March 7, 2016 - NORWAY - Snow devils or "snownadoes" are extremely rare weather phenomena since
they require very specific meteorological conditions to form.
Snow tornadoes are so rare that only six have ever been captured on camera and very little is known about them.
These twisting columns of snow are closely related to waterspouts since
they form over either frozen lakes or snow-covered areas.
For snow devils to occur, the necessary conditions include a colder air
mass passing over a relatively warmer surface heated by sunlight, and a
low-level wind shear (change of wind speed or direction with height) or
colliding air currents to get the rising air to spin.
A warmer surface causes the snow or ice to form fog or steam, and if
there is a column of colder, low-pressure air above this fog, it will
begin to rise, and the wind shear or currents will cause it to rotate
and begin to pick up loose snow forming the recognizable funnel shape.
WATCH: Snownado in Norway.
The combination of these conditions is what makes snownadoes so rare and less intense than tornadoes.
Snownadoes have been reported as large as 30 feet wide, 45 feet high, and capable of lifting objects over 1,500 pounds.
They usually occur under or before a snow squall, meaning they are often indicators that more snow is on the way.
The one above, recorded by Tom Ording Dahl in Skjåk, Norway on March 1, 2016 was definitely not dangerous, but mesmerizing. - Strange Sounds.
Search and rescue crews work after an avalanche hit several houses in Longyearbyen, Norway, Saturday Dec. 19. 2015. It is unclear about the number of people
caught in the avalanche but authorities are calling for volunteers with shovels to help in the search to locate victims. AP
December 19, 2015 - NORWAY - Several people were injured and several others missing on Saturday after
an avalanche buried about 10 houses on the Svalbard archipelago in the
heart of the Norwegian Arctic, local officials said.
"Several people have been injured and hospitalised. Some people are
also missing," the region's government said on its website. "All
available human resources are mobilised for the rescue operation."
A spokesman for the rescue services said four adults and two children
were hospitalised but that their injuries were not life threatening.
Around 10 brightly-coloured wooden houses, typical of the style found in
the archipelago, were buried by the avalanche which happened at around
11:00 am (1000 GMT).
Witnesses said the snow had shifted the houses set on hillsides about 20 metres.
One resident, Kine Bakkeli, told NRK public television that she had
managed to escape through a window. "It's complete chaos here," she
said.
Rescuers, police and residents using spades raced to clear houses buried
under a thick layer of snow in the hope of finding the missing. It was
not known how many people were missing.
A team of doctors was planning to set out from the Norwegian city of Tromsø for Longyearbyen, Svalbard's main town.
Emergency accommodation has been set up in a youth centre and the town's church.
Weather conditions have been harsh since Friday with authorities warning people to take care in high winds. - The Local.
December 9, 2015 - NORWAY - Houses have been swept away in Norway due to heavy flooding, caused
by a huge storm which has battered the country for the past two days.
Parts of Norway have seen more than 170mm of rainfall in 48 hours.
It
is the worst flooding to hit the Scandinavian country since records
began in 1897, according to The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy
Directorate.
The video above shows that downpours have caused extensive damage:
roads flooded, trees felled and houses completely immersed underwater.
More than 30 mudslides have also been reported in the area.
According to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, officials
evacuated 100 homes in the south-western town of Eigersund.
There have
been no reports of deaths or serious injuries.
This is the second storm to hit southern Scandinavia in a week
following last weekend’s extreme weather that damaged buildings and
affected transport in Sweden and Denmark.
December 4, 2015 - NORWAY - Around 30 wild wolves are thought to call Norway home, but that
hasn't stopped the nation from allowing hunters to kill more than half
of them.
The move has been met with extreme interest: a total of 11,571
people applied for licenses to shoot 16 wolves.
The overwhelming demand from outdoor sportsmen has amounted to a ratio of 723 hunters per wolf.
Wolves have proven to be the most popular animals to hunt in the 2015-16 season, which began October 1 and ends March 31. The numbers are an increase from the 2013-14 season, when 10,000 people were registered, according to the Norwegian Association for Fishing and Hunting.
The Norwegian brown bear was the second most popular animal with hunters, as 10,930 people registered to kill just 18 of the animals. In the third place was the wolverine, with 10,820 hunters registered to shoot 141 of the furry mammals, Norway’s NRK reported.
Norway has a long tradition of hunting, with 200,000 registered hunters. The country's authorities issue licenses to keep predator populations under control and to protect livestock.
However, it is believed that the population of some animals – wolves in particular – is kept low by illegal hunting.
The controversy surrounding the country's hunting laws came to the forefront in February, when Norwegian politician Sandra Borch posted a photo of herself wearing a coat made of wolf's fur on Twitter. The move sparked anger from animal rights activists online.
"She's doing this very clearly to provoke, but I'm pretty sure it does not change the attitude of large sections of the population in Norway who say 'no' to the hunting of wolves and who are critical of the fur industry,” said Siri Martinsen, leader of the animal rights organization NOAH, as quoted by The Local.
“I knew there would be reactions, but I wanted to show that I do not care,” Borch told the newspaper VG. - RT.
November 27, 2015 - NORWAY - Fisherman in northern Norway first noticed the strange-looking purple
slime in late August of this year. At first, there were large clots of
the slimy stuff, but now, it has collected in a 200 meter (219 yards)
wide belt around Lyngen Fjord.
Whatever the purple slime is, it's freaking out fishermen and sailors alike, and no one seems to know what it is.There are various descriptions of the mass of purple slime, from clotted and mucoid, to gelatinous and gooey.
The Local,
Norway's news in English reported that Roger Larsen, an associate
professor at the University in Tromsø, told state news broadcaster NRK, "We have not been able to find out what this really is, other than that we are talking about large amounts of jellyfish." Larsen
said they have used echo sounders on the mass of purple goo, but their
results have been atypical, leading him to say he was "absolutely
sure that this is something we've never seen before. We are talking
about millions of cubic metres." That is a lot of slime.
The leading theory to what the clotted mess might be was suggested by
Tone Falkenhaug and Jan Helge Fosså, oceanographers at Norway's
Institute of Marine Research (IMR). They suggest the gelatinous goo is
caused by the disintegration of comb jellyfish, or more specifically, Ctenophora Beroe.
They are common in the fjords of Norway says Mother Nature News,
but the reasons behind the huge mass of dying comb jellies is still
being investigated. Samples of the purple sludge have been taken for
analysis, but a report on exactly what the slime is composed of has not
been released yet.
Falkenhaug told The Local. "We can't explain why it is like this, but
it's not uncommon that jellyfish appear in very dense aggregations like
this, especially deep in the fjord. I have heard that you can get this
when it's rotten, that you get this purple mucous from jellyfish. If you
have dense blooms of jellyfish, and they fall down into the water
column and they start to disintegrate."
Ctenophores, or the comb jellyfish
This phylum of marine animals can be found in oceans worldwide. The one
thing that make them distinctive is their "combs," groups of cilia they
use to move about. They are also the largest animals that move by using cilia. Their sizes range from just a few millimeters to 1.5 meters, (4-feet, 11-inches).
There are anywhere from 100 to 150 species of comb jellyfish in the
world, and they can be found in many different marine habitats, from
polar to tropical, inshore or far offshore. They can live near the
surface of the ocean or down deep. But the best-known Ctenophores are
the one that are seen near the ocean's shores.
Almost all of these creatures are predators, their prey ranging from
microscopic larvae and rotifers to the adults of small crustaceans. They
can also upset ecosystems as was demonstrated after one species,
Mnemiopsis, was accidentally introduced into the Black Sea. The ctenophore population erupted, not only eating their regular diet of marine organisms but fish larva as well. - Digital Journal.
November 13, 2015 - NORWAY - A mysterious purple slime has emerged off the coast of northern
Norway, coating millions of cubic meters of a picturesque fjord with a
strange mucoid, margarine-like substance.
"We have not been able to find out what this really is, other than that
we are talking about large amounts of jellyfish," Roger Larsen,
associate professor at the University in Tromsø, told state news
broadcaster NRK on Sunday.
"The images we are picking up from the echo sounders and other equipment are totally atypical.
