Wolves making it against all odds

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, wildlife, wildlife management, wolves, biologists, naturalists, memoirs

About two decades before wolves were trucked into Yellowstone National Park, a lone female wolf made her way from Canada into the area around Glacier National Park. She was named Kishinena, Later a male wolf joined her, and the pair raised at least three litters of pups. By the time "re-introduction" was officially carried out, the Glacier NP area was host to a few packs of self-introduced wolves.

One woman witnessed it all, and continued to study wolves in and near Montana for forty years. Dr. Diane K. Boyd became the most skilled wolf trapper in America, although she never caught Kishinena. We can be generous and say that she was still learning in those early years.

At first when I was reading Dr. Boyd's memoir A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, my mental image of a wolf trap was the cruel leg-crushing snap trap employed by fur trappers. Eventually I learned that recovery trappers use a cable trap that doesn't break any bones and seldom breaks the skin. A wolf (or mis-caught bear or other animal) that struggles for hours against such a trap can still cut off circulation to the trapped foot to cause permanent injury; this is why a biologist runs the trapline at least twice daily. 

The author tells one story of herself and an assistant, also female, tranquilizing a wolf that had become so exhausted from fighting the trap that it was practically frozen to death, and the foot was solid as a rock. The two women took the sleeping wolf into the truck, laid it across their laps, ran the engine fast and the heater all the way up. Then they took off their shirts and body-warmed the wolf, whose body temperature was about eight degrees below normal by then. Once the animal began to warm, Diane realized it was waking, but for a while it stayed still to enjoy the warmth. She carefully reached to open the door, holding the radio collar they'd put on earlier to keep that mouthful of teeth away from her face, and let the wolf bolt away. Quite a sight they must have made, two half-naked women covered in sweat and black-and-gray fur! Happy to see the wolf on the run. A visit to the area the next day to follow its tracks for a ways confirmed that the wolf didn't just run a quarter mile and drop dead; it was apparently well enough to run long and far. Radio tracking in the following days showed that it covered a lot of territory, and made kills as usual.

During her forty years with the wolves, the author saw their situation come nearly full circle. Wolves were once so universally hated they were destroyed from every square mile of the U.S. "lower 48" except the extreme north of Minnesota and Isle Royale on Lake Superior. By the mid 1990's they were much beloved by many Americans, federal legislation protected them, and they multiplied all across the northern states, from the Great Lakes to Washington state. Over the next decade or so the mood shifted again, and the fear and hatred of wolves was on the rebound. Even today, the pendulum is a bit to the side of "protect livestock" rather than "protect wolves". Nonetheless, the gray wolf has been restored as a major predator in the northern US.

Consider this list: Grizzly Bear, Wolf, Coyote, Fox, Wolverine, Mountain Lion, Bobcat. Five of these seven can easily kill a human. Only wolves are hated in a special way. This came out especially strongly at a public meeting in 2018 in Trout Creek, Montana. For more than two hours a couple hundred wolf-hating folk berated Forest Service members and supporting scientists, including Dr. Boyd. Earlier in the book she calls her treatment among wildlife biologists and forest rangers, as a young, slender blonde woman among "mountain men", a baptism of fire. But this was another thing entirely. When she had opportunity, she spoke reason, but when the crowd is unreasonable—and half are drunk—that's like tossing a snowball into a hot wind.

I don't know what the national mood is today. Where has the pendulum swung in the past seven years? I was once told by a policeman that there's a threshold of 15%: if more than 15% of the population habitually speeds, for example (and the level is more like 75%), speed laws cannot be effectively enforced. I don't know what the present level of wolf-hatred is, but if it's more than about a quarter of us, a lot of wolves are at risk. Poaching has existed all through the past 4-5 decades, but it reached an all-time high within the past decade, and I just don't know if the trend is still upward, or if it is abating.

Duck-Duck-Go's AI Assist tells me this:

As of 2024, the estimated gray wolf population in the contiguous United States is between 14,000 and 18,000, with Alaska having an additional 7,000 to 11,000 wolves. Most of the populations are concentrated in the northern half of the country.

