Entomologist Justin Schmidt, who boasts of having experienced the stings of 157 insects, identifies and describes the top ten most painful.

Interesting, but one wonders how certain spiders, like the Australian funnel-web, Atrax robustus, for instance, would compare. Its bite induces convulsions, paralysis, and death, and the victim spouts blue saliva.

The all-time champion painful sting is probably really the one administered by fish of the genus Synanceia, stonefish. Stonefish stings are so painful that victims apparently regularly plead for the injured limb to be amputated.

In Chicago, this winter, a Peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) took a go at a Snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus). A local birder named Rick Remington got some great photos and described the action.

North American Birding:

[The owl] would do a somersault just as the Peregrine approached and flash its nasty talons in an attempt to scare off the Falcon. The battle lasted for 5 full minutes before the Falcon headed off in another direction and the Snowy Owl flew down to the rocks by the lake. It was a surprisingly violent and noisy encounter, with both birds shrieking loudly and the owl extending its giant wings to intimidate the smaller falcon. I fully expected this to end badly for the owl based on what I was watching. In spite of the obvious mismatch, the Snowy Owl managed to hold its own and escape unscathed.

This was clearly a territorial conflict rather than mere attempted predation. The duck hawk may have been the aggressor, but it was wise not to get close enough to get nabbed by the owl’s talons.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Poor Vermont!

The old Green Mountain State, once home to rugged individualists and real outdoorsmen, has become a favored residence of affluent fashionistas. Politically, the ‘chucks (as newcomers derisively refer to native Vermonters) are reliably outvoted by treehuggers, goat milkers, and aging Trustafarian hippies.

In the old days, the Vermont state character was typified by drinkers and brawlers like Ethan Allen and by thrifty and laconic Yankees like Calvin Coolidge. Today, it has socialist Bernie Saunders representing it in the US Senate and a governor who champions gay marriage and everyone’s “right to health care” at somebody else’s expense.

Vermont’s wimp democrat Governor Peter Shumlin was recently frightened by some of the local wildlife.

Politico:

Shumlin says he was in bed in his rented Montpelier home late Wednesday night when he heard what turned out to be four bears in the backyard.

He says he looked out and saw the bears, including two cubs. He tried to chase the bears away, but they kept coming back.

Shumlin says he ran out barefoot in an attempt to rescue his birdfeeders. He says one of the bears charged him on the porch.

Shumlin tells the Valley News editorial board that Vermont “almost lost the governor.” He says he was within “three feet of getting ‘arrrh.’”

Black bears are rough on bird feeders. They typically totally demolish them to get at their contents more conveniently.

Some years back, at my farm in Central Pennsylvania, my father was making his morning coffee, when he looked out and saw a group of bears taking apart his bird feeders. My father stepped outside the cabin door, right on top of the offending bruins, pointed his .44 Magnum revolver in the air and touched off a couple of rounds. He then phoned me and reported with delight the comedy that ensued, noting with surprise just how fast properly motivated bears can run and describing exactly how funny they looked running for their lives up the mountain side.

Governor Shumlin went out and doubtless tried to influence them by making a speech.

All this proves that bears pay no attention to democrats, but understand the language spoken by Smith & Wesson extremely well.

Jessica Grose, in Slate, describes how the swift and hearty justice dealt out to man-killing grizzlies in simpler and less-grovelly-toward-Nature times has been replaced by a new intensely ethically conscientious regime that will only kill bears which are deemed to have behaved with “unnatural aggression” or which have been found to have eaten people.

In the bad old days, they knew what to do with man-killing bruins.

The first extensively documented death by grizzly within Yellowstone Park’s borders was the fatal mauling of 61-year-old government laborer Frank Welch in 1916. And the park’s first extensively documented judicial execution of a grizzly soon followed. Some historians suspect the bear that killed Welch was abnormally ill-tempered because his toes had been ripped off when he escaped from a trap in 1912. Whatever the bear’s motives, though, Welch’s fellow laborers decided that “Old Two Toes” deserved to die for his crimes. Men from the road camp where Welch had been working placed some edible garbage in front of a barrel filled with dynamite. When the bear began to eat, they blew it to smithereens.

That was how grizzlies were treated if they injured humans in the early days of Yellowstone: They were killed.

Not today. Today, when Ephraim or Ephraimina takes out a tax paying citizen, there is the equivalent of a judicial procedure. There are major exculpatory loopholes. And even totally guilty bears are put down reluctantly, as big, salty tears pour down the faces of the responsible officials.

Every bear is pwecious, you see.

