Small Places and Lions

This is not about global warming  but was brought on from reading the May issue of Natural History Magazine. I read an article in that issue about the African Lion, how it followed the forest pig into livestock and farmlands of tribal groups like the Masia and like the Bantu’s. The lions avoid the Masai and their spears, but during some years they will follow pigs into the agricultural lands and literally eat the persons who are watching the crops or prey on the persons who are most vulnerable to lion predation like a baby who might be nursing. The bottom line is that these lions might kill as many as 137 persons a year.

I am trying to imagine this but I am from a neighborhood in the United States where crossing the avenue was the greatest possibility of taking your life into your hands.

I have been to the part of Africa where lions, an animal I like a lot, prey on persons and I have seen lions in that country and Giant Forest Pigs also.

I went into a thatch hut in this area and went inside. I am average size and had a hard time imagining other persons spending time in these very small huts. There were many tribal men close in size to me but the smallness of these huts was distressing.

Lions were seen within easy hunting distance of this hut, so close in fact that I could hear a lion roaring in the savahnah nearby.

I would want out of the hut that small, in that heat; as small in space as a mountain tent and I found that I was at home in a  tent in which 4 persons could easily stand up and where I also heard a lion roar in the distance…I am sure bear spray will work on lions but an entire lion pride..? thats a lot of lions and I am glad I am not in those places where lions eat humans.

Matt

Two Days In Yellowstone National Park

For the past two days I have been to Yellowstone National Park, which for many years was one of my old stomping grounds.

What I saw was several old friends, several old associates and new friends, seven grizzly bears, four black bears, 23 wolves ( a record for me),  several thousand elk, about 1500 bison, thirty bighorn sheep, one hundred pronghorn antelope, one hundred mule deer and two hundred whitetails.

The wolf watchers, who have grown in numbers since 1995, are far more organised than the bearwatchers. They travel in packs of wolfwatchers, use walky talkies to say where a wolf has been found and stand together in strategic locations scouting out wolves for others to share in. Of course they will stop to watch a grizzly bear or black bear.

This time of year is the breeding season for bears. Large male bears, usually very secretive and very rarely seen, are seen more frequently this time of the year as they hunt down mates. Two of the bears we saw during this 2 day period were large adults, very likely male bears.

I saw some excellent birds and met an excellent bird watcher from another part of the country. Of course we compared lists and he showed me an osprey nest which was in the cliffs near Tower Falls, a great view of the nesters which you could look right into. We had several spotting scopes with us so the looking was dramatic.

It was hot by mid-morning. Everyone shed down to t-shirts.

 Speaking of hot it was supposed to get up to 78 degrees here today, instead it will be about 88 degrees; quite warm for this part of the country, even in the summer.

Yesterday in Yellowstone we saw a bald eagle, two golden eagles, one merlin, one prarie falcon, one kestrel, one Harrier and so on. We saw neat birds like Brewer’s sparrow and close ups of breeding male yellow-rumped warblers. In the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone I have watched over we did see Canada Geese nesting in cottonwoods; something I have only seen in that valley in Yellowstone over a thirty plus year period.

The gentleman we met had seen many more birds than we had, afterall this is the spring migration and the song bird period is in full swing and he and his wife stayed in Yellowstone for a long period of time each year and had been coming to Yellowstone in spring to bird watch for the past 15 years.

Perhaps the saddest thing we saw, to be expected as our climate changes for the worse, is the drying out of potholes, especially in the area called Little America Flats, where for years we saw a bunch of waterfowl. These waterfowl are gone now and things are changing for the worse as a grizzly bear, several hundred bison and two black bears graze nearby totally oblivious to a change, too, in their life.

Matt

Rite of Spring In Bozeman, Montana

One of the main rites of springtime in Bozeman, Montana is to go down to Yellowstone National Park and watch grizzly bears, black bears and wolves.

I remember many cold, windy mornings with a lot of coffee watching bears in Yellowstone mostly alone.

About 20 years later we also watched wolves and their predations and skirmishes, mostly with bears and elk.

It is a great spring rite. Throw in some birding and the yearly trip becomes very special.

Matt

Which Tyrannosaurine Wins a Fight?

Dasplaetosaurus and Gorgosaurus were 2 tyrannosaurines that may have run into each other while eating, like a brown bear, at a carcass. Both of these tyrannosaurines were smaller, by  2 tons, than the average female adult Tyrannosaurus Rex. They averaged about 30 feet long and just over 2 tons. These were not small animals but small tyrannosaurids.

I would say these predator/scavengers were the most likely to fight in competition for food on rare occasions and each dinosaur had a face full os teeth.