That's a big difference from the near-zero population of the period from 1940-1970. And Dr. Boyd witnessed all of that recovery. She is an admirable naturalist/biologist, and a great storyteller.

The warmest and fuzziest -- with big claws!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, pets, wildlife

It takes extraordinary experiences to set the stage for a wild animal to become bonded to a person. In the case of a bobcat, soon to be named Trooper, these experiences included being the only survivor of his family's massacre by coyotes and getting stuck in a patch of cholla; for Johnson, they included a life that led to particular love for wild places and wildlife, and a temperament that just matched the bob-kitten's need. Basically, Johnson found the dying kitten, extracted him from the cholla (a most dangerous cactus), and took him to a veterinarian who was able to meet his medical needs and, even more, knew just how to prepare the kitten and Johnson for a life together in and around the home Johnson and his wife had created. Thus begins Trooper: The Bobcat Who Came in from the Wild by Forrest Bryant Johnson.

Years later, when a self-styled animal activist accused Johnson of "imprisoning" the cat, he was able to show her that Trooper came and went as he pleased and was never caged except when he needed to be taken to see the vet. Trooper loved the vet, just not the car ride. He also preferred to sleep snuggled against Johnson's arm.

At the risk of spoiling, although Trooper was a gentle companion and friendly to people, he kept enough of his wild nature to kill a coyote that began to stalk him and other animals around the Johnson mini-ranch. It was a collaboration: Johnson and neighbors first killed all the coyotes but one of a small pack that "moved into the neighborhood" and began preying on pets and even stalking children. Trooper finished off the last one.

In the years between, Trooper and Johnson learned from each other. Johnson ruminates, somewhat ruefully, that he knew Trooper thought of him as a rather inept cat. Not for Trooper the notion of being a "person". The book is full of stories of cat and man, and the man's wife, grown daughter and other family members. Of the time his wife good-naturedly tried to hire a "home-call" grooming service to "bathe" Trooper, and the way Trooper so thoroughly intimidated the groomer, without harming him in the slightest, that the groomer simply turned and left. Of the time a great horned owl knocked itself silly against a window, and Trooper brought it inside, not to eat, but perhaps hoping for a new kind of playmate; it was a job and a half getting the irate owl back out the door! Of the time the alarm service kept phoning Johnson that there was an intruder tripping the light beam in the house's hallway, but nobody was ever found. What was found? Trooper and another (ordinary) cat that had come to live there, jumping off furniture and interrupting the beam; the alarm company removed that particular sensor.

There are still many people who say animals are totally instinctual and cannot think, or plan, or feel pain. Such people have never owned a pet, never watched it plan, perhaps for days, how to attack a particular kind of prey or enemy. They've never thought through the fact that animals seem to easily learn a number of our spoken words, but we learn hardly any of theirs, or none at all. Even the most inbred, bred-for-looks-not-for-smarts Pomeranian pup or Persian cat shows these attributes. Johnson found that a bobcat, that must live by its wits, had quite a lot going on in that big, fuzzy head of his.

This book gets my Heart-Warming, Heartstring-Tugging, Drippy-Nose Award for the year!

Walk on the wild side - on Main Street

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wildlife, cities

Do children still sing "Skip to my Lou"? One verse repeats, "Pigs in the parlor/What'll I do?". Other verses mention flies in the buttermilk, a cat in the cream jar, and a couple of birds. If you want to get creative, verses could be added about coyotes or deer in the back yard, cottontails in the corncrib, and if you were in Cape Town, baboons in the kitchen.

Most people in the cities tend to think of the city as a pretty sterile place, inhabited only by humans and their pets, maybe with pigeons and sparrows around, and a few pests such as flies thrown in. Tristan Donovan is here to tell us there is more to cities than we might imagine, in Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle.

Much of the book contains stories about animals, not just in suburban areas and city fringes, but right in the middle of our cities around the world: Boars in Berlin, Coyotes in Chicago, the resident Cougar in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a flock of Parrots in Brooklyn, Baboons breaking into homes in Cape Town, and the finding by researchers in Raleigh that every home is host to at least 100 species of insects and spiders.