We have tried to gather information to find the answers, but I am
absolutely sure that this is something we've never seen before."
Larsen, who has been surveying the emergence of the slime since
fishermen first began reporting it in late August, said that the
substance had collected in a 200m wide belt around the Lyngen Fjord.
"We are talking about millions of cubic metres," he said.
On Monday, Tone Falkenhaug and Jan Helge Fosså, oceanographers
at Norway's Institute of Marine Research (IMR) argued that the slime
might have been caused by a gigantic bloom of cigar comb jellies which
had then partially disintegrated.
"It's probably dead or partially dead jellyfish, and we think its the kind of jellyfish we think it is is called Ctenophora Beroe," Falkenhaug told The Local.
"We can't explain why it is like this, but it's not uncommon that
jellyfish appear in very dense aggregations like this, especially deep
in the fjord."
She said that while she had herself never seen a bloom of jellyfish
breaking down into a mucoid substance, the phenomenon had been
documented elsewhere.
"I have heard that you can get this when it's rotten, that you get this
purple mucous from jellyfish. If you have dense blooms of jellyfish, and
they fall down into the water column and they start to disintegrate." - The Local, Norway.
May 18, 2015 - NORWAY - Two trees disappeared one and a half meter into the ground as a sinkhole
suddenly appeared outside the entrance to the college BI at Greenland
in Drammen Thursday night.
The sinkhole outside the building
Papirbredden, which includes the economic college BI and the college of
Buskerud and Vestfold, was five times five meters (sixteen times sixteen feet).
The depth is estimated to be one and a half meters as two trees at the
site fell one and a half meters into the ground.It was the police
themselves who discovered the sinkhole when a police car passed the
place just before 22.30pm, writes the local newspaper Drammen Tidende
.An eyewitness informs local newspaper that the ground just collapsed
while the paper's own reporter mentioned that the hole was several
meters deep- It looks like a big mud pool and several meters deep.
The lapping in this deep pool, the newspaper said. Emergency
services created first major security roadblocks but narrowed later in
the evening the size.
Police kept watch at the site until Friday, when a geologist will
investigate the ground around the hole.Southern Buskerud Police District
Operations leader Trond Egil Groth says to the newspaper VG
that Drammen river are very close and that there may be water there
which trickles into the hole, but that it is too early to say anything
about what has happened.
According to police, there is a well that is 90 meters below ground at
the site, and there is also a moraine area. This may have created the
hole, said the police. - Norway Today.
Popular theories on how they got there include violent weather phenomena such as water spouts
April 16, 2015 - NORWAY - Meteorologists and biologists have been left baffled by earthworms raining from the sky over Southern Norway.
According to Norwegian news service The Local, the most recent phenomenon was discovered by biology teacher Karstein Erstad while he was skiing in the mountains.
“I saw thousands of earthworms on the surface of the snow,” he said.
“When I found them on the snow they seemed to be dead, but when I put them in my hand I found that they were alive.”
He
thought they might have crawled through the snow, but rejected this
idea, as the snow was over half a metre thick across the mountains.
This
is not the only time an area experiencing worms raining from the sky in
Norway, with other cases found in Molde and Bergen, both in the south
of the country.
One
popular theory on random animal rain suggest that the worms may have
been lifted up by a violent air pocket and then brought back down miles
away from where they started.
Another theory says water spouts,
weather systems similar to tornadoes, can travel from seas onto land and
pick up vegetation, debris, and small animals, carrying them miles away
from where they started before they blow themselves out.
According to Erstad, it’s not a new phenomenon, with reports of worms raining from skies above Norway dating back to the 1920s.
This rain of worms isn’t confined to Norway either, with a similar case reported at a Scottish Academy secondary school in 2011.
According to a report by STV, a teacher and his students had to take cover during a game of football after worms started falling from the sky.
Teacher
David Crichton said: "We were out playing football and had just done
our warm up and were about to start the next part of the lesson.
“We started hearing this wee thudding noise on the ground. There were about 20 worms already on the ground at this point."
Crichton told STV he and his colleagues counted 120 worms across the astroturf pitch following the rainfall.
The phenomenon remains a mystery. Heaven sent: Other falling creatures
* Between AD 77 and AD 79 the Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded a storm of frogs and fish in his Natural History.
* Showers of live minnow and smooth-tailed sticklebacks fell on Aberdare, Wales, 11 February 1859.
* On 21 May 1921 thousands of frogs fell on Gibraltar during a thunderstorm.
* On 4 March 1998 a shower in Shirley, Croydon, included a large number of dead frogs.
* A heavy storm in Acapulco, Mexico, on 5 October 1967, was accompanied by maggots around 1in long.
*
Dozens of fish, later identified as flounder and smelt, were found in
gardens and on roofs in the borough of Newham in east London, following a
thunderstorm on the night of 27-28 May 1984.
* On 17 May 1996 a fall of more than 20 small fish was witnessed at Hatfield in Hertfordshire.
* A shower of apples brought rush-hour traffic to a halt in Coundon, Coventry on 5 December 2011.
April 8, 2015 - EARTH - The following constitutes the latest reports of unusual and symbolic animal behavior, mass die-offs, beaching and stranding of mammals, and the appearance of rare creatures.
At least 5,000 birds killed by hailstorm in Bangladesh
20 hurt, 500 houses damaged, 5,000 birds also killed as the seasonal storm hits Kushtia, Jhenidah
Nor'wester lashed Kushtia and Jhenidah districts yesterday, leaving two people killed and 20 others injured.
The deceased are Nisarunnesa, 55, of Baghdanga village, and Rahela
Khatun, 65, of Afzalpur in Kushtia Sadar upazila, reports our
correspondent.
Locals said the two died when the sheds of their houses collapsed on
them during the storm that lashed Baghdanga and Afzalpur villages at
around 3:30am.
Deputy Commissioner Syed Belal Hossain visited the areas in the morning.
A number of houses in the areas were also damaged by the storm, said the DC.
Away in Jhenidah, a storm hit over 50 villages in Shailakupa upazila of
the district early yesterday, leaving at least 20 people injured and
damaging around 500 houses.
Of the injured, 11 were admitted to the upazila health complex while the rest given first aid, reports our correspondent.
The affected villages include Mirzapur, Diknagar, Kacherkool, Sarutia, Hakimpur and Monohorpur.
At least 5000 birds of different species also died during the storm that lasted for about 30 minutes from 4:00am, said locals.
Golam Mostofa, a farmer of Monohorpur village, said "The storm
destroyed banana and paddy on my two and three bighas of land at
midnight."
Upazila Nirbahi Officer Sandip Kumar Sarkar said the storm swept though
the areas, leaving at least 5,000 birds dead and damaging around 500
homesteads. - The Daily Star.
Baby melonhead whale found stranded near Yamba, Australia
This whale calf was found stranded near Yamba at the weekend
Staff from Dolphin Marine Magic were called to assist in the treatment
and care of a stranded whale calf on a beach south of Yamba.
DMM staff travelled to the beach and worked with volunteers from ORRCA
to stabilise the whale for several hours on Saturday until veterinary
assistance arrived. Veterinary inspection of the whale revealed that it
was an extremely young Melonhead Whale calf and therefore unable to be
released back into the ocean.
"The size of the whale and its lack of developed teeth indicates that
this was a young calf still highly dependent on its mother for
survival," DMM Veterinarian Dr Duan March said.
"The animal was heavily emaciated and in very poor body condition which
suggests it had been separated from its mother and had not been feeding
for some time.
"Unfortunately in cases like this the kindest option to the
animal is humane euthanasia rather than starvation in the ocean."
In related news, a mother and calf pair of Dwarf Sperm Whales washed up dead on a beach near Byron Bay earlier that morning. The
bodies of the whale calves from both Byron Bay and Yamba are being
transported to Coffs Harbour for post-mortem examinations by DMM staff.
"Although these two situations had a sad outcome, we can still learn a lot from these whales,"Dr March said.
"The information gained from the post-mortem examinations will increase
our knowledge and understanding of these stranding events as well as
giving us an indication of the health of whale populations off the coast
of Eastern Australia.