The euthanization of the bear known as “the Wapiti sow” was the culmination of a series of horrifying events that had gripped Yellowstone for months, and alarmed rangers, visitors, and the conservation biologists tasked with keeping grizzly bears safe. In separate incidents in July and August, grizzlies had killed hikers in Yellowstone, prompting a months-long investigation replete with crime scene reconstructions and DNA analysis, and a furious race to capture the prime suspect. The execution of the Wapiti sow opens a window on a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears and the humans who share their land. It also demonstrates the difficulty of judging animals for crimes against us. The government bear biologists who enforce grizzly law and order grapple with the impossibility of the task every day. In the most painful cases, the people who protect these sublime, endangered animals must also put them to death.

Whenever a grizzly bear commits a crime in the continental United States, Chris Servheen gets a call at his office at the University of Montana in Missoula. Servheen has been the Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for three decades. ...

Before Servheen, Gunther, and their bear management colleagues could decide what to do, they’d need a lot more information. Was a grizzly bear in fact responsible for this second death? If so, which bear did the mauling? And what were the circumstances that led up to attack—was it provoked or had some hiker just been caught unaware? The answers to those questions would determine whether a precious animal would need to die. ...

Wildlife biologists like Kerry Gunther help the park’s crime-scene investigators by speculating on a bear’s emotional state. Based on the evidence at hand, he tries to determine whether a given act of bear aggression might have been a natural behavior—the result of being startled while feeding on an elk carcass, for example, or seeing someone approaching her cubs. If a bear appears to have followed a hiker down the trail instead of backing off, or if it attacked campers while they were asleep, that would be more unusual—the result, perhaps of a deranged grizzly mind.

If you blunder into a bear that is thought to have attacked and killed you out of natural aggression (you violated that bear’s space, dude!) or via an impulse of self defense, that’s just too bad for you. The bear goes free, as long as he refrains from dining on your pitiable remains.

The authorities in question reluctantly draw the line at actual predation, simply because they are afraid of the public response to tolerating man-eaters in National Parks.

The zero-tolerance policy for man-eating bears invites an obvious question, though. Once a bear kills someone, whether it’s out of some wild-animal psychopathy or a natural inclination to defend her young, why wouldn’t she eat the corpse? Everyone agrees that it’s natural for grizzlies to eat carrion—they’re scavengers, after all. When I ask Servheen whether grizzlies can get “a taste for human blood”—whether a grizzly that starts eating people-meat will desire it endlessly—he dismisses the idea. “That’s for horror stories in movies,” he says. “Bears don’t get a taste for human blood. There’s no studies that show that.”

No studies show it, in part because every time a bear eats someone, they kill it. Not that it’s something that would ever be studied—biologists would never want to take the risk of keeping a bear that had eaten a person in the greater bear population. “We don’t want to test whether bears really get a taste for people,” Gunther explains. “The public wouldn’t appreciate us using them as subjects.” That’s for horror movies, but it seems like even the bear biologists think there might be some truth to the campfire legends.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

MySanAntonio:

A 6-year-old boy was attacked by a mountain lion while walking near the lodge at Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park with his family Sunday night.

The boy suffered non-life-threatening injuries — scrapes and puncture wounds to his face, according to park officials.

His father was able to fight off the cat by stabbing it with a pocket knife.

The attack occurred on February 5th. Mr. Hobbs stabbed the lion with a Spyderco Calypso pocketknife with a 3” blade. Better to have any weapon on hand than no weapon.

The Senator, a 125 feet (38 meters) tall pond cypress (Taxiodum ascendens), with a trunk diameter of 17.5 feet (5.3 meters), located in Big Tree Park, Longwood, Florida, was destroyed last night by an unexplained fire which initiated in the tree’s hollow interior.

The cypress, estimated to have been 3500 years old, was the oldest tree east of the Mississippi River, and counted on some lists as the fifth oldest tree in the world.

The Senator was 165 feet (50 meters) in 1925, before a hurricane took down its top. It was named for Senator M.O. Overstreet who donated the tree and the land surrounding it to Seminole County in 1927.

Local firefighters laid 800 feet (243.8 meters) of hose in a vain attempt to save the ancient tree.

Washington Post

cfNews13

Michael Yon (who I’m reluctantly linking, despite his being on my shit list these days for devoting so much of his blogging recently to narcissistic attempts to play crusading journalist taking on the American military high command) has fresh photos from someone in the field today.