Why should there be animals in our cities? By making cities comfortable for humans, we have made them comfortable for a multitude of opportunistic animals. In the U.S., northern cities are warmer, sometimes as much as 10°F and even more. Further south, many spaces are air conditioned, so an overheated jaybird in Tucson might make its way into the local WalMart to cool off. Cities in dry places are wetter, and homes in wet places are drier, than their surroundings. Snakes have been found with half their bodies hanging into a hot tub on a cool night, occasionally diverting a human romantic encounter from its intended course. And there is food everywhere, everywhere! Raccoons raiding garbage cans. Crows and gulls picking at road kill. Rats in the storm sewers, eating our refuse and being hunted by snakes and coyotes and wildcats. To a bobcat a rat's intended purpose is turning our crap into his lunch.

Biologists have compared animals in cities with their rural counterparts, and have found that many species are more abundant, better fed and live longer in a city than in the countryside. Why wouldn't there be animals in our cities?

I really like the turn taken in the last couple of chapters. We ought to be making our cities more friendly to species we like. For most people, a little time spent watching rabbits or otters is calming. My wife was quite delighted one day to report seeing a deer "pronking" down our street outside our hedge. A few endangered species are actually doing better in cities than in their "native" habitat. The Peregrine Falcons nesting on window ledges in skyscrapers come to mind (Bookmark the DuPont FalconCam and take a look beginning next March; just now I see only feathers in the nest).

Many doctrinaire environmentalists might shudder at the thought of making our cities into better habitat for beneficial or endangered animals. To them, cities are Evil and part of the probem; there's no way they can be part of the solution. But face it, cities are here to stay. They presently encumber only 2% of the land area, but that is growing, and their impact is greater than you might think. A certain parrot species is found in greater numbers in certain southwestern U.S. cities than in its entire home range in Mexico. They go where the living is better!

And suppose we were to succeed in creating cities in which nothing could live except humans and a short list of "approved" human pets. Then what? Should inner city kids—and their parents—be deprived of the sight of a blue jay, cardinal or indigo bunting? Should they be doomed never to see a living rabbit or raccoon? Should the endangered parrots of the U.S. southwest be "repatriated" to a "native" habitat that is getting too degraded to support them?

I don't like flies in my home, so I welcome the spiders that live here. There are at least 10 species that I've found. Only when a spider gets too big and is found crawling on the bed do I evict her. Our yard hosts rabbits and squirrels, so I do have to put small-mesh fencing around the garden, and we hope for the occasional visit by a fox to keep their numbers in check (she comes through every couple of years). We see deer droppings under the apple tree in the fall. As long as I don't corner a deer and get clipped by those front hooves, I'm happy to have one bed down there occasionally. We're planting a greater variety of flowers to draw butterflies, but avoiding the "butterfly bush" which is too concentrated and becomes a praying mantis colony beneath which one finds piles of butterfly wings! When I find a robin nest in the hedge, that section goes an extra month without being clipped until the chicks fledge. We let wasps nest in the louvers of the attic vents, but not in areas where children might play. Wasps are great predators of the insects I don't want to encounter. We encourage dragonflies, which keep the mosquito population down. A local hawk "tends to" the various little mammals such as mice and voles.

I appreciate the biologists who agree with Mr. Donovan, and are working to make our cities better for human-animal coexistence. Of course we don't want rats everywhere, but the best exterminators are Maine Coon cats, not poison baits that kill so many other animals as a byproduct, and make rat bodies poisonous to house cats and wild cats. With proper education we can even learn to live with coyotes in our midst...and we aren't going to see those exterminated anytime soon, anyway! Nearby New Jersey residents need to learn to think like bears so they don't attract them where they don't want them, but do attract them where they do want them. We need to face it, humans are part of nature. Let's open up to seeing "who else" shares our cities.

A very education and refreshing book.

Mount Cuba 2012

kw: photographs, wildflowers, wildlife

We spent a pleasant hour at the Mount Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware this afternoon. The Center is famous for preserving and studying the native vegetation of this region. Less well known than some of the DuPont family estates such as Longwood Gardens, it is the only one I know that has solely native plants on display (except in the Round Garden where there are tulips and delphiniums).