"This knowledge can also be used to assist us in saving other whales and dolphins in the future. - The Daily Examiner.
Aggressive coyote attacks man in Saddle River, New Jersey
A man working in his garden in the Twin Brooks area of the borough was
attacked Monday by a coyote that was then hunted down and euthanized,
authorities said.
The man, whose identity was not released, was taken to a hospital for
treatment and then released for recovery at home, according to a report
on the Saddle River Police Department's Facebook page.
The man was attacked from behind by the animal and managed to escape, the police report said.
Officers who investigated the incident learned that the same coyote had attacked a neighbor's dog last week, requiring the dog's owner to have it treated at a veterinarian's office, police said.
In addition, the police report said, workers in the area reported having seen the coyote several times on Monday, acting aggressively toward other dogs.
Officers who responded to the attack saw the coyote running
through a neighbor's yard during daylight and called a local pest
control company, which arrived, along with officers from the New Jersey
Division of Fish and Wildlife.
The coyote was found in a wooded area and put down, police said. The
animal's body was removed by the Fish and Wildlife officers for testing
and analysis.
Police asked any resident who has had an encounter with the coyote to
call 201-327-5300, to document the event. Police also are reminding
local residents to report aggressive wildlife behavior immediately, to
head off the chance of another attack. - The Record.
Strange animal behaviour: Giraffe is gored to death by an antelope at Norwegian zoo
Dozens of children witnessed a giraffe being gored to death by an antelope at a Norwegian zoo on Easter Monday.
Melvin the giraffe had got his head stuck in a fence when he was attacked by an eland antelope walking in the same enclosure at Kristiansand zoo, around 200 miles south of Oslo.
Zoo vets rushed to the scene, but were unable to save the five-year-old giraffe, who died in front of shocked families.
Around 30 people witnessed the unprovoked attack at Dyreparken Kristiansand on Monday.
Melvin was a firm favourite among young visitors, having been named in a
readers' competition in a national newspaper when he was born at the
zoo in 2010.
Witness Øivind Hansen, who was visiting the zoo with his family
and photographed the event said even his 23-year-old daughter had come
home crying after the incident.
Tragedy: Melvin the giraffe was attacked by an antelope walking in the same enclosure at Kristiansand Zoo in southern Norway
Around 30 people, many of them children, witnessed Melvin, who was born at the zoo in 2010 and named in a local newspaper competition, die in the enclosure
'It was very traumatic. People were crying everywhere,' he told Verdens Gang.
Melvin had gotten his horns stuck in the enclosure's fence when
suddenly the eland, the second largest antelope in the world, suddenly
attacked.
'He was panicking and tugged and tore to free himself, and then came a rather large animal with sharp horns and ran right into him,' Mr Hansen adds.
Around 30 people, many of them children, witnessed Melvin, who was born
at the zoo in 2010 and named in a local newspaper competition, die in
the enclosure
'It is incredibly sad,' Dyreparken's chief executive told Dagbladet.no.
'He was alive when our veterinarian came to the scene, but died while he tried to save him.'
'Melvin was gored right near his lungs and heart, and the injuries were
so serious that they killed him,' veterinarian Rolf Arne Ølberg, who was
called to the scene, said.
Mr Ølberg added that the two animals have been walking in the
same enclosure since Melvin's birth in 2010 and has no idea why the
antelope launched the deadly attack on the young giraffe.
- Daily Mail.
Bee swarms interrupt Obama storytelling
Obama is disrupted from story telling as bees cause chaos
A group of unwelcome bees disrupted US President Barack Obama's storytelling session for children at the launch of the White House Easter egg roll on Monday.
As the president was reading from 'Where the Wild Things Are', bees began buzzing around the children seated on the South Lawn.
Mr Obama told the panicked children, "Bees are good. They won't land on you. They won't sting you. They'll be OK."
The US president used this year's Easter egg roll event to support first lady Michelle Obama's 'Let's Move!' initiative to encourage children to exercise and eat healthily.
WATCH: Obama is disrupted from story telling as bees cause chaos.
The theme of this year's egg roll was 'Gimme Five', with participants encouraged to identify five ways they plan to be more active and live healthier lives.
The Easter egg roll draws tens of thousands of people to the White House South Lawn each year. - Telegraph.
Man killed by bull in Hoschton, Georgia
Bull.
Jackson County authorities say a man was killed in a bizarre accident in Hoschton Friday night.
According to Steve Nichols, the director of Jackson County EMS, the man was gored to death by a bull grazing on his propertyon Highway 332. He said emergency responders arrived at the scene just after 8 p.m.
"They kept the bull at bay until the first responders could remove the victim from the field," said Nichols.
Nichols said the victim owned the property and he owned the animal. He did not know what prompted the animal to attack.The bull was not euthanized; family members will decide what to do with the animal, according to Nichols.
Nichols was unable to release the victim's identity because of HIPPA regulations.
- Access WDUN.
Long harsh winter in Nova Scotia hard on predators like bobcat, foxes
It's been a long, harsh winter for all local wildlife, but the top of the food chain is suffering most.
Andrew Hebda, the Nova Scotia Museum's curator of zoology, said the recent heavy snowfall is leaving predators hungry.
"It's been especially difficult for foxes, bobcats and coyotes," Hebda
said Tuesday. "Anything that relies on rodents, rabbits or any small
mammal for food is stressed."
According to Hebda, small mammals are hibernating longer this year, leaving carnivores at risk of starvation.
"We've had quite a few reports of saw-whet owls being found dead," he
said. "If you make your living catching things that move, then there's a
problem. They just don't have access to food."
Hope Swinimer, director of the Hope for Wildlife Society, has been rehabilitating wild animals for 20 years. So far this winter she's treated eight bobcats, two minks and countless other owls and rodents for starvation.
"I've been doing this a long time, and I've never seen
anything quite like this," said Swinimer. "These animals were so close
to death. Bobcats are even wandering into people's backyards, just
desperate for food."
It hasn't been easy for the migrating bird population either.
"Woodcocks and robins are arriving in large numbers now," said Hebda.
"And they require access to the ground for food. This snow we've been
getting in the last 24 hours is a challenge for those birds looking for
that first nibble."
"Just this morning, I left my desk for an hour," said Swinimer.
"When I got back, I had over 30 calls about dead or dying robins."
Much like the birds, deer are also wandering farther from the forest to find food.
"Their birthing season is soon, so the does need to be in the best shape
possible," said Hebda. "That's why they're moving in, scavenging on the
sides of the highways where the snow melts."
Even though this spring is off to a late start, he expects the ecosystem to bounce back.
"There's not much ground frost under those masses of snow. So once the
snowpack goes, I think we'll find that heat is driven into the ground
much faster. Once that's gone, I think we'll see a fairly rapid onset of
growth." - The Chronicle Herald.
March 19, 2015 - EARTH - The following constitutes the latest reports of unusual and symbolic animal behavior, mass die-offs, beaching and stranding of mammals, and the appearance of rare creatures.
Large fish kill and dolphin stranding reported on Outer Banks beaches, North Carolina
A large number of dead fish and a dead dolphin have washed up on the beaches of the Outer Banks over the past few days. Locals have reported that the stretch of dead fish runs for approximately three miles in the Corolla area.
The North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources,
Division of Water Resources manages fish kill activity in the state.
Environmental Senior Specialist Jill Paxson with the Division of Water
Resources says she hasn't seen the fish kill nor gotten reports of it,
but says they are typically caused by one of two factors.
One
is netting from commercial fishermen who are permitted to discard
certain fish that they are not targeting. These fish are then sometimes
brought ashore by the winds.
The other common cause is a water
quality event with a drop in dissolved oxygen. This can happen after a
heavy rain with a lot of sediment or a localized algae bloom.
She says without being there, she couldn't say for sure what would cause
this event, but did say that a dolphin also washing up was
"interesting."
Jane Kepler, Wildlife Education Specialist with
the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission first responded to
reports of the stranded dolphin around 11:00 a.m. Tuesday.
