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.
You’ll never see this bird and mammal wandering in North America.
The bird is the cattle tyrant (Machetornis rixosa) of South America, related to the great kiskadee whose northern range extends into south Texas.
The mammal is the world’s largest rodent, a capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), also in South America.
Capybaras are semi-aquatic (“hydro” in their genus name) and very social, living in groups of up to 100 individuals. See both characteristics in this video.
When I saw a blue jay eating a baby bird in Schenley Park last week I jumped to the conclusion that jays are a huge threat to nesting birds … but are they? A 2016 analysis of 53 North American nest-predator studies, comprising more than 4000 camera-monitored nests, found that the top predators are far different than I expected. The biggest threat to a nest varies by region, habitat, the size of nesting adults, and the height of the nest.
Across the North American continent about 37% of nest predation is done by mammals, a combination of “mesopredators” (raccoons, foxes, squirrels) and rodents.
One of the 53 studies, published in 2007, listed predation counts by species in the continental U.S. Thompson et al’s top six nest predators are shown in the slides below.
(*) Perhaps this is The Revenge of the Mammals: When dinosaurs, birds’ ancestors, ruled the Earth they feasted on mammals, all of whom were tiny and hid underground. Now the tables are turned and small birds are at the mercy of mammals.
Just because black bears don’t have thumbs doesn’t mean they can’t get into cars and trucks. If there’s food inside a vehicle they have a big incentive to open it, even if it means breaking the glass and bending metal, as shown above in California.
This week in Evergreen, Colorado a bear smelled dog food inside a truck in a driveway. Since the truck was unlocked he didn’t have to break the windows and doors to get in.
See what happened next in this tweet from Colorado Parks and Wildlife — Northeast Region (@CPW_NE).
Dog food + unlocked truck = bear trapped in your truck
?up to listen our wildlife officer free the bear and scare it from the area. Good lesson to bring in food from your vehicles! Bears can smell it and learn how to open doors. pic.twitter.com/hKkgfwrXoH
Geneticist Kathleen Morrill compared Balto’s DNA with more than 600 genomes of wolves, coyotes, and dogs of different breeds including modern sled dog breeds such as Siberian huskies, more physically and genetically isolated sled dogs in Greenland, and “village dogs”— ownerless canines that live in Africa, South America, and Asia and make up 80% of the world’s dogs.
Being from a place where free-ranging dogs are rare because they’re collected by Animal Control, I was amazed to learn that more than three quarters of the dogs on Earth are “village” or “street” dogs.
I had a taste of this on my trip to Ecuador in February. I saw many, many free-ranging dogs in the cities, villages and the rural countryside.
The dogs in Quito understood busy streets and the ebb and flow of traffic. They jaywalked when the street was clear to feast on the garbage bags placed on the median for collection. This was obviously a problem in rural places where people built raised platforms for their trash bags.
Not all of the dogs were on the street. I saw them perched on balconies …
At first I thought the street dogs were ownerless strays but then I noticed some had collars.
Veterinarian Nancy Kay visited Ecuador in 2016 and asked questions about the street dogs. She learned that most had owners but the owner-dog relationship is different than we’re used to in the States. Her insights include (paraphrased from her The Street Dogs of Ecuador blog):
“Much like ravens and crows, these street dogs always managed to get out of the way [of vehicles] just in the nick of time.
For the most part the dogs are owned solely for the purpose of property protection.
While the dogs go home at night, most of their daylight hours are spent out on the streets.
Most receive a modicum of food from their owners, so must rely on food found on the streets to sustain themselves.”