Today was special: because of the mild winter, the Trilliums are actually past their prime, the dogwoods as well, but the wild azaleas are just getting into full bloom (see below. I am still getting used to the new blogging software).

Lavender Trilliums with Bluets

It was also special because they had two people from a wild bird rehabilitation center (I didn't catch its name) bring in some raptors (hawks and a falcon), and this vulture, to show us. Each of the birds shown is injured in some way and could not live in the wild. The vulture is 20 years old and was raised as a pet, so it is much too trusting around people.

Closeup of wild Azalea

A pleasant day, with perfect weather for a long walk in the woods and gardens.

Bee islands

kw: chores, wildlife

Mowing earlier today, I saw a few dozen honeybees; the first time I've seen more than one at a time in several years. They were working over the clover flowers in the yard. I began to regret that I was turning my yard into a bee desert by mowing off nearly all the blooms. So I chose two patches that are nearly all clover with very little grass and mowed around them. They are oases for the honeybees.

My sunflowers for this year's Great Sunflower Project are about half grown. Buds have appeared on the largest plant, so I'll be taking statistics starting in another week or so. Honeybees seldom come to sunflowers, which have no nectar. The Project monitors wild bee activity. Most wild bees are pollen gatherers.

Sunflowers fading

kw: nature, wildlife, conservation

My sunflower plants are done for the year. In a summer of recording bee activity for The Great Sunflower Project, I learned a few things:

• At this latitude, don't bother planting seeds until late May. The first plant didn't come up until June.
• It takes another month for the first flower to appear.
• On a robust plant (I had one very robust plant and two much smaller ones), a new flower will bloom every 3-4 days.
• Only the latest 2-3 flowers have any pollen.
• Don't expect to see honeybees; they concentrate on nectar-bearing blooms, and sunflowers have no nectar. (The GSP is all about native pollen-gathering bees)
• Goldfinches love half-ripe sunflower seeds. They picked the flower heads almost completely bare within a couple of weeks of each one getting seed development.
• There are five common species of native bee in this area: two sizes of bumble bee, 30mm long and 25mm long; a green-thorax-black+yellow-abdomen mason bee of the genus Osmia, 20mm long; a small green bee, 15mm long; and a bee colored like a honey bee but about 18mm long (honey bees are 25mm long).

During just over 60 days that my plants bloomed, I made more than 40 observations of bees, plus a few days when no bees landed on the flowers. The mason bees were most frequently seen, followed by the smaller bumble bee. I had a variety of other blooming plants that came and went in that time. The chives brought the most bees; they have plenty of nectar, though the flowers are very small. They were the only place I saw honey bees. The most common nectar-gathering bee, however, was a tiny black bee, 9mm long or less.

I am looking forward to next Summer.

The chives bring the bees

kw: wildlife, bees, honey bees

I spent a lot of time, in 15-minute chunks, watching for bees on the sunflower plants I grew for The Great Sunflower Project. I've seen four species of pollen-gathering bees on the sunflowers, including a little striped bee I couldn't identify. I called it DK for "don't know", in my reports.

Today, camera in hand, I took a look at other parts of the garden to see what bees were being attracted elsewhere. The chives are in full bloom right now, and they were a bonanza of bee species. They draw some different bees because they have nectar, which sunflowers don't.

This image shows the largest and smallest species together. Before I tell you, can you find the little one? She is just opposite the bumble bee, in the lower right corner, a little out of focus. This bumble bee is a big one, nearly 30mm long, while the small bee (another species I can't identify, yet) is probably no more than 5mm long. This image is somewhat larger than life size, and the larger image you can see by clicking is about 3x life size.

There were also a number of honey bees on the chive blossoms. This one is working opposite one of the DK bees I've also seen on the sunflowers. This image is much better focused. While the honey bee is the typical 20mm size, the smaller bee is probably half that, smaller than a sweat bee.

Considering the worries over honey bees being decimated by "colony collapse disorder", it was a relief to see several today. There were none on my apple tree this Spring, and I saw very few prior to today.