She
says the dolphin was an adult male that was healthy, aside from a chunk
taken from its right side. That could have possibly been a shark bite,
but it's still unknown whether that happened before or after the dolphin
died. A necropsy will be performed to determine an exact cause of
death.
The dolphin was a "common dolphin," which is actually a
quite uncommon sight for the Outer Banks. Common dolphins are an
offshore species that roam in large groups. Most of the dolphins seen in
the Outer Banks are Bottlenose dolphins.
Researchers say at
this point, there's no way to tell if the fish kill and the dolphin
stranding are related or just a coincidence. - WTKR.
Spectacular lost hummingbird rediscovered after 69 years in Colombia
Conservationists
Carlos Julio Rojas and Cristian Vásquez were trekking through the high
altitude wetlands of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta when they were
stopped in their tracks by a rare and beautiful find.
Given
their location in the coastal range home to the "Lost City" (and many
yet to be discovered archeological sites), these biologists working at
the Reserva Natural de Aves 'El Dorado,' a scientific research station
of the ProAves Foundation, managed to capture with a camera the Colibrí
Barbudito Azul, or Blue-bearded Helmetcrest.
For bird lovers
around the world, the spotting of a Blue-bearded Helmetcrest is
important news, as the last time this hummingbird was seen by humans,
was back in 1946.
"I saw the flash of a bird screeching past me
and it perched on a bush nearby. I managed to take a quick photo of it
before it flew off. I then reviewed the photo in the camera and
immediately recognized the strikingly-patterned hummingbird as the
long-lost Blue-bearded Helmetcrest," explains Cristian.
The
habitat of the three birds which were spotted by Rojas and Vásquez, is
under threat by forest fires in the world's highest coastal range, the
Sierra Nevada, as extensive cattle ranching on high-elevation slopes,
involves burning brush and forest to make way for more grassland.
Over the past ten years, expeditions to find the charismatic
Blue-bearded Helmetcrest have failed. Last year, the species was
pronounced "critically endangered" by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International.
Many
ornithologists have even considered the Blue Helmetcrest to be extinct.
Survival has been made even more difficult for this bird as it feeds on
the flowering Santa Marta Frailejon (Libanothamnus occultus) plant, and with the extensive fires in the Sierra - due to a long and dry summer - are now also under threat.
"Sadly the survival of the Blue-bearded Helmetcrest hangs by a thread,"
states Carlos Julio Rojas. "The impact of brush fire is everywhere,
with the charred remains of plants littered across the páramo." For
Rojas and Vásquez, it is critical that these man-made threats are
stopped and that livestock is removed from the highest elevations of the
mountain to allow a fragile páramo, the hummingbird's natural habitat,
to recover.
A scientific article detailing the discovery of the Blue-beared Helmetcrest has been published in the journal Conservación Colombiana and is available online at the www.proaves.org website. - The City Paper.
Polar bear attacks tent in Norway's Arctic, injures tourist
Arctic campsite.
A
Czech tourist suffered minor injuries when a polar bear attacked the
tent he was sleeping in on the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard,
Norwegian authorities said Thursday.
Police spokesman Vidar
Arnesen said the man was among a group of six that was on a combined ski
and snow scooter trip on the remote islands more than 800 kilometers
(500 miles) north of the Norwegian mainland. The group was camping north
of the main town of Longyearbyen.
The man, Jakub Moravec, told local media he hoped to be out of the hospital later Thursday.
"Now I am fine. I have some scratches in the face, on one arm and on the back. But I feel fine," he told the Svalbardposten newspaper.
No one else was injured in Thursday's attack.
Another person in the group who slept in a separate tent, Zuzana
Hakova, told the newspaper her mother shot three times at the bear,
prompting the animal to flee. It was eventually found and killed by
authorities.
Moravec and Hakova told Svalbardposten that they also had traveled to Svalbard to see Friday's total solar eclipse.
Lodging on Svalbard has been sold out for years for the eclipse, and
visitors are reminded often that polar bears roam. Authorities say that
when moving outside of settlements, people must carry firearms.
Moravec said the bear attack hadn't scared him.
"I'd gladly go out to the mountains on Svalbard again," he was quoted as saying. - Townhall.
Wolf attacks a dog in Duluth, Minnesota
A wolf.
Duluth woman has a warning for pet owners after she says her dog was attacked by a wolf.
Maureen Zupancich says her 11-year-old dog Max was attacked Tuesday
morning at their home on the Portage Road in Piedmont Heights.
She says the pooch suffered puncture wounds and bruises and had to get stiches and staples.
Zupancich says her husband saw the dog being carried away by the wolf.
WATCH: Duluth dog owner offers warning after wolf attack.
"This animal had picked Max up by the neck, and Max weighs 36 pounds, and carried out of the front yard,across
the street and was getting ready to enter the woods," said Zupancich.
"At that time when my husband was running down the driveway and
screaming at this animal dropped Max on the other side and ran into the
woods."
Zupancich says she and her husband have been in touch
with both Duluth Police and the Department of Natural Resources about
the incident.
She fears the wolf is still on the prowl in the neighborhood.
Our Facebook fans also weighed in the story and some said they've seen wolves and coyotes in other Duluth neighborhoods, but nothing like what Zupancich experienced.
They gobble up trees and send politicians into a frenzy. But do the bugs know more about climate change than we do?
There is an eerie feel to this grove of lodgepole pines that I can't
quite put my finger on as entomologist Diana Six tromps ahead of me,
hatchet in hand, scanning the southwestern Montana woods for her target.
But as she digs the blade into a towering trunk, it finally hits me:
the smell. There's no scent of pine needles, no sharp, minty note wafting through the brisk fall air.
Six hacks away hunks of bark until she reveals an inner layer riddled
with wormy passageways. "Hey, looky!" she exclaims, poking at a small
dark form. "Are you dead? Yeah, you're dead." She extends her hand,
holding a tiny black oval, maybe a quarter of an inch long. Scientists
often compare this insect to a grain of rice, but Six prefers mouse
dropping: "Beetle in one hand, mouse turd in another. You can't tell
them apart." She turns to the next few trees in search of more traces.
Pill-size holes pock their ashen trunks—a sign, along with the missing
pine scent, of a forest reeling from an invasion.
These tiny
winged beetles have long been culling sickly trees in North American
forests. But in recent years, they've been working overtime. Prolonged
droughts and shorter winters have spurred bark beetles to kill billions
of trees in what's likely the largest forest insect outbreak ever
recorded, about 10 times the size of past eruptions. "A doubling would
have been remarkable," Six says. "Ten times screams that something is
really going wrong."
Mountain pine, spruce, piñon ips, and other kinds of bark beetles have chomped 46 million of the country's 850 million acres of forested land, from the Yukon down the spine of the Rocky Mountains all the way to Mexico.
Yellowstone's grizzly bears have run out of pinecones to eat because of
the beetles. Skiers and backpackers have watched their brushy green
playgrounds fade as trees fall down, sometimes at a rate of 100,000 trunks a day. Real estate agents have seen home prices plummet from "view shed contamination" in areas ransacked by the bugs. And the devastation isn't likely to let up anytime soon. As climate change warms
the North American woods, we can expect these bugs to continue to
proliferate and thrive in higher elevations—meaning more beetles in the
coming century, preying on bigger chunks of the country. BEETLEMANIA
From 2000 to 2014, bark beetles destroyed large swaths of forests in the American West—and they're not done yet.
In
hopes of staving off complete catastrophe, the United States Forest
Service, which oversees 80 percent of the country's woodlands, has
launched a beetle offensive, chopping down trees to prevent future
infestations. The USFS believes this strategy reduces trees' competition
for resources, allowing the few that remain to better resist invading
bugs. This theory just so happens to also benefit loggers, who are more
than willing to help thin the forests. Politicians, too, have jumped on
board, often on behalf of the timber industry: More than 50 bills
introduced since 2001 in Congress proposed increasing timber harvests in
part to help deal with beetle outbreaks.
But Six believes that
the blitz on the bugs could backfire in a big way. For starters, she
says, cutting trees "quite often removes more trees than the beetles
would"—effectively outbeetling the beetles. But more importantly,
intriguing evidence suggests that the bugs might be on the forest's
side. Six and other scientists are beginning to wonder: What if the
insects that have wrought this devastation actually know more than we do
about adapting to a changing climate?
