Watering holes are places of abundant wildlife in Arizona’s Sonoran desert as captured on this trail cam in the borderlands. One of the night visitors is a ringtail (Bassariscus astutus), a member of the raccoon family, shown above. (There are two embedded videos below; please wait for them to refresh.)
Lots of other interesting critters visit this borderlands trail camera: coyote, coati, bear, gray fox, northern goshawk, ringtail, deer, Mexican spotted owl eating a bat, turkey vulture, Gould's turkey, and western spotted skunk, to name a few. https://t.co/KRYPVrxWd7pic.twitter.com/JKZ3FN29N6
When water crosses political boundaries animals cross, too, back and forth from Arizona to Mexico. But now the Border Wall makes most of that impossible.
Listen to Quitobaquito Springs flowing peacefully just feet from the U.S.-Mex border. This true desert oasis has provided life-giving water to endangered wildlife in the UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve spanning Arizona & Sonora, Mex, which is now severed by a border wall. pic.twitter.com/MWBjm0TeER
Arizona's wildlife is really wild! ? Check out these awesome snaps of a bobcat perched atop a saguaro at Lost Dutchman State Park. ? You might think "ouch" but bobcats are adept climbers with tough paw pads. ? P. Giebelhausen (closeup) and Ranger Hailey on a hike last winter pic.twitter.com/q7825rQtwN
In New Jersey a buck ran through a front yard, jumped over two cars, and miscalculated the landing. Despite that he hopped out of the truck bed and ran away.
This week is the coldest we’ve had since last March or early April. Squirrels are getting serious about winter in @YardGoneWild‘s North Carolina backyard.
Do you feel thirsty when you wake up in the morning?
It turns out that as we exhale we also breath out water vapor, so during the hours of sleep we lose water. According to sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus, the healthy solution is to drink a full glass of water in the morning before you drink coffee because caffeine is a diuretic.
We could avoid this by getting up in the middle of the night to drink water, but perhaps our bodies are compensating in another way …
Despite the current warm weather, chipmunks (Tamias striatus) are frantically gathering food to store in their underground burrows where they’ll spend the winter. Since they can’t use their paws to carry food, they fill their enormous cheek pouches.
What could possibly make their cheeks so fat? How about acorns?
With so many chipmunks scurrying in autumn, you rarely see two together. Chipmunks are antisocial but they like to make calls to warn each other of predators. Among their most common calls are two kinds of warnings.
Cheep or Chip: “Danger from the ground!” This call sounds almost like a bird and warns of nearby terrestrial predators such as a cat, fox, coyote or raccoon.
Tock or Knock: “Danger from the air! I see a hawk!” This is a useful call for birders that tells us to search for a hawk nearby. However, chipmunks know that hawks fly rapidly through the forest so all of them take up the call, far and wide, even though the hawk is not near them. Tock! Tock! Tock! Where is that hawk? Erf!
Elk bugling in Elk County, Pennsylvania (photo by Paul Staniszewski)
29 September 2023
If you’ve been waiting to hear the elk bugling in Pennsylvania, now’s the time to make the trip to Benezette, PA.
In September and October Pennsylvania’s elk (Cervus canadensis) are in the rut, their annual period of sexual activity. The bulls gather harems, pursue the females, antler-spar with other males, and “sing” a bugling love song.
Like white-tailed deer, male elk grow new antlers every year but these cervids are huge. Males are 25% larger than the females and can weigh up to 1,100 pounds with antlers that can span five feet.
Consequently it’s a bit surprising that the bugle is such a high-pitched call. Its bell-like echoing carries far in the woods and fields.
The Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) is the largest tiger subspecies and one of the most endangered animals on the planet. It nearly went extinct in the 1940s due to habitat loss and poaching, but conservation efforts in Russia allowed the population to increase to 400-500 in the wild. This map shows how their range contracted from the 1800s to the 2010s.
Saving the tigers requires knowing more about them but there are so few in the wild and they are so spread out that studying them would be too intrusive.
Instead a recent study of the dispositions of tigers interviewed the caretakers of 248 semi-wild tigers living in two large wildlife sanctuaries in northeastern China. The goal was to learn the the tigers’ personality traits, the traits that work well and those that don’t.
The research team invited more than 50 feeders and veterinarians to fill out questionnaires with lists of 67 to 70 adjectives that described tiger personality traits for each cat in their care. These words ranged from “savage” and “imposing” to “dignified” and “friendly.” The researchers designed the questionnaires to mimic human personality tests.
… Two distinct personality types emerged that accounted for nearly 40% of the tigers’ behaviors. Tigers that scored higher on words such as confident, competitive, and ambitious fell under what the researchers labeled as the “majesty” mindset. Those that exhibited traits such as obedience, tolerance, and gentleness were grouped together under the “steadiness” mindset. Together, these two personalities explained 38% of the behavioral differences displayed by the tigers in the study.
The study then matched the personality ratings of the individual cats to their success in life. “Based on their weights and eating habits, the tigers with majesty mindsets were generally healthier than those with steadiness personalities. They hunted more, mated more often, had more breeding success and appeared to have a higher social status than the steadiness tigers.” — Science Magazine
So for most of the tigers it comes down to Majesty …
Compared to most other states Texas has generous (some say “lax”) wildlife-as-pets laws. Pet tigers are supposed to be registered in Texas and the owner must carry $100,000 in liability insurance but the number of registered tigers is lower than the actual number that live in the state.
For instance, take the Bengal tiger who roamed the streets of West Houston in May 2021. Houston is one of the few places in Texas where pet tigers are illegal so of course the 9-month-old tiger, named India, was not registered. The tiger caused a stir after he jumped out of his enclosure and walked around the neighborhood. The owner bundled him into an SUV and drove away, evading police (mistake! The owner was out on bond in a murder case). Eventually the wife turned over the tiger to police and it was given safe haven at the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch where there are other tigers. Read all about it in the Houston Chronicle: Everything we know about the tiger seen roaming a west Houston neighborhood.
Above, two young bobcats explore near a motion detection “camera trap” at Bosque del Apache. Below, a backyard cam caught the moment when a fox found a skunk in the dark.
Trail cam snaps an encounter between a red fox and a skunk (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
At Melissa Crytzer Fry‘s video camera trap in the Sonoran Desert, a mother Gambel’s quail chased away danger. Turn up the sound and find out what upset her.
Some fears, based on a species ancient experience, are bred-in-the-bone and guide behavior for millennia. For example, some people automatically fear snakes even though they never encounter them. This makes sense as an ancient fear spawned from early humans’ experience in Africa.
When wolves move in, coyotes leave the area and move closer to humans. Theoretically, the enemy of my enemy is my friend so humans would provide a shield against wolves.
Bobcats exhibit the same behavior in the presence of cougars, whom they fear.
Unfortunately, getting close to us is a bad bet for coyotes and bobcats with scant experience of humans. A recent study by Laura Prugh in northern Washington state, found that for 35 satellite tracked coyotes and 37 bobcats, the majority of those that died were shot.
Prugh’s work showed that in the case of coyotes and bobcats, gambling on safety with humans was a losing bet. Of the 24 coyotes that died, 14 were at the hands of people (13 shot and one roadkill). None were killed by wolves. Of the 18 dead bobcats, people killed 11. All told, a coyote was 3 times more likely to die at the hands of a human than in the jaws of a carnivore, the researchers found. For a bobcat, the odds were even higher at 3.8 times.