Who would win the fight? That depends on who was the outwardly most agressive between these 2 types of tyrannosuridne because they were both essentually the same size. The fossil record, which we know these dinosaurs from, tell us nothing about these dinosaurs aggression. Both dinosaurs were contemporaries from the latter portion of the Cretacious, or last period of the dinosaurs.

I might give a fighting edge on these 2 tyrannosaurines to Daspleatosaurus because it was thought that this tyrannosaurine took on the much tougher prey, the horned dinosaur while gorgosarus took on duckbill dinosaurs.

Matt

The Sunderbans and Tigers

This is an area of southeast Bangledesh. The Sunderbans are a protected mangrove forest along the coast. This area is being ravaged by global warming. The area is perhaps the last place in the world where tigers regularly kill human beings.

First of all tigers rarely live in mangrove forests. Tigers regularly prey on human fishermen and Honey Hunters.

What these professions have in common is that they occur in an isolated part of the world, in isolated habitat  in fifty years this habitat will be underwater and it will not be the fault of the very poor people of the Bay of Bengal or Bangeladash. We, in the US, are the major reason that that part of the world, and other parts of the world, will be underwater as a result of global warming we have caused. China and other developing countries who want to be like the US are now very much more like the US and if those countries survive the global financial crisis they too will grow dramatically as they pursue their own version of the American Dream.

There are protected areas of the Sunderbans but it does not keep out desperately poor local persons trying hard to raise large and extended families.

I am not a human eating tiger’s apologist but I will say that tigers are exploiting an opportunity that is an artifact of our behvior…and the tiger killing of humans will occur for the duration of these behaviors, or until the local persons are removed from the Sunderbans or the area becomes inundated in water…it is like a game of Russian Roulette for the Sunderban people and if tigers disappear here they have very few strongholds left…talk about catch 22’s.

Matt

Poachers Put Balkan Linx on the Edge of Extinction

This is about the essence of this blog and the dying out of this lynx shows that human’s might kill off all of its “competition”  before global warming does.
Matt

Jasmina Mironski – Sun Feb 22, 1:17 am ET AFP/File – A Balkan lynx. Poaching is one of the biggest threats to the survival of this Balkan subspecies of the …
Slideshow:Balkan Lynx GALICICA MOUNTAIN, Macedonia (AFP) – The camera sits hidden in a field ready to track every move of the Balkan lynx, a wild cat both revered as an icon and reviled as a pest that has teetered on extinction for nearly a century.

“The lynx has no natural enemy except man,” said Georgi Ivanov, an ecologist working on a project to monitor lynx numbers in western Macedonia’s Galicica National Park, where 30 such cameras have been set up.

Poaching is one of the biggest threats to the survival of this Balkan subspecies of the European lynx, the largest wild cat found on the continent.

Though its overall numbers are uncertain, they seem to hover dangerously around the 100 scientists say are needed for their population to remain stable.

In Albania and Macedonia, foreign experts put their number at less than 80 though local counterparts say there are fewer than 40. The estimates in neighbouring Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia are even worse.

Lynx are killed by villagers in the impoverished region mainly for their prized fur, a spotted golden-brown. But dwindling forests and a lack of prey are also factors in their decline, experts say.

“The main cause of the extinction threat is illegal hunting, as well as environmental destruction and, above all, uncontrolled forest cutting,” said biologist Dime Melovski of the Macedonian Ecological Society.

The monitoring scheme is also underway in Mavrovo National Park, also in western Macedonia, and in Albania in cooperation with the Swiss-based research group KORA, Germany’s Euronatur and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA).

Adeptly maneuvering his jeep along Mount Galicica’s winding roads, Zoran Celakovski said members of the Ohrid Hunting Society, which he heads, are also doing their part to protect the Balkan lynx.

“We have information that there are some lynx here so we help the ecologists in their work, patrols and file-keeping,” he said.

In addition to determining the cats’ status, via camera date, research and interviews, the project aims to establish protected areas for the animal and help local authorities develop a conservation strategy. It is due to wind up at the end of 2009, Melovski said.

Long seen as an unofficial national symbol in Macedonia, the Balkan lynx — whose scientific denomination is “lynx lynx martinoi” — features on both a postal stamp and a coin. With a short tail, long legs, and thick neck, its defining characteristic may be the striking tufts of hair on both ears. They grow to an average one metre (three feet) in length and 65 centimetres (two feet) in height and can weigh up to 25 kilograms (55 pounds).

The wild cat prey mainly on roe deer, the mountain goat-like chamois and hares, but never attack its greatest threat — human beings.

Although hunting lynx is punishable by prison terms of up to eight years, poachers continue to pursue the animal with impunity, knowing that no one has ever been prosecuted for doing so.

Lynx-advocates like Macedonian ecologist Aleksandar Stojanov have been pushing to have areas where the cat roams proclaimed as national parks, to “reduce threats and increase the number of protected mountainous areas”.

