Gordon Grice's Blog, page 96

The Wildlife of This Land

I've been remiss in not mentioning This Land, a new publication out of Oklahoma. It looks like a newspaper, but the contents include fiction, poetry, photography, and articles on, for example, Thurgood Marshall and a guy who owns a burger joint in Tulsa. The February issue includes my essay "Bat Country." 
The photo above, by Lee Roy Chapman, shows a rare white bison (and its less glamorous friend, a longhorn steer). I'm not even going to get into what a certain Lybian leader may have said about This Land. You'll have to visit the website for that. 
Highly recommended. 

Crocodile seizes fisherman from boat

This story becomes less interesting once you realize "mate" means friend in Australia. The crocodile, presumably of the saltwater species, seized the man while he was fishing. It apparently released him as he fought back.
Croc attacked man while mate slept

Dangerous animals on the lam

An animal control officer writes:
I once responded to a call of an escaped male jaguar from a predatory cat park. When I arrived on scene, the park was closed to the public, and park personnel along with law enforcement were searching for the 185-pound cat, which had escaped while being transferred from one enclosure to another.
More:
Tug Gettling: Dangerous animals on the lam

Girl, 3, bitten by dingo

Creative Commons/Marc Tarlock

More trouble between people and the feral dogs of Australia.
Girl, 3, bitten by dingo at Fraser Island | Herald Sun

Mountain lion found in backyard

Officials used a tranquilizer dart to capture this cougar in a back yard in Tulsa. A friend from the area tells me this address is "just northwest of downtown Tulsa, not far from Tulsa Country Club."
A wildlife official quoted in the story says cougars are rare in Oklahoma, but folks in the Western part of the state might dispute that. They are certainly rare in urban yards, which suggests this one may be an escaped pet.


(Thanks to Matt O. for the news tip.)
Mountain lion found in backyard taken to Tulsa Zoo | Tulsa World

Meat

Here's an interesting account of turning a live chicken into meat. This is, of course, a common occurrence; what I like about this blog post is its way of digging into the implications. As the author notes, most of us are insulated from the realities of consumption. Even for vegans, the production of food is a messy, sometimes unappetizing business, one that brings us closer to our own animal natures. It's easy to fall into delusion when we eat only factory-processed foods. Processing your own food forces you to notice how things live—and how they die.
Reader Steve V., who pointed me to the blog, poses this question: Does any other animal take care of another for an extended period for the purpose of eventually eating it? I haven't come up with any so far. Certain ants keep aphids and feed them; the ants eat the honeydew the aphids secrete. That's closer to dairy farming than butchery, however. Some parasites confer accidental benefits on their victims. For example, some intestinal worms reduce the allergic response in humans. But this is a long way from actually feeding the victim.
Perhaps the closest parallel with our habit of raising animals for food occurs in lichens. The lichen is a symbiote, part fungus, part alga. Both partners get benefits, but the alga does all the work of feeding both through photosynthesis. In effect, the fungus is a farmer. There are even fungi that take over the brains of ants and cause them to climb trees. Once up the tree, the ant undergoes a peculiar metamorphosis. Its brain sprouts a fungus, which disperses spores over the jungle floor.
So that's my best answer, until somebody points out a better: We're like fungi. Some of us more than others.   

Mountain wolf kills one, injures another in Kütahya

In Turkey, a wolf, apparently rabid, has killed one woman and critically injured another.
A rabid wolf is arguably the most dangerous of all carnivores. In the Old West, there were reports of single wolves attacking more than 100 people in a few hours. 
Mountain wolf kills one, injures another in Kütahya


Slideshow: North American Wolves:

Survivor Describes Leopard Attack

The leopard often kills by biting through the skull of a human or other primate. It sounds as if this one attempted to do just that.

Bull Sharks on the Golf Course

No golfers have been hurt by these sharks; we can only hope.

http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/The-most-hazardous-water-hazard-ever-a-shark?urn=golf-wp1022

Arachnaphobe's Nightmare

Antique illustrations of arachnids from the Century Dictionary (1886).