Yesterday on Ellsworth Avenue my husband was surprised to see a curious fawn inside the Hunt Mansion fence. The fawn began to approach him. Where was its mother?
Not far away. After a few steps the fawn paused and went to mom nearby. Its mother taught it that humans on the sidewalk are not dangerous, but don’t get too close.
The doe must have indicated she was going outside the fence. “I’m going to eat that hedge. Go to your hiding place while I’m gone.”
The doe crossed the street to the yard with the delicious hedge and the fawn trotted away.
There is an elusive desert wild cat that is so similar in size and shape to a domestic cat that it could be mistaken for one. The sand cat (Felis margarita) lives in disjoint areas in deserts from North Africa to the Middle East to Turkmenistan and is so well camouflaged that it is almost impossible to see in the wild. They are always in remote desert areas and possibly extinct in some of their range.
Almuntasir often received inquiries about the video but it led nowhere until Firas Hayder at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa proposed searching for and mapping sand cat locations using GPS, still shots and video.
It was a dangerous effort for humans because of armed smugglers in the region. However, the 8-year collaboration placed the sand cat on the map in Libya. I’ve hand drawn the approximate location in blue.
If you’ve seen a sand cat in a zoo I’m sure you’ve been surprised by how much it looks like the cats at home(*). These are the zoo-bred descendants of sand cats caught in southwestern Pakistan in the early 1970s and exported to zoos worldwide. Sand cats are gone from Pakistan in the current map. It is encouraging to hear they are in Libya.
They never mentioned the black bears who used to live here, were gone for a long time, and are now making a comeback on their own.
Black bear in western Pennsylvania, May 2010 (photo by Chuck Tague)
This week a black bear is roaming North Park, running across the street, and swimming in the lake. CBS Pittsburgh reports, “The Pennsylvania Game Commission is monitoring the situation. … Visitors are asked to use caution, give the bear plenty of space and keep their dogs on leashes. Don’t try to interact with the bear.”
Learn more about Beasts of the East when Andrew Moore presents his new book at Greentree Public Library on June 24th. Registration is required for this event.
Marsupials are unusual mammals whose young are born in an undeveloped state and complete their development inside their mother’s pouch. Australia has many marsupials including kangaroos and koalas but north of Mexico, North America has only one. The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) is the northernmost marsupial in the world.
This week Dana Nesiti saw an opossum crossing a gravel trail and published it in slow motion on Facebook. Notice how “fat” this possum appears to be. She’s a mother carrying her growing young inside her pouch.
NOTE: If you’re viewing this on mobile and cannot see the video: A Facebook bug prevents displaying of embedded Facebook posts on some mobile devices. Until Meta fixes it click here to see Dana’s post.
When her young get larger they won’t fit in her pouch so she’ll have to carry them on her back. The caption on this Wikimedia photo says she’s carrying nine!
At the time, Chernobyl was in the Soviet Union. Five years later, in December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine and Belarus became independent. In 1996 the radiation exclusion zones spanned three countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Note how close the power plant was to the Belarus border.
By 2016 it was safe enough to go on guided tours in the ghost town of Kopachi within the 10km Chernobyl exclusion zone. Here a tour guide shows his Geiger counter reading in Kopachi. (Don’t linger!)
However two years later a 2018 study, published in the journal Environment International, found that cows as much as 140 miles away from the original disaster were still producing radioactive milk. The air was OK but a long-lived radioactive isotope in the soil, cesium-137, is easily taken up by the plants the cows consume and it gets into their milk.
According to the New York Times in 2018, the milk was five times the Ukrainian government’s official limit for adults, and more than 12 times the limit for children.
It is easy to see how this could happen. The cows pictured at top in 2005 were drinking water in a drainage ditch whose purpose was to gather water that cleansed radioactive isotopes from the contaminated soil. The photo caption reads:
Water drainage trenches like this one in Jelno – a village some 300 km away from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant — removes excess water from the peaty soil as a first step. The next step is to diminish the content of radionuclides in the soil by ploughing and introducing mineral fertilizers. Caesium and potassium are chemical twins. Hungry for minerals, a plant will pull out caesium from the contaminated soil but if potassium is in good supply the plant prefers mineral fertilizer. (Jelno, Ukraine, July 2005)
The 2018 study explained that the problem of radioactive milk could be fixed by adding hexacyanoferrate to cattle feed. This chemical binds with heavy metals, including cesium-137, but it is very expensive.