Raising awareness among villagers is also needed, he said. Local lore holds that lynx are “pests that kill livestock and that is why they do not like it.”

“But our data has shown that in only four cases has the animal actually caused any damage, and it was minimal,” said Stojanov.

Experiments in other parts of Europe have been encouraging. Conservationists reintroduced wild lynx to Switzerland after its eradication there at the end of the 19th century, raising the population to 140 in the last two decades.

Similar action has seen the lynx population recover in the Baltics, in the Carpathian mountains that run from Slovakia to Romania, and in Scandinavia.

Some experts involved in the Balkans project, like John Linnell of NINA, warn this success might be difficult to repeat here because “poaching is obviously a factor that is limiting their ability to recover.”

Another, Manuela von Arx of KORA, stressed that improving law enforcement and stepping up efforts to educate locals about the animal was the key to the Balkan lynx’ survival.

“Legal protection is meaningless if violations are not persecuted,” she said in a statement.

“In the long run co-existence between large carnivores and people can only be achieved and secured if the local people and land users are willing to tolerate animals such as the Balkan lynx in their vicinity.”

Whats Happening To The Big Cats

This occurred to me yesterday evening as I listened to Joel Berger, a well known carnivore expert, address The Wildlife Conservation Society at the Beal Art Gallery in downtown Bozeman, MT. I visited lion country, leopard country, cheetah country in Africa and the parks they were in  were surrounded by cattle raising persons whose entire culture was based on killing lions. The hunters, and all the persons around the wildlife parks, were bursting at the seams (burgeoning populations of humans).

Cheetahs are also genetically depauperate. Much has been written on this topic but bottom line is that these cheetahs are natural born killers of livestock.

Tigers also live in reserves surrounded by cattle growers, these  same tigers, and their habitats, are greatly encroached on by poverty stricken persons and the tigers are killed for a variety of reasons as they react to this encroachment. In Far East Russia, Siberian Tigers are poached heavily, where 300 may exsist. In China tigers are grown on farms where their parts are used to make humans more viril, what a laugh if it wasnt so sad!!!

Jaguars live in South America and will kill livestock. They are heavily persacuted as a result of this.

Mountain Lions in South and North America will also eat cattle. They are hunted. This all ads up. and the mountain lion can be widely prosecuted for this habit.

So the number one killer  of large cats is encroachment by droves of pesons in big cat habitat. The second reason for killing big cats, and this reason is closely related to reason #1, is that they will kill livestock as long as the opportunty presents itself.

Tolerance is a large factor in cat conservation and also as long as cats have something to eat they will eat…livestock or not. This is where Global Warming may impact the large cats. As big cat food decreases as the planet heats up big cats will be negatively impacted if enough big cats are around for that to really matter.

Mountain Lions Pop Into My Mind

There are fires burning near hear that have yet to make the news.

A mountain Lion came into a fellows house (basement) in a nearby town. The fellow shot the lion with a hunting rifle, killing it.

It is not unusual for Mountain Lions to be close to this town, but this year they seem more aggressive and are in the town; that is unusual. If I had to guess they are preying on town deer and dogs and female lions with litters are hungry and young cats, especially young male cats are avoiding “Toms” which are established male mountain lions and the young cats are also avoiding adult female cats, especially with litters, and otherwise.

 With the changing world, lions are changing to, until they are shot because they are not wanted in houses, in town or eating somebody’s labrador retriever. How do you tell the transgressor cats this, you dont.They will be shot.

What Is Going To Happen To the North American Black Bear Because of Global Climate Change.

This is an opinion.

 The North American black bear is (Ursus americanus) is a generalist and can eat foods of all types. Though the bear has a carnivorous dentittion I have seen wasp, wild strawberries and ramp onions in the bear’s scat and a lot of berries of all kinds and White Bark Pine Nuts.

If the planet warms forest may extend to the North Coast of Alaska. The black bear is the most tolerated of all bears, as evidenced by black bears in the Pocono Mountains near New York City. When grizzly bears and all brown bears diminish and polar bears dissapear, one of the ways bears may lightly fall with humankind, is the black bear in response to a rapidly warming planet may replace polar and grizzly-brown bears along stretches like the Alaskan Coast and exsit in places throughout North America where forests thrive and black bears can climb trees or be secretive in avoiding us and the occasional adult brown bear.

I have seen 30 million year old redwood and some kind of myrtle forest in Yellowstone National Park’s north side near Slough Creek; these forests were petrified.

Matt

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year. I am just glad, as I no many of you are, to make it across the 2007 finish line. There were days when I had real doubts about making it to 2008. The “Curious George” side of me wants to see what’s up in a “Brave New World!” Do you?

Matt