A BUG'S LIFE
An adult mountain pine beetle lays her eggs under the bark. On her way,
she disperses fungi that turn the trees' tissue into food for her
babies, eventually killing the tree.
THOUGH THEY'RE OFTEN
described as pesky invaders, bark beetles have been a key part of
conifer ecosystems for ages, ensuring that groves don't get overcrowded.
When a female mountain pine beetle locates a frail tree, she emits a
chemical signal to her friends, who swarm to her by the hundreds.
Together they chew through the bark until they reach the phloem, a cushy
resinous layer between the outer bark and the sapwood that carries
sugars through the tree. There, they lay their eggs in tunnels, and
eventually a new generation of beetles hatches, grows up, and flies
away. But before they do, the mature beetles also spread a special
fungus in the center of the trunk. And that's where things get really
interesting.
Six focuses on the "evolutionary marriage" of
beetle and fungi at her four-person lab at the University of Montana,
where she is the chair of the department of ecosystems and conservation
sciences. Structures in bark beetles' mouths have evolved to carry
certain types of fungi that convert the tree's tissue into nutrients for
the bug. The fungi have "figured out how to hail the beetle that will
get them to the center of the tree," Six says. "It's like getting a
taxi." The fungi leave blue-gray streaks in the trees they kill;
"blue-stain pine" has become a specialty product, used to make
everything from cabins to coffins to iPod cases.
A healthy tree
can usually beat back invading beetles by deploying chemical defenses
and flooding them out with sticky resin. But just as dehydration makes
humans weaker, heat and drought impede a tree's ability to fight
back—less water means less resin. In some areas of the Rocky Mountain
West, the mid-2000s was the driest, hottest stretch in 800 years. From
2000 to 2012, bark beetles killed enough trees to cover the entire state
of Colorado. "Insects reflect their environment," explains renowned
entomologist Ken Raffa—they serve as a barometer of vast changes taking
place in an ecosystem.
Typically, beetle swells subside when
they either run out of trees or when long, cold winters freeze them off
(though some larvae typically survive, since they produce antifreeze
that can keep them safe down to 30 below). But in warm weather the bugs
thrive. In 2008, a team of biologists at the University of Colorado
observed pine beetles flying and attacking trees in June, a month
earlier than previously recorded. With warmer springs, the beetle flight
season had doubled, meaning they could mature and lay eggs—and then
their babies could mature and lay eggs—all within one summer.
That's not the only big change. Even as the mountain pine beetles run
out of lodgepole pines to devour in the United States, in 2011 the
insects made their first jump into a new species of tree, the jack pine,
in Alberta. "Those trees don't have evolved defenses," Six says, "and
they're not fighting back." The ability to invade a
new species means the insects could begin a trek east across Canada's
boreal forest, then head south into the jack, red, and white pines of
Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, and on to the woods of the East
Coast. Similarly, last year, the reddish-black spruce beetle
infested five times as many acres in Colorado as it did in 2009. And in
the last decade, scientists spotted the southern pine beetle north of
the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time on record, in New Jersey and
later Long Island. As investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk put it
in his 2011 book on the outbreaks Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America's Great Forests, we now belong to the "empire of the beetle."
[...]
But
Six has a different way of looking at the trees' plight: as a battle
for survival, with the army of beetles as a helper. She found compelling
evidence of this after stumbling across the work of Forest Service
researcher Constance Millar, with whom she had crossed paths at beetle
conferences.
Millar was comparing tree core measurements of
limber pines, a slight species found in the eastern Sierras of
California that can live to be 1,000 years old. After mountain pine
beetles ravaged one of her study sites in the late 1980s, certain trees
survived. They were all around the same size and age as the surrounding
trees that the beetles tore through, so Millar looked closer at tree
ring records and began to suspect that, though they looked identical on
the outside, the stand in fact had contained two genetically distinct
groups of trees. One group had fared well during the 1800s, when the
globe was still in the Little Ice Age and average temperatures were
cooler. But this group weakened during the warmer 1900s, and grew more
slowly as a result. Meanwhile, the second group seemed better suited for
the warmer climate, and started to grow faster.
When beetle
populations exploded in the 1980s, this second group mounted a much more
successful battle against the bugs. After surviving the epidemic, this
group of trees "ratcheted forward rapidly," Millar explains. When an
outbreak flared up in the mid-2000s, the bugs failed to infiltrate any
of the survivor trees in the stand. The beetles had helped pare down the
trees that had adapted to the Little Ice Age, leaving behind the ones
better suited to hotter weather. Millar found similar patterns in
whitebark pines and thinks it's possible that this type of
beetle-assisted natural selection is going on in different types of
trees all over the country.
When Six read Millar's studies, she
was floored. Was it possible, she wondered, that we've been going about
beetle management all wrong? "It just hit me," she says. "There is
something amazing happening here."
Last year, Six and Eric Biber, a University of California-Berkeley law professor, published a provocative review paper in the journal Forests that challenged the Forest Service's beetle-busting strategies.
After scrutinizing every study about beetle control that they could get
their hands on, they concluded that "even after millions of dollars and
massive efforts, suppression...has never effectively been achieved,
and, at best, the rate of mortality of trees was reduced only marginally."
Six points to a stand of lodgepoles in the University of Montana's
Lubrecht Experimental Forest. In the early 2000s, school foresters
preened the trees, spacing them out at even distances, and hung signs to
note how this would prevent beetle outbreaks. This "prethinned" block
was "the pride and joy of the experimental forest," Six remembers. But
that stand was the first to get hit by encroaching pine beetles, which
took out every last tree. She approached the university forest managers.
"I said, 'Boy, you need to document that,'" Six says. "They didn't.
They just cut it down. Now there's just a field of stumps."
Six
and Biber's paper came as a direct affront to some Forest Service
researchers, one of whom told me that he believes changing forest
structure through thinning is the only long-term solution to the beetle
problem. Politicians tend to agree—and beetle
suppression sometimes serves as a convenient excuse: "It is perhaps no
accident that the beetle treatments most aggressively pushed for in the
political landscape allow for logging activities that provide revenue
and jobs for the commercial timber industry," Six and Biber wrote in the Forests review.
Take the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act, proposed in 2013 by then-Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and championed by then-Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). The
bill sought to designate "Revenue Areas" in every national forest
where, to help address insect infestations, loggers would be required to
clear a certain number of trees every year. Loggers could gain access
to roadless areas, wilderness study areas, and other conservation sites,
and once designated, their acreage could never be reduced. The zones
would also be excluded from the standard environmental-review process.
Six
and other scientists vehemently opposed these massive timber
harvests—as did environmental advocates like the Sierra Club and
Defenders of Wildlife, the latter warning that the harvests would take
logging to "to unprecedented and unstable levels." The bill passed the
House but died in the Senate last year. But Daines, now a senator and one of 2014's top 10 recipients of timber money, vows to renew the effort so as to "revitalize Montana's timber industry" and "protect the environment for future generations."
This
summer, Six plans to start examining the genes of "supertrees"—those
that survive beetle onslaughts—in stands of whitebarks in Montana's Big
Hole Valley. Her findings could help inform a new kind of forest
management guided by a deeper understanding of tree genes—one that
beetles have had for millennia.
If we pay close enough
attention, someday we may be able to learn how to think like they do.
University of California-Davis plant sciences professor David Neale
champions a new discipline called "landscape genomics." At his lab in Davis, Neale operates a machine that
grinds up a tree's needles and spits out its DNA code. This technology
is already being used for fruit tree breeding and planting, but Neale
says it could one day be used in wild forests. "As a person, you can
take your DNA and have it analyzed, and they can tell you your relative
risk to some disease," Neale says. "I'm proposing to do the same thing
with a tree: I can estimate the relative risk to a change in
temperature, change in moisture, introduction to a pathogen."