Unfortunately the problem is probably not being treated. Russia began their full out war on Ukraine on 24 February 2022(*) and there are more immediate dangers now than cancer. 40 years later the milk is probably radioactive.
For more about the Chernobyl disaster, see this documentary video from June 2019.
(*) p.s. The war in Ukraine is Putin’s effort to regain what the Soviet Union lost due to a combination of factors that included the Chernobyl disaster:
The Soviet Union collapsed on December 25, 1991, due to a combination of chronic economic stagnation, unsustainable military spending, rising ethnic nationalism, and the unintended destabilizing effects of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms (glasnost and perestroika). These factors, exacerbated by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and falling oil prices, led to a loss of central control and the eventual independence of its 15 republics.
Glen Hazel eagle listens to coyotes howling, 14 Mar 2026, 7:50pm (screenshot from PixCams on YouTube video embedded below)
17 March 2026
ICYMI (In Case You Missed It):
Last Saturday night around 8:00pm the sound of sirens in the Monongahela Valley near Glen Hazel prompted a nature sound below the eagles’ nest.
The female eagle, nicknamed Mom, was sleeping and ignoring the sirens (“it’s just more of that human noise”) but she woke up and watched when coyotes answer the siren’s wail. PixCams moved the camera to see if he could find the coyotes, but no.
It should be no surprise there are coyotes on the wooded hillside near the eagles’ nest. They have been in the Pittsburgh city limits since at least 2003, my neighbors saw them in Greenfield in 2017, and I regularly see coyote scat in Frick and Schenley Parks.
Coyote scat in Schenley Park, May 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Some people are afraid of coyotes but are they dangerous? Not to us humans but myths abound, apparently borrowed from our myths about wolves.
No, coyotes will not be gone from your neighborhood if you remove the one you’ve seen. New coyotes arrive soon to take its place.
Some of our fears, not based in modern experience, seem to be bred-in-the-bone from prehistoric time. For example, some people automatically fear snakes even though they will never encounter them. This makes sense as an ancient fear spawned from early humans’ experience in Africa.
Legend has it that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland(*). Does anyone in Ireland fear snakes anyway? Interesting question.
This video was captured on a trail cam by the Voyageurs Wolf Project, a Univ of Minnesota research project that studies wolves in and around Voyageurs National Park. The park is in “The Arrowhead” of Minnesota on the U.S.-Canadian border in a huge wild area that includes Voyageurs, Superior National Forest, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in the U.S., and Quetico Provincial Park in Canada.
There are many familiar animals in the video but you might not recognize the animal standing on its hind legs at the beginning. It’s a fisher (Pekania pennanti), an omnivorous member of the weasel family that is only the size of a large house cat. To put its size into perspective, here’s a porcupine and a fisher near each other.
and (I’ve just invented this) I’m calling it the elephants’ lucky day.
It’s always a good day for elephants when they find food and water in a safe place. Sometimes it’s in a reliable location where they eat every day such as the Khulu Bush Camp in Zimbabwe where I visited two years ago (January 2024).
Elephants at Khulu Bush Camp, 26 Jan 2024 (video by Kate St. John)
And sometimes they just luck out by being at the right place at the right time. Like when this orange transport truck broke down in South Africa.
With more snow on the way today in Pittsburgh we need something to take our minds off our troubles. Sea otters are the perfect solution.
Sea otters live among kelp because they eat the organisms that eat kelp. They dive to gather sea urchins, sea stars, sea cucumbers, crustaceans, a variety of mollusks, snails and bivalves. Then they float on their backs with their food set on their bellies as they open and eat their prey.
One week from today we will celebrate Squirrel Appreciation Day … or rather, “some of us” will celebrate. My husband has heard people complain about squirrels and asked, “How many members in the squirrel fan club? Three?”
If you have bird feeders, squirrels are often the mammal you love to hate.
An acrobatic eastern gray squirrel reaches Marcy Cunkelman’s feeder, Nov 2010 (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
Who's eating this hedge?
_with_Geiger_Counter_-_Kopachi_Village_-_Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone_-_Northern_Ukraine_(27099691485).jpg){kind=link}