I had begun cutting off the chive blooms, because I don't want them going to seed. They are perennial, and they've taken over a substantial section of my garden already. But when I saw so many bees, I quit cutting and got my camera instead. I will leave the rest to bloom until they fade, to feed the bees.

Fate of two dozen young

kw: wildlife, conservation

I didn't see a single bluebird all Summer, but some of my colleagues did. This year two colleagues and I, as part of a wildlife conservation project at our workplace, monitored six bluebird boxes on a weekly basis beginning in late April. The season was slow getting started, but eventually all six boxes produced young birds, though one clutch all died.

Three nest boxes hosted Tree Swallows, lovely blue-and-white birds. Two nests produced, respectively, four and three young that successfully fledged (the three had a fourth sibling that died), while a third nest produced two chicks that died, almost fully fledged, when temperatures here passed 100°F (nearly 40°C).

Three boxes hosted Carolina Wrens, and we counted, 3, 4, and 5, though the nest with three was set up a month later than the other two. No wren chicks died. On today's run, we found that last nest empty, so all the boxes are empty and have been cleaned out in anticipation of the next season.

That's the tally: 19 live chicks and three dead ones.

Caught a pic of the bee

kw: photographs, wildlife, insects

My sunflowers don't follow the sun. I have been collecting bee data for the Great Sunflower Project this summer. The first four flowers produced by my plants have all faced East, so that they are backlit by the sun in the afternoon when I can do my data gathering. I've wanted to photograph the variety of small bee that is the most frequent visitor, but I couldn't get a good picture until today.

A flower opened a couple days ago on the West side of a plant, and I have been able to take usable photographs. I think this is a variety of mason bee, but I'm not sure yet. It is smaller (less than half the weight) than a honey bee, about the size of a sweat bee or even smaller, but not as small as the tiny all-green bees that show up on occasion.

Visible at the top of the image is some damage to the flower's seed head. Goldfinches have been eating the immature seeds. That is OK. I have seldom had a chance to observe goldfinches before. Another side benefit to growing sunflowers is that they draw the occasional hummingbird. Even though this variety, Lemon Queen, has no nectar, it is big, bright and bold, so hummingbirds will come, buzz the flower for no more than a second, then zoom away.

I have observed mostly this kind of green-and-striped bee and bumble bees at my sunflowers, plus a few of the tiny green ones, and just two (so far) very small bees that are colored like a honey bee. Not a single honey bee as yet. In fact, I've looked for bees in lots of places this Spring and Summer, and have seen no more than three honey bees all season.

A walk for nests and trees

kw: photographs, wildlife

This was a nice day to get out with a colleague or two and check our "bluebird" boxes. The current inventory is

• 2 boxes still empty
• 2 boxes with Tree Swallows (6 eggs each)
• 1 box with Chickadees (4 mostly-fledged young)
• 1 box with Carolina Wrens (6 eggs)
  

The Tree Swallows are pretty bold. We've learned to talk as we approach the nest box. Then the sitting bird will poke her head out. That is how I got the following photo. She was pretty bold this time:

This photo is similar to one I posted a couple weeks ago, but was taken at much closer range. The original is thus much more clear. Once the mother fled the nest, she dive-bombed us until we left. We made quick work of counting the eggs and closing up the box.

The first time we looked in on the Chickadee, she didn't leave the nest, even after we knocked on the box. When we opened it, she was sitting there and did not leave. We closed up the box and left her alone. She hasn't been there when we checked the chicks. I think I will get a small sheet of Plexiglas so I can slide it up after just cracking open the box's movable wall. Then there is no danger of chicks falling out.

Today, the Wren didn't leave her box until we began to open the box. This is the first time we've seen her. Usually, we can just hear her mate's complex song from a nearby tree. He acts unconcerned while she sasses us: "chip chip".

Not far from the Wren box we stopped to look at the second-largest Tulip Poplar (Yellow Poplar) tree in Delaware. It is a Specimen tree, and the sign posted nearby states it probably first began growing in 1771. This is based on an estimate, because nobody had cored the tree to count the rings. Its breadth at chest height is more than four feet; the circumference is probably 13-14 feet.