Right now, foresters prune woodlands based on the size of trees' trunks
and density of their stands. If we knew more about trees' genetic
differences, Neale says, "maybe we would thin the ones that have the
highest relative risks." This application is still years off, but Neale
has already assembled a group of Forest Service officials who want to
learn more about landscape genomics.
Six, meanwhile, places her faith in the beetles.
Whereas traditional foresters worry that failing to step in now could
destroy America's forests, Six points to nature's resilience. Asked at TEDx how she wants to change the world, she responded,
"I don't want to change the world. We have changed the world to a point
that it is barely recognizable. I think it's time to stop thinking
change and try to hold on to what beauty and function remains." - Mother Jones.
Dog viciously mauls a two-year-old girl in Suwannee, Florida
UF Health in Gainesville.
A
two-year-old girl was viciously attacked by a dog on Wednesday, March
18, marring her face and upper body with severe wounds that may require
cosmetic surgery, according to reports. The attack happened near the
intersection of 177th Rd. and 120th Rd. in Western Suwannee County. The
girl, Marina Aldama, was treated by medics at the scene until she was
life flighted to UF Health in Gainesville. She was in stable condition
when she was transported, according to Public Safety Director James
Sommers.
"It was a significant dog attack," said Sommers. "She
will probably need cosmetic surgery to reattach everything. Her face,
shoulders, upper torso, and back of the head were wounded."
According to a report from the Suwannee County Sheriff's Office, Marina
was with her mother in a van with the side door open waiting for her
father to get lunch around 1 p.m. on Wednesday. Marina was pulled out of the van and attacked by a dog, the report states. The attack was unprovoked, according to the report.
t is unclear whether Marina was attacked by just the dog who pulled her
out of the van or two other dogs who were also found with blood on them
at their owner's residence, according to the SCSO report. The dogs were
described as "white with brown on them" in the report and officers
found blood on one dog's face and neck while two other dogs had blood
splatters and streaks on them. Animal control officers made contact with
the owner of the dogs regarding the attack.
The dogs were reported to be mixed breed bulldogs.
The report states Marina received a large laceration on her back left
shoulder and an unknown extent of injury to the right side of her face.
According to an animal bite investigation report, the owner of the dogs
reported that the main dog, a three-year-old female, was vaccinated
against rabies and had not bitten anyone before.
The Suwannee Democrat is attempting an interview with a family member of Marina. - Suwannee Democrat.
A
security guard at a KwaZulu-Natal game reserve cannot believe that he
is still alive after he was attacked by a hippo while on patrol.
Bongani Makhanya said that he had been patrolling near the Paperbark
Lodge at the Tala private game reserve just before his shift ended on
Thursday morning, when the startled animal attacked him.
"I did
not know that there was a hippo sleeping behind a tree when I walked
by. My footsteps obviously disturbed the animal. It came straight at me
and was after my head but I blocked it with my arm, so it bit that
instead," Makhanya said in a TimesLive report.
He said that his screams of pain scared the animal away.
Makhanya said that he ran back to his transport to get help.
Paramedics said that they found Makhanya with a badly crushed right
arm, but managed to stabilise him before taking him to hospital. He
underwent surgery on his arm on the same day.
"I am so lucky to
be alive. Hippos leave nothing behind when they attack. I still cannot
believe that I am alive," he said in the report.
Makhanya said that it was the first attack on the reserve, that he knew of, in his 25 years of working there.He
though did not blame the animal for the attack, adding that he was
looking forward to going back to work as soon as possible.
"I love my job too much. And I love animals. It was not the hippo's fault," he said from his Pietermaritzburg hospital bed. - iAfrica.
Dead gray whale found off Torrey Pines State Beach, California
A
dead gray whale was found floating in the waters near Torrey Pines
State Beach Thursday morning, San Diego Lifeguard officials confirmed.
The young whale -- measuring approximately 15 to 20 feet in length --
was discovered about 250 yards off the shore. Lifeguards confirmed the
animal was dead when they reached it just before 10 a.m.
Aerial video showed dozens of birds hovering over the carcass, which was floating belly up in the water.
San Diego Fire-Rescue spokesman Lee Swanson said lifeguards were
waiting to see if the whale would drift to the shore before beginning
any recovery operations. Swanson said officials were trying to determine
if the whale would wash up on a city or state beach in order to then
decide who would then be responsible for getting rid of it.
WATCH: Dead whale removed from ocean.
Swanson said lifeguards don't have the equipment to haul it off, so
officials would need to hire a contractor for the clean-up.
Marine Safety Lt. James Gartland said there was no threat of the animal
washing onto the shore. Ultimately, he said officials decided to tow the
whale into Fiesta Island on Mission Bay in an operation that would take
several hours.
Gartland said the whale would be towed in by
the tail. After that, he said a national marine fisheries team will come
out and take samples from the whale in order to determine its cause of
death. Once that's complete, a team will dispose of the carcass by
hauling it to the city dump.
Gartland said it appears the whale
has been floating in the water for weeks, as its carcass is very
bleached out. He said the clean-up would be inevitably smelly.
"It's really pungent; it's usually a pretty stinky operation," he explained.
Gartland said the last time a whale was found near a local beach was around this time last year near Sunset Cliffs. - NBC San Diego.
Farmer killed by elephant near Gudalur, India
Asian elephant.
A man was killed by an elephant near Gudalur on Thursday. Forest sources told The Hindu that the animal attacked Baapu Kutty alias Hamza (72),a farmer of Pakkanna, when he came out of his house early morning.
In the darkness, he failed to spot the elephant. People in the vicinity raised an alarm, but he did not hear them.
The elephant pushed him down before moving away.
The pachyderm was seen in the area a few times recently.
Nilgiris Collector P.Sankar handed over a cheque for Rs. three lakhs to the family of the victim. - The Hindu.
Elephant herd tramples man to death in Dhepapalli, India - third fatality in 15 days
Charging elephants.
A
herd of elephants trampled Kasi Nath, 70, to death at Dhepapalli, 80 km
from here, under Ganjam district's Sorada forest range yesterday.
Patra was going to catch a bus to Sorada when he confronted the wild
elephants. He died on the spot, said divisional forest officer (DFO),
Ghumusar South, R K Mallick. He said the kin of the deceased would get
Rs 3 lakh as compensation in tune with government policy.
The herd also damaged maize crops. This was the third death in the district by elephants in last 15 days. A
wild tusker crushed two persons to death at Dolaba, 40 km from here,
near Digapahandi on March 4. While one died on the spot, the other
succumbed to his injuries at MKCG Medical College and Hospital here the
next day.
The DFO said a herd of nine
elephants, a tusker, four females and four calves, are moving in Sorada
jungles in search of food and water. The herd might have migrated from
Lakhari valley elephant reserve, said forest range officer (Sorada) K C
Sahu.
Since the herd is camping in the nearby jungle, a
10-member squad to drive away the jumbos has been deployed in the area,
Sahu said. Forest officials have asked people through loudspeakers not
to venture into the jungle. - The Times of India.
March 14, 2015 - EARTH - The following constitutes the latest reports of unusual and symbolic animal behavior, mass die-offs, beaching and stranding of mammals, and the appearance of rare creatures.
A
bear attacked a woman in northern Karelia's Juuka, when she came upon
the animal that had woken from its winter sleep. The bear was tracked
down 10 kilometres from the spot, and shot.
The woman was
walking in the woods on Thursday morning, when she stumbled across the
bear's den. The woken beast attacked the woman, lashing out at her with
his paw and biting her in the elbow and buttock. The bear then
disappeared into the woods.
The woman called emergency services
herself, and was picked up in the forest about an hour later. According
to the police, the woman was not injured seriously. She walked to the
ambulance herself.
Appealing to police law, the authorities ordered the bear to be put down.
Tracked down and shot
The bear was finally tracked down some 10 kilometres from the attack
location, in Ahmovaara near Kolinportti on Friday morning.
According to authorities leading the hunt, the bear was followed for a
couple of kilometres before a dog was unleashed. The dog quickly found
the bear, who tried to escape across Kajaanintie, a major road in the
region, but was shot dead on the other side. The male bear weighed over
200 kilograms.