The pictures (taken from a helipcopter north of Kandahar) are clearly of a Jungle Cat (Felix chaus), an Asian critter a bit larger than a lynx or bobcat (20-24”—48 to 61 centimeters) running 22-37”—55 to 94 centimeters in length. The body color and tail markings are pretty distinctive. Try Google Images for comparable pictures.

Three people were seriously injured in the leopard attack before the leopard was tranquilized. A former journalist and lawyer called Deva Kumar Das succumbed to his injuries on Sunday. The condition of the other two was said to be stable.

The BBC reported:

The leopard was first sighted on Saturday morning near a crematorium in the town.

As the funeral of a Congress Party leader’s son was going on, the place was full of dignitaries, ministers and other VIPs.

Police sent them to a safer place and chased the leopard out, but it turned towards the Shilpukhuri residential area.

“First, it jumped across several multi-storey buildings, including a bank, then jumped on to the ground,” said Manas Paran, photojournalist for the Sunday Indian magazine and an eyewitness.

Local people armed with sticks and iron rods tried to chase the leopard away. The enraged animal then started attacking locals, Mr Paran told BBC.

Mr Paran kept following the big cat at extremely close quarters to get good pictures for his magazine.

Deb Kumar Das, aged around 50, was one of the first people whom the leopard clawed at. He suffered severe wounds to the head, ear and neck.

He was treated in hospital but later returned home, where he was found dead on Sunday. ...

When the leopard entered a shop, locals locked it up. Forest officials and vets reached the scene after some time with tranquilisers and were able to capture it.

“After it was tranquilised and treated in Guwahati Zoo, we released it in the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary today”, said Utpal Borah, head of the zoo.

So, the leopard shows up in a large city, kills one man and seriously injures two more people, and they tranquilize it and then release it. That makes a lot of sense.

We live in the age of imbecility, don’t we?
————————————————-

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Genus Pogona.

Villagers in Bunawan, Philippines last month successfully captured what is believed to be the largest crocodile ever taken alive.

The monster is 21 feet (6.4 m.) long, and weighed in at over a ton (2365 lbs.—1065 kg.). It took more than one hundred men to lift the giant reptile out of the swamp where he was trapped and to get him onto a truck.

The villagers named the crocodile “Lolong” and plan to exhibit him to tourists in a new park built for the purpose. Lolong will be the largest reptile in captivity in the world, so he will probably attract plenty of visitors.

It took about a month, but Lolong resumed eating early in October.

Daily Mail

A Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection staff member examining the dead mountain lion at the Sessions Woods Wildlife Center in Burlington, Connecticut

Science News came up with some more information on the mountain lion killed in Milford on Connecticut’s Wilbur Cross Parkway in June.

Original story

[H]air and fecal matter [from the exactly same cougar] had been collected more than a year earlier by biologists tracking the Connecticut-bound cougar across Wisconsin. First spotted in Champlin, Minn., in December 2009, biologists tracked him as he zig-zagged through Wisconsin, leaving behind a trail of paw prints, hair and poop.

Even in Wisconsin — with its bears and wolves — cougars are unexpected visitors, says mammalian ecologist Adrian Wydeven of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in Park Falls.

There have been only four confirmed cougars in that state since 2008, so when the traveling cougar appeared, Wydeven and his team kept a watchful eye on his movements. From December 2009 through late spring 2010 they haunted the cat’s trail, collecting samples and sending them to the lab. In December, a trail camera captured a cougar prowling through the evening snow near an area where hair had been sampled earlier, providing scientists with a glimpse of the cat.

Then, after another trailside portrait in May 2010, the cat disappeared.

The next time he appeared was more than a year later and a half-continent away, just a few miles from the Connecticut shore. Scientists don’t know much about the cat’s journey between Wisconsin and Connecticut, but wildlife biologist Clayton Nielsen of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale speculates the cat probably crossed Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, then wound his way down through New York. “There’s no real way of knowing,” he says. “But going south through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio — that’s very poor habitat, with a high likelihood that people would see the animal.”

Nielsen, who is studying cougars in the Midwest, says while roaming young males are increasing in the area, there are still no known breeding populations east of the Black Hills, except for an endangered group of less than 100 in and around the Florida Everglades. Scientists hypothesize that the Connecticut cat was wandering in search of food and a mate — but since he didn’t find a mate, he kept on moving. Female cougars don’t travel nearly as far as males, which limits the establishment of new breeding populations. But, Nielsen hypothesizes, if a few females made similar journeys, it’s plausible that a cougar population could re-establish itself farther east.

————————————————-

David Baron wrote a kind of obituary for the Connecticut cougar in the form of a New York Times editorial, provocatively titled The Cougar Behind Your Trash Can:

Thanks to the South Dakota cat and its incredible journey, residents of the Eastern United States can now experience the fear and thrill that come with living below the top of the food chain. America has grown a bit less tame.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The last confirmed (until now) mountain lion resident in the Northeastern United States was killed by a trapper in Somerset County, Maine in 1938.

Mountain lions are thought by the wildlife experts to have a habitat range of 50 to 350 square miles.

DNA tests demonstrate that a mountain lion which was struck and killed by a 2006 Hyundai Tucson SUV around 1:00 a.m. on June 11 on Wilbur Cross Parkway in the area of Exit 55 in Milford, Connecticut came from far away and seems to have set something of a record for mountain lion roaming.

Middletown (CT) Press:

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said today that results of genetic tests show that the mountain lion killed in Milford in June made its way to the state from the Black Hills region of South Dakota and is an animal whose movements were actually tracked and recorded as it made its way through Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Genetic tests also show that it is likely that the mountain lion killed when it was hit by a car June 11 on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Milford was the same one that had been seen earlier that month in Greenwich.

Mountain lion seen and filmed in Greenwich circa June 5.

Wikipedia says that it is perfectly safe to swim in the immediate vicinity of Whale Sharks, Rhincodon typus, the largest extant species of fish which can reach a length of over 40’.

Whale Sharks are docile, only eat plankton, and the worst thing that can happen is the Whale Shark might accidentally bump you with his majestic tail.

Still, the diver in the Daily Mail photo looks concerned about getting sucked into that enormous gaping maw with all the plankton and finding out the hard way what those more than 300 rows of tiny teeth can do.

Who knows? The occasional diver may go nicely as an accent with one’s plankton.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

From Eiknarf via Push the Movement.

Via Zoe Pollock.

Giant hogweed, a species native to the Caucausus and Central Asia, was introduced in Britain in the 19th century as an ornamental. It has spread subsequently to Continental Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Giant hogweed can grow to a height of 23 feet (7 m.). It is invasive and its sap is highly toxic producing phytophotodermatitis, a chemical reaction causing skin cells to become hypersensitive to ultraviolet light, resulting in blisters, long-lasting scarring, and even blindness.

Giant hogweed has been found to date in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Vermont.

Via HuffPo.

For the first time in 44 years, an estimated-to-be 10-months-old Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) waddled ashore on Peka Peka Beach near the bottom of the North Island of New Zealand yesterday, approximately 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from its native Antarctic waters.

The immature Penguin is roughly 31” tall. Emperor Penguins are the largest Penguin species and can reach 48”.

News reports are indulging in the usual kinds of empty speculation. Reports of the Penguin’s possible thirst (it has been observed to be eating wet sand) are probably not well-founded. Penguins can drink salt water.

The only other confirmed sighting of a wild Emperor in New Zealand was in 1967 at the southern Oreti Beach.

Daily Mail story (good pictures)

ABC story (better information)

1:13 video

A couple of generations ago, coveys of wild bobwhite quail could be found by hunters from Florida as far north as Southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Today, quail hunting exists only for pen-raised, released birds on pay-for-shooting preserves and plantations.

What happened to wild quail? Where did they all go?

The New York Times discusses the problem and advances a theory.

Quail hunting has been both aristocratic and egalitarian. It is a sport of Southern plantation gentry who ride walking horses with bespoke double guns in their scabbards and have pedigreed pointing dogs racing across the fields before them. It is also the sport of the farm kid armed with a dad’s old shotgun and a rangy mutt for a hunting companion. Both types of hunters have equally satisfying hunts, but these days social standing does not matter. Everyone is quail-poor. Bobwhite quail are one of the most studied wildlife species in the United States, yet conservationists have yet to halt the declining populations.

Biologists agree that overhunting is not the issue. Quail are prolific breeders but have a short lifespan. Hunting seasons could be eliminated and still approximately 90 percent of the quail would be dead within the year. Other predators, like raptors, coyotes or raccoons, are also not the reason for their decline, although many hunters point the finger at them.

Don McKenzie is in charge of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, a team of 25 state fish and wildlife agencies and conservation groups. The goal of the group, formed in 2002, is to get wild quail populations to what they were in 1980.

It is one of the most difficult large-scale wildlife restoration projects. Canada geese, whitetail deer and wild turkeys — all at one time low in numbers — have become so populous that they spill into the suburbs, but bringing back bobwhite populations is a struggling enterprise.

