dingoes could prey on relatively large animals, like wallabies, not just small creatures like rats.


"The second body of evidence that may well be of interest are the events of Fraser Island, showing that when humans and dingoes are in relatively close proximity, that dingoes become sufficiently emboldened to attack humans," he said."

The Spider and the Rose

Photography by D'Arcy Allison-Teasley
Related Post: Design