Bear attacks on humans are extremely rare in
Finland. The animals usually run away if possible. A bear may attack if
frightened by a surprise visit to its den. Another dangerous situation
is where a human comes between a bear mother and its cubs. - YLE.
200 reindeer killed by avalanche in Trollheimen, Norway
Reindeer killed by avalanche
An
animal tragedy in the Oppdals part of Trollheimen, specifically in the
area south of Storhornet, was discovered Wednesday afternoon.
Two local residents, Day Jørund Vik and John Bjorndal, wanted to see the
extent of the landslide and took a trip inland to the area the same
day.
We had heard about it being exceptional and wondered how
big it was. We discovered that the animals had been taken and notified
the reindeer owner, says Vik Adresseavisen.
The animal tragedy was also featured by a number of other media including local newspapers Opdalingen, Up and NRK Sor-Trondelag.
In the spring
The landslide proved to be about one mile wide and nearly as long. It
is estimated that there was about 120,000 cubic meters of snow.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 tons had swept over all or most of the
reindeer herd of a few hundred animals that winter in the area.
Three to four days later four animals, still alive, were unearthed from
the snow by herder Gustav Kant and crews that had been called in.
Three of the animals were so severely injured that they had to be
euthanized. The fourth, a doe, was in such good shape that she ran away
and disappeared into the mountains.
The reindeer owner and his
aides have so far unearthed 35-40 dead animals from the snowpack which
had a depth of between two and nine yards.
The dead animals lay
partly on the surface and partly buried in the snow. The rest are
probably buried well down in the snow and many of them will not be found
until the snow melts in the spring. - TK. [Translated]
Wolves attack dogs in Pacific Rim Park, Canada
Parks Canada is warning people to keep their dogs
on a leash while walking in Pacific Rim National Park near Ucluelet,
B.C. because of attacks by wolves.
Two dogs are injured and another is missing after a series of wolf attacks near Ucluelet, B.C.
On
Tuesday morning, a pair of wolves attacked two dogs being walked off
leash on Wickaninnish Beach. While the larger dog escaped, the smaller
one — a Jack Russell Terrier — was taken by the pair.
Todd Windle, a human-wildlife conflict expert with Parks Canada, saysthe dogs' owner was only 200 metres away when the attack happened.
"She saw both wolves come up and they started attacking her larger dog first," says Windle.
The second, smaller dog then came in to defend the larger one. The
wolves left the bigger one alone and made off with the smaller one
instead.
Three days earlier, a chocolate lab was attacked by two wolves in a driveway of a home near Ucluelet, but a neighbour scared off the pair.
Windle says dogs must be leashed when in the park including its
beaches. He says off-leash dogs are at a greater risk of being attacked
by wolves and cougars.
"Although there's several incidents
every single year in this region, we are not aware of any single
incidents where dogs have been attacked where they're on leash," says
Windle.
Wolves and cougars frequent different areas of the park including the beaches.
If people come into contact with a wolf, Windle suggests making noise and keeping as far away from it as possible. - CBC.
What
would you do if your refrigerator and kitchen cupboards were locked and
you didn't have a key? The grocery stores were all boarded up, and it's
the dead of winter so your garden has long stopped being productive.
Oh, and you can't drive anywhere because of a natural instinct telling
you to stay put.
That is what the last six weeks have been like for many birds, especially waterfowl. And it's been a deadly scenario.
I heard the other day that upwards of 70 ducks and geese were found
dead at the Norwalk Wastewater Treatment Plant, most likely because of
malnutrition. I also received a call from a Westport resident who had
five dead Canada geese in her yard one morning. The number swelled to
eight as the week went on. Mute Swans have been stranded on frozen
water, too, although some of those birds have been saved.
"It's
been the most severe winter we've had in 30 years," said Min Huang, a
waterfowl specialist with Connecticut Department of Energy and
Environmental Protection (DEEP). "We've seen a lot of mortality over the
last three weeks up and down the coast, mostly geese and puddle ducks."
Waterfowl, including geese, can find food in the water or on land under
normal circumstances. The sources of food on land have been covered
since the late January snow storm. A few additional snow storms and a
few ice storms for good measure have all but sealed up that food source
for more than five weeks. Only in the last day or two has some snow
melted to show grass along the edges of yards and fields.
Throw
in sustained subfreezing temperatures that froze all the water in
sight, including Long Island Sound, and you have a very deadly winter
for ducks and geese.
"We don't usually get a sustained freeze that lasts all of February and into March," Huang said.
Huang confirmed that DEEP personnel did visit the wastewater treatment
plant in Norwalk this week. He didn't get a number of dead waterfowl,
but he did say that most of the dead birds were geese and puddle ducks.
"I haven't received any reports yet, but I'm 95 percent confident that (those deaths) are just malnutrition," Huang said.
Puddle ducks, such as Mallards and American Black Ducks, dabble, or tip
up, to feed in the water. That method, obviously, is rendered useless
when the water is frozen.
Diving ducks, such as Hooded
Mergansers, were able to find small pools of water kept unfrozen by
bubblers at boat docks. They were able to dive for small fish and other
morsels within those pools.
Huang said the DEEP will not know the real impact on duck and geese populations until they do their surveys in the spring.
Milan Bull, senior director of science and conservation at Connecticut
Audubon, said the timing of the deep and sustained freeze did not work
in the waterfowl's favor.
He said geese and duck eat
voraciously in the fall to store up fat reserves for the winter. In
winter, they eat what they can find to sustain themselves.
"If
this freeze happened in December or January, they'd be fine because of
their fat reserves," Bull said. "The later it gets in winter, the harder
it is."
Bull confirmed what Huang said about the bird mortality being a problem in the entire state.
"Up and down the coast there are a lot of dead waterfowl," he said.
So why not just fly south to find open water and food? Huang said by
December ducks have found their wintering grounds and they aren't likely
to move on until the end of winter.
"Once we're into December,
they aren't going anywhere," he said. "The ducks feel it's not worth it
to use the energy it takes to migrate.This year, frozen water has been a problem from Virginia to Maine."
In other words, ducks and geese gamble that local waters will not
remain frozen for long and that offers better odds survival than trying
to use what fat stores they have left to fly hundreds of miles south to
find open water.
In most winters that gamble pays off. This winter, it was a bad bet for many geese and ducks. - The Hour.
1,450 sea lions have washed up on California beaches this year
By the time Wendy Leeds reached him, the sea lion pup had little hope of surviving.
Like more than 1,450 other sea lions that have washed up on California
beaches this year, in what animal experts call a growing crisis for the
animal, this 8-month-old pup was starving, stranded and hundreds of miles from a
mother who still needed to nurse him and teach him to hunt and feed. Ribs jutted from his velveteen coat.
The pup had lain on the beach for hours, becoming the target of an
aggressive dog before managing to wriggle onto the deck of a
million-dollar oceanfront home, where the owner shielded him with an
umbrella and called animal control. In came Ms. Leeds, an animal-care
expert at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which like other California
rescue centers is being inundated with calls about lost, emaciated sea
lions.
"It's getting crazy," she said.
Experts suspect that unusually warm waters are driving fish and other
food away from the coastal islands where sea lions breed and wean their
young. As the mothers spend time away from the islands hunting for food,
hundreds of starving pups are swimming away from home and flopping ashore from San Diego to San Francisco.
Many of the pups are leaving the Channel Islands, an eight-island chain
off the Southern California coast, in a desperate search for food. But
they are too young to travel far, dive deep or truly hunt on their own,
scientists said.
WATCH: California sea lions pups in crisis.
This
year, animal rescuers are reporting five times more sea lion rescues
than normal — 1,100 last month alone. The pups are turning up under
fishing piers and in backyards, along inlets and on rocky cliffs. One
was found curled up in a flower pot.
Last week,
SeaWorld San Diego said it would shut its live sea lion and otter show
for two weeks so it could spare six of its animal specialists for the
rescue-and-recovery effort.
"There are so many calls, we just
can't respond to them all," Justin Viezbicke, who oversees stranding
issues in California for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, said on a conference call with reporters. "The reality
is, we just can't get to these animals."