My next-door neighbor has one of these, about half this size. It gets aphids in the Spring, which drop a lot of sugar on any car we park under it. This year so far it seems there have been enough ladybugs to keep the aphids down; lots less sugar.

Pod feeding

kw: observations, musings, wildlife, whales

I watched the PBS Nature program on Humpback whales earlier this evening. I've been thinking ever since. In a segment on feeding behavior in Alaskan waters, their cooperative hunting technique was shown: about ten whales descend beneath a shoal of herring, and station themselves in a loose ring. One of them swims in a big circle blowing bubbles, which cause the herring to clump together and rise toward the surface. The whales communicate the whole time, and at some signal, all rise through the bubble net and swallow lots of herring. They do this over and over, eventually devouring almost the entire shoal, perhaps a few tons of little fish.

As a young person in the heyday of the "everything animals do is instinct" school of animal behavior, I was not satisfied with the reigning paradigm. I am even more convinced now that animals of all kinds learn from one another and from their environment. While it has been posited that some whales may exceed human intelligence, I don't think we can know, because their intelligence is of such a different kind than ours.

I have taken many IQ tests. All require the subject (me) to "do your own work". We need a different kind of intelligence test, in which the subject is required to obtain all answers from others, and the efficiency and speed of doing so determines the score. Oh, yeah, we have such a test; it is called being a middle manager or supervisor! Passing grades are rewarded with continued employment; superior grades garner promotions. Suffice it to say that I tried my hand as a supervisor, and asked to be relieved of such duty and return to "staff". I would not score very high on a networking-intelligence test, I suppose. (I am glad a big company is willing to pay me for what I can do!) Those whales, along with other cooperative hunters such as wolves, would score pretty high.

This day was for the birds, gladly

kw: observations, birds, wildlife

This is a house swallow sitting on a bluebird box, which is probably holding her eggs or babies. I belong to a volunteer program at work; a colleague and I make weekly checks of four bird boxes of the 25 or so that are scattered about the complex. The boxes are made with a hinged front so we can look inside. This is one of a number of projects that the company does under the aegis of the Wildlife Council.

When I joined the program two years ago, a number of us got a short session of training, and then we were assigned a few boxes per pair of us. Though these are called bluebird boxes, and bluebirds are the most desirable species we wish to encourage, there are three other species that we allow to use the boxes: house swallows and two species of wren.

We were told to specifically discourage invasive sparrows, which are not native to the U.S., by removing their nests and eggs. Fortunately, I have had to do this only once. It is a sad duty. Last year, I didn't have any bluebirds in any of the four boxes I (and my colleague) care for. Three pairs of swallows fledged from four to six young each, and one box was fought over by wrens and starlings, and nobody raised any young.

The hole on that last box was too big; starlings won't try to use a box with a bluebird-sized hole. We asked the facilities folks to make a front with a smaller hole. That worked. This year, that box has six pale brown wren eggs in it, and we saw one of the parents flitting about when we checked inside.

The swallows are running a couple weeks earlier than the wrens this year. We first saw white swallow eggs five weeks ago, six each in two boxes. Two weeks ago the eggs were still being sat upon. Last week we saw tiny baby birds. Today I took this picture in one of the boxes with babies. This youngster is just beginning to get big feathers on the wings (barely visible to the right), so it is about 10-12 days old.

We didn't open the other box of swallows; we could see the parents actively bringing food. We won't open either of these boxes until we don't observe any more feeding behavior. This year especially, things got started early enough that the swallows may raise a second brood. We hope to catch them re-lining the nest and laying a second clutch of eggs.

One of the boxes that had a successful family last year has so far produced nothing. At the beginning of the season we found a half-completed nest with a dead swallow inside. We cleaned it all out. Two weeks later a messy sparrow nest got built up, and when we saw eggs in it, and verified that they were being sat on by a sparrow, we removed nest and eggs. That was last week. This week there were a few straws in the box, but it doesn't look like the sparrows intend to finish the nest. Next week we'll know more.

So, this year so far, two boxes that started with six eggs each have several live babies that are about ten days old; one box has a clutch of five or six wren eggs; and one is probably not going to be used. Who'd have thought such drama goes on in these little boxes?