“One of the difficult parts of quail restoration is we have to restore suitable habitat at a landscape scale,” McKenzie said. “When you compare that with deer and turkey restoration, the habitat was already suitable. It was a matter of catching remaining wild animals in places where they were and moving them to places where they weren’t and protecting them until they took care of themselves. It’s still a challenge, but nothing compared to what we face now with bobwhites.”

The reason restoring bobwhite quail is so difficult is because it involves changing the nation’s manipulated rural landscape. According to McKenzie, exotic fescue, Bahia grass and Bermuda grass took hold across the United States in the 1940s. These carpetlike grasses were planted to promote better cattle grazing and edged out the native warm-season grasses that are conducive to good quail habitat. The native grasses grow in clumps, which allow the quail to hide, move and forage and are essential to their survival.

With pastures covered with invasive exotic grasses, the quail found cover along brushy fencerows and field edges, but by the 1970s modern agricultural practices that maximized every inch of soil devoured these small sanctuaries and left quail with few hideouts.

Wildlife biologists have known about this connection between warm-season grasses and quail habitat, and many landowners have tried to create an oasis for quail on their property by planting a paradise of native plants. Yet the quail population never reached the old numbers.

“Resident game bird conservation professionals have been telling landowners this for 50 years: all you need to do is some small-scale stuff on your place and you’ll have birds and everything will be fine,” McKenzie said. “Well, after 50 years of doing that, it certainly doesn’t work.”

The problem is that the islands of prime quail habitat — restored or naturally occurring — are not connected to one another to create larger plots of good habitat where quail have greater odds of survival.

“We have to come up with bigger pieces of landscape that are managed in common, and have connections with other pieces of well-managed landscape where there are sustainable populations of birds,” McKenzie said. “We must make it happen by the millions of acres instead of by the tens of acres.”

The problem is not restricted to bobwhite quail. The Times overlooks the fact that same thing has happened to the ringnecked pheasant in the Eastern United States.

Up to the 1960s, the Asiatic pheasant had been successfully naturalized for many decades, and wild pheasant populations existed from Maryland and Virginia all the way up to Southern New England.

As with the bobwhite quail, one finds today everywhere in the East, the wild pheasant population has been completely eliminated. The State of Pennsylvania stocks thousands of pen-raised pheasants annually, and it makes no difference. Within weeks, the birds are gone.

I think the Time’s authorities are correct that edge-to-edge farming, encouraged by the Department of Agriculture’s experts, had something to do with all of this, and the altered system of grasses theory has some plausibility, but I think there may be more to it than that. I don’t see how the complete protection of raptors cannot be playing a role. And, beyond that, experience shows that populations of wild birds and animals do change dramatically and unpredictably.

Back before WWII, Canada geese were becoming very scarce and some subspecies were even believed to be nearing extinction. The wood duck was rare, and had been removed from the bag list of huntable species. In those days, the prime hunting ducks were black ducks in the Northeast, and canvasbacks in the Chesapeake.

Today, Canada geese are a public nuisance. They’ve stopped migrating. Their population has exploded, and the once less common larger subspecies is a standard inhabitant of malls, office complexes, and parks. Wood ducks are now common and have the largest bag limit, and it is unusual to ever get a shot at a black duck or a canvasback.

I don’t think the experts have a good explanation for all the wildlife population changes which occur over time.

Why are ruffed grouse scarce this year? Ask Madame Goshawk.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

And they clearly have terrific noses for food, as this Sun story repeated by MSNBC demonstrates.

A fox cub was found living at the 72nd floor of the U.K.’s tallest skyscraper, it was reported Friday.

The animal, estimated to be six months old, had lived for at least two weeks on scraps of food left by workers about 945 feet up in the under-construction Shard tower in London, The Sun newspaper said.

Pest controllers managed to catch the fox and it was released near London Bridge after a health check, the tabloid reported. London is home to a large population of urban foxes.

“It was unbelievable,” local government official Les Leonard told The Sun. “To get up there the fox would have had to climb 71 sets of stairs and an old-fashioned ladder.

“We finally caught him in a large fox cage, baited with chicken carcasses.”

The Library of Congress isn’t sure, but they think that they have a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipter cooperii) currently in residence in the main reading room. (You’d think there’d be a copy of Roger Tory Peterson in there somewhere.)

They also don’t know how to catch it.

The preferred method of reducing raptors to possession is a device called a bal-chatri, a small wood or metal cage covered with loops of monofilament (in the old days, horsehair). You place a pigeon in the cage, drop the cage on a reading room table, and go away. The hawk goes for the pigeon and gets his feet entangled in the loops. You return and there’s your hawk.