As the injured animals
proliferate, their encounters with humans are growing. Some people
offer misguided help such as dousing the pups with water or trying to
drag them back into the ocean. Others take selfies with the stranded
animals, pet them or let their children pretend to ride them, rescuers
said.
As Ms. Leeds approached the quaking sea lion on
Capistrano Beach, she frowned at a pile of tuna near his muzzle. "Has
someone been trying to feed him?" she asked.
Many are sick with
pneumonia, their throaty barks muted to rasping coughs. Parasites have
swarmed their digestive systems. Some are so tired that they cannot
scamper away when rescuers approach them with nets and towels and heft
them into large pet carriers.
"They come ashore because if they
didn't, they would drown," said Shawn Johnson, the director of
veterinary science at Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. "They're just bones and skin. They're really on the brink of death."
This year is the third in five years that scientists have seen such large numbers of strandings. - New York Times.
Woman dies and 2 injured after whale crashes into tourist boat off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
A
Canadian woman died from injuries sustained when a grey whale crashed
into a tourist boat as it returned from a short excursion out of the
resort city of Cabo San Lucas in Mexico.
Two other passengers
were injured in the accident, which took place close to the beach around
11am on Wednesday, according to a statement released by tour company
Cabo Adventures.
"The captain had to make a movement to avoid a
whale that surfaced just in front of the boat," the statement said.
"The whale hit one side of the boat, leaving two people injured and
another passenger hurt who, unfortunately, later died in hospital."
Port director Vicente Martínez said the woman was 45 years old. Some
reports said she was 10 years younger. The collision happened on the
Pacific coast side of the Baja California Peninsula. One reported version said the whale jumped out of the water and landed on the boat filled with 24 people, including the crew.
The confusingly worded statement from the tour company appeared to
suggest that the victim fell into the water during the collision. Once
she was pulled back into the boat, it said, she immediately received
mouth to mouth resuscitation from another tourist who happened to be a
qualified nurse before naval rescue paramedics arrived and took her to
the hospital.
Two other injured tourists were also taken to
hospital - one was later released and the other's life was not in
danger, the statement said.
Cabo San Lucas promotes whale
watching among its major attractions, promising tourists safe and
awe-inspiring encounters with the huge docile mammals that every winter
migrate thousands of miles from Arctic waters to warm shallow lagoons
off the Mexican coast where they breed.
The fatality happened
on the same day that Mexican authorities announced a particularly high
number of grey whales had gathered in the area during this year's
season, which runs from mid-December to the end of April.
The
National Commission for Natural Protected Areas said its census
indicated a 10% increase on last season, making it one of the highest
migrations registered during the last two decades. - The Guardian.
Family dog mauls 2-year-old boy in Kauai, Hawaii
Pitbull terrier
A two-year-old boy is in serious condition after being attacked by a family dog Tuesday on Kauai.
Officers responded to Wena Street in Puhi at about 11 a.m. on a dangerous dog complaint.
The boy was bitten by a pitbull on the face, neck and back.
He was transported to Wilcox Memorial Hospital in serious condition,
then medevaced to Queen's Medical Center on Oahu. Kauai Humane Society
Executive Director Penny Cistaro confirmed the dog was euthanized. - Kiki Radio.
Wolf seen prowling the streets of Kolham, Netherlands
A bizarre video has emerged in the Netherlands of a lone wolf stalking a city suburb as it hunted for its next meal.
The huge grey wolf was filmed running along a residential street in the
northern city of Kolham, which is normally packed with children and
family pets.
The 22 second video shows the wolf strutting along
the road for around 30 metres, stopping from time to time to look into
gardens before continuing on its way.
Although running at a brisk pace, witnesses say that it did not seem dangerous and was possibly looking for a new home.
WATCH: Terrifying footage of wolf prowling the city streets.
However,
wolves have not been seen in the country for more than 150 years .
Local experts believe the wolf had travelled to the city from Germany -
up to 190 miles away.
Oguz Acioz, 35, captured the footage while driving to work before calling the police.
The salesman said: "The last wolf was seen here about 150 years ago.
"I was about a metre behind it. I could see the mouth and the teeth and
I knew it wasn't a dog so I started filming straight away.
"I was so surprised. You never see one of these on a street. It's not a normal sight.
"Luckily, there was nobody on the street as everyone had gone to work.
Normally there are lots of children around and chickens in back gardens.
"I looked at it in the eyes. It seemed hungry.
"I wasn't scared. I wanted to see him. I thought he might need help.
"It was seen crossing the border [with Germany] on Friday. There is a picture of it and it is the same wolf.
"People think it might have been looking for a new home or mate. It ran a long way.
"Yesterday, they captured it and took it back to Germany." - Daily Mirror.
Biocide! 2.9 million whales slaughtered in 100 years
Whales slaughtered.
The first estimate of the number of whales killed during the 2oth century is set to be published in the next edition of Marine Fisheries Review. Researchers hunted through the records and found that between 1900 and 1999 a total of 2.9 million whales were killed.
The scale of modern industrial whaling that took hold in the early and
mid 1900's is astonishing. The researchers, Robert C. Rocha, Jr.,
Phillip J. Clapham, and Yulia Ivashchenko, found
that between 1900 and 1962 the number of sperm whales killed equalled
the total estimated to have been killed over the previous 200 years.
But the height of the whaling industry was only just beginning. In the
following 10 years between 1962 and 1972 the industry managed to repeat
the scale of killing.
The
researchers estimated that between 1712 and 1899 whaler in small
sailing boats managed to kill 300,000 sperm whales. Modern techniques
and improved shipping meant whalers killed 300,000 sperm whales between
1900 and 1962. Then the big factory ships were launched and in just 10
years another 300,000 sperm whales were caught.
By the time the
International Whaling Commission had effectively banned whaling in 1982
they estimate that at least 2,870,291 had been killed since the start
of the century.
Up to 1963 it was estimated
that whalers were taking upwards of 10,000 fin whales each year before
numbers began to fall. Sei whales where then targeted at rates exceeding
10,000 per year. Baleen whales were a major species for the whalers
until population levels dropped to levels which led to annual catches
falling below 10,000 per year in 1969.
Following declining
catches of preferred species (fin and sei) in the northern hemisphere
during the 1970's the whalers turned their harpoon sights on Bryde's and
humpback whales.
Minke whales in the northern hemisphere were
targeted by whalers as the northern blue whale population declined. From
the 1940 through to the 1980s about 3000 minke whales in the northern
hemisphere were killed. Minke whales escaped targeting for a couple of
decades because of the prevalence of more profitable species. But by
1964 the minke whales of the southern hemisphere were also being
targeted as other whale species declined.
The
speed and scale of the whaling during those 85 years was such that many
species almost disappeared and have still not recovered - and are
unlikely to reach their former populations. The paper points to theSouthern Blue whale which now numbers just 1% of prewhaling populations.
The researchers were also able to take advantage of the more open
scientific relationships in the former USSR compared to the times of the
whaling industry. They were able to uncover new figures from the
Russian whaling fleet which partly explains the failure of the North
Pacific right whales. Despite a hunting ban being put in place on the
species in 1935 the USSR continued to hunt the whales and failed to
report the killings to the IWC. Total global catch for all whales
recorded in Russia appears to be 534.204 but 178,118 of them were not
reported to the IWC monitoring group.
While the USSR were not
the only country to be actively killing whales that had been put on IWC
ban lists - many countries including the UK were actively ignoring
international agreements on various species - they were the most
prolific poachers.
After the blue whale hunt ban was bought
established in 1966 98% of ban breeches were by soviet whalers. 96% of
humpbacks killed after that species were protected by hunting was again
by soviet whalers. Despite a ban on hunting of northern grey whales
during the 1930's the US government still issued permits for over 300
whales after 1947 for 'scientific' reasons. The
worst year for whales in the northern hemisphere was 1966 when 33,473
whales were killed. In the southern hemisphere the worst year was 1960
with 62,169 killed.
The scientists concluded
the paper with a quote from John Gulland regarding fisheries: whaling
management in the 20th century was an interminable debate about the
status of stocks until all doubt was removed. And so were most of the whales.
Paper reference:
