"Maladaptive".
It's one of my favorite words, as it explains why most predators are so cautious in the wild, and why so many prey species appear to be so lucky.
To be too bold or too aggressive is to be maladaptive. "Too bold is soon cold."
A predator cannot afford damage to muscle, joint, bone, tooth, wing, or talon.
And yet a predator cannot afford to be slow, and cannot always be cautious. At some point is has to eat.
And so the great game begins.
Every flight or run holds within it the possibility of great tragedy -- a torn cruciate ligament, a ripped claw, a shattered beak, a lost eye.
Is it any wonder that lions, tigers, and bears are generally so cautious around men? Most of the time, we represent the unknown, and the unknown always represents the chance of great harm.
It does not take much to undo a top predator. And yes, they somehow know that.
In the picture above, taken last Thursday, Florida Bald Eagle No. 512 is released back into the wild after being rescued and rehabilitated for the second time in 19 years.
This bird was first brought into rescue in 1996, after being shot in the leg and through the wing. Released back to the wild in 1998, she thrived until getting mugged by another eagle while attempting to defend her nesting site. It seems a younger female eagle kicked her off her roost in late November, pinned her to the ground, plucked her chest feathers, and then skewered her with her talons.
Rescued after the battle, Bald Eagle No 512 spent the next three months recovering from her injuries at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey. Now healthy, #512 was re-released at the same exact same location she first flew to freedom in 1998.
How long do Bald Eagles live? In zoos, they have lived as long as 48 years. On average, however, 15-20 years seems to be about average, so Bald Eagle No. 512 is doing pretty well thanks to a little help from her friends.
Link
So here's the concept: Strap a tiny video on top of an eagle and then see the world as she see its. This was shot in Spain, I believe. The web site is of falconer Jose Luis Ortiz. Nice!
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Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente hunting Red Fox with a Golden Eagle in Spain. Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente was a world-class falconer and more-or-less the Spanish equivalent of Jacques-Cousteau-meets-David-Attenborough.
His wildlife narratives (complete with multiple-camera crews, transportation, etc.), were paid for by a rich Saudi prince who recognized his extraordinary abilities with Golden Eagles and the fact that he was a once-in-a-lifetime character who might translate well on to film.
Felix Rodríguez de La Fuente died in 1980 in an airplane crash in Alaska, and his funeral was attended by thousands. Today, there are several statues of him in Spain, where he is a national hero for his efforts to popularize and protect Iberian wildlife.
Rodríguez de La Fuenta's films have recently been digitally remastered which is terrific, as a whole new generation of folks can now see them.
Whatever you think aesthetically about filmed (and yes sometimes partly staged) wildlife shows a-la Frank Buck, Wild Kingdom, Steve Irwin, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough, there can be little doubt that these things have done a great deal of good for wildlife and wild places, because they have let people know what is out there and what is at risk of being lost.
That said, it is always fun to mock these things a little bit, and the segment below is pretty rich. Can you figure out who is playing "Cousteau?" I think this might be his only good performance ever!
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Hunting roe deer with Golden Eagles. Hat tip to Isaac Nichols at Another Falconry Blog.
To see the other end of the sport, in terms of size, check out this clip of hunting grasshoppers with an American Kestrel (aka a "sparrow hawk").
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My house is back a couple of blocks and on top of a cliff above the Potomac River. I go down a short run along a creek, and then along a 500-yard stretch of George Washington Parkway before I swing back up again to Key Bridge in order to cross into Georgetown and across the river into Washington, D.C. Today, for reasons unknown, the traffic was stop-and-go, and a huge bird sailed in to light in a tree along the Parkway. It was a mature bald eagle.
We have about two dozen bald eagles along this 10-mile stretch of the Potomac River. They tend to like it down by Wilson Bridge a bit more than up near Key Bridge (not sure why), but they sometimes come up this way, and I have seen dark-headed juveniles as well as white-headed adults. A nice thing to see on the way to work.
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Add a novice hawker to the mix, along with a rioting pack of hounds, a couple of dozen spooked horses, a large dog fox, and a few overhead power lines and roads, and you clearly have winged disaster waiting to happen. Already, I have a report that two Golden Eagles have died from the sheer stupidity of it all.
And yet, perhaps God does have a sense of humor. There may yet be a punch line to this joke.
It turns out that after being extirpated from the UK for more than 100 years, once-native Eagle Owls have mysteriously begun to show up and breed in the wild.
I have little doubt these are captive birds that have escaped and hacked themselves back into prosperity on a diet of pigeon, starling and rabbit.
Excellent.
Mother Nature may yet bat last, and if the stupid anti-fox hunting law is repealed (as I believe it must and will be), then a fair number of captive Golden Eagles and Eagle-Owls may be yet be hacked back to the wild.
What a glorious day that will be!
"For decades it's been seen as some of the most worthless wasteland in Kansas.
Not anymore.
Not long ago valued at $300 an acre, some rugged land is now on the market for more than $3,000 an acre.
The increased value isn't from a discovery of coal or oil deposits. The new, most valued natural resources wear fur, feathers and fins.
"If you love to hunt and fish, you'd be hard pressed to find a better piece of property than this," said Brad Harris, as he toured 900-plus acres near Pittsburg. "It's seriously some of the best in the nation."
Chernobyl: Prior to 1986, the area surrounding Chernobyl in the Ukraine was an agricultural area populated by about 135,000 people. After an uncontained nuclear power plant accident, however, livestock and crops across a vast area were systematically destroyed, and all of the people within a 2,800 mile area around the nuclear plant were evacuated. With the removal of humans has come the return of some of Europe's most endangered species, including lynx, wolves, cranes, beaver, eagles, hawks, wild boar, roe deer, badger, and otters. Populations of human-dependent animals, such as rats, house mice, sparrows and pigeons, have declined. While some folks may imagine that the Chernobyl site must be filled with two-headed frogs, radioactive fish, and sterile deer, scientists have found relatively few visible wildlife side-effects. Dr. Ron Chesser, a senior research scientist and genetics professor at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL) in Aiken, South Carolina notes that "There are no monsters. The Chernobyl zone is actually a very beautiful place with thriving wildlife communities. Without a Geiger-counter, you wouldn't know you were in a highly contaminated place." The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ): The Korean Demilitarized Zone is about 2.5 miles wide and 155 miles long, stretching across the entire length of the Korean Peninsula. It is one of the largest unmanned areas in northeast Asia. Festooned with barbed wire, landmines, tank traps, sensors, automatic artillery, and patrolled by scores of thousands of soldiers with "shoot-to-kill" orders, the Korean DMZ is also home to hawks, eagles, antelope, two kinds of rare cranes, frogs, black bears, and roe deer. The DMZ is also rumored to be home to the last Korean tigers on earth. In total, more than 20,000 migratory fowl utilize the DMZ border area which encompasses a broad cross-section of Korean ecosystems and landscapes. Military Weapons Production Facilities: Military weapons production facilities in the U.S. have resulted in the creation of several large "no man" zones. In Washington State, for example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was created as part of the WWII-era Manhattan Project. Today the 586-square mile site is one of the most contaminated spots on earth due to nuclear waste, but it also contains the best undisturbed "shrub-steppe" habitat in the Columbia River basin, and the only undammed stretch of the Columbia River. The healthiest populations of wild chinook salmon on the river system can be found along the Hanford Reach, and more than 200 species of birds and more than 40 rare plants and animals, such as the long-billed curlew, call it home.
In Colorado, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal (which produced and stored vast quantities of chemical weapons) systematically kept out humans for more than 40 years. As a result, the 10-square mile Rocky Flats complex outside of Denver has been described as "a rare biological treasure" -- one of the last remaining Front Range open spaces with natural prairie grassland -- while the Rocky Mountain Arsenal (also just outside of Denver) has thriving colonies of prairie dogs and over 100 overwintering bald eagles, as well as trophy-sized mule deer and impressive populations of ferruginous hawks, burrowing owls and mountain plovers. Both locations, for the record, are now National Wildlife Refuge's.
In Georgia, a 300-square-mile property along the Savannah River was set aside for nuclear research and development more than 50 years ago. For most of the Cold War this site produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs. While a small part of the complex remains heavily contaminated, most of the area was left in pristine condition as a security buffer zone -- an area that today is home to more than 240 species of birds, 100 species of reptiles and amphibians, and nearly 100 species of freshwater fish. Because Savannah River wildlife was left alone to matures, many state record holders have been caught or trapped here, including the largest South Carolina alligator ever caught (13 feet) and the largest South Carolina largemouth bass. Despite jokes about "glowing frogs," University of Georgia's Whit Gibbons says there is no evidence to date of genetic damage to wildlife. "It's a pretty simple formula," he note, "The best protection for the environment is no people."
"And rain came down, and floods came, and winds blew, and the house built according to my teachings did not fall down, for it was founded on stone.
"As for the house built on sand, and not according to my teaching, rains came down, and floods came, and winds blew, and hurled against the house, and it fell in a mighty roar."
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Immigration and Wildlife:
1. Do the animals exist at all?
This may sound like an odd question, but it's a pretty important one because a lot of what is written about species extinction is totally unsupported by observed data.Here's the scoop: Over the course of the last 400 years, only about 820 species of vascular plants and vertebrate animals are listed as having gone extinct by the IUCN Red List. In addition, the IUCN reports several species being "rediscovered" every year after having previously listed them as "lost".
Though the IUCN cannot report on what has not been discovered, we have clearly discovered most of the mammals, birds, fish, snakes, frogs, shrubs, vines, grasses and trees in the world. While new species of wildlife are being discovered every day, there is no evidence to support the notion that even 50 vertebrates and vascular plants are going extinct every year, much less the 20,000 number commonly cited (invertebrates and fungi are very difficult to push into extinction as any farmer can tell you).
As odd as it may sound, even physical evidence of the existence of a species does not necessarily mean that this species has ever existed. Here, I am specifically talking about birds, where it turns out some "extinct" species are based on single skins collected in the 19th or early 20th Century. The cone-billed tanager is a good example (to read more about the hunt for this "extinct species" read "The Ghost With Trembling Wings" by Scott Weidensaul).
The problem with birds is that they hybridize a lot, and bird species are not always very distinct from each other. Along with the cone-billed tanager, for example, there are several species of hummingbirds that we know of only due to single examples collected for the millenary trade. These
so-called "Bogotá Skins" (for their central shipping point out of South America to Europe) may in fact represent evidence of a new species of now extinct hummingbirds -- or they could simply represent hybrids of other hummingbirds. With about 10 percent of all bird species known to cross the "species barrier," it's hard to know.
2. Is the animal being described really a species?
In fact a lot of stories about species decline are NOT about the decline of a species, but about the decline of a SUB-species in a very specific area.A sub-species is, by definition, NOT a species. In fact most subspecies are nothing more than slightly different colored animals that exhibit no other behavior differences and that freely breed with populations of other animals in their species (animals whose populations may in fact be quite large and growing).
Sub-species are an interesting thing. I have always found it ironic that many environmentalists place little value on the prolific creation of thousands of new subspecies of apples, potatoes, pigs, cattle, and chickens, but assign tremendous value to subspecies of cougars, lions and pronghorns (to give just three examples). In fact, mmany sub-species of wild animals are little more than political artifices designed to boost the careers or egos of the people naming them.
In some cases there is another less vanity-centered reason to name a subspecies -- you can "up list" an animal (and its habitat) for protection by simply singling it out. The Sonoran pronghorn appears to be an example -- an animal made "rare" despite the fact it appears to be little more than a light-colored variant of an animal that actually numbers in the million.
3. Was the species ever very common?
Some threatened and endangered species are animals that were always rare and not very successful to begin with. Take the Whooping Crane, for example. DNA analysis suggests Whoopers never numbered more than about 5,000 individuals. The 1850 population of the bird (when most of the American West was still unsettled and very wild) is estimated to have been just 1,500 individuals. There are now 500 Whoopers in the world, with about 350 of them in the wild. I am very glad the Whooper was pulled back from the edge of extinction, but the fact that the bird was never common or genetically successful is not an inconsequential part of its story (though it is rarely told).The Florida Manatee is another animal that was probably never terribly common. The Manatee population of Florida before there were outboard motors is estimated to have been around 10,000 or so. By the 1980s, the manatee population had declined to about 800, but it has since risen to over 3,000.
Again, bringing the American manatee (Trichechus manatus) back from extirpation in the U.S. is excellent, but we should not expect the population to ever get really huge. Note that the American manatee also exists in many other Caribbean countries south to Brazil, but it is a rare animal there due to hunting by indigenous people .
4. What is the population of the species now?
I am always interested in both the percent decline or increase in a species and the total number of individuals that exist (and existed). For example, if I am told that 97% of all pronghorn antelope are gone, I am shocked. But if I am told that this 3 percent totals 1 million animals, I begin to feel a
little better. I begin to feel pretty good when I know that in Wyoming the pronghorn population is estimated to equal the human population of the states, and even better when I learn that the human population of Wyoming is actually declining.The point here is that numbers are only meaningful within context. Do I wish there were more pronghorn in America? Sure! But one million pronghorn -- up from just 13,000 individuals at the Turn of the 20th Century -- is pretty good news and one we should be celebrating!
5. What has really caused the decline (or increase) of this species?
The death of any species is important, but I also want to know the circumstances of the decline or extinction. I consider the loss of the Passenger Pigeon and the Eskimo Curlew (there were once millions of these birds flying over vast areas of this continent) a much more significant tale than the loss of a species of flightless rail on a small island in the Pacific. One extinction signals the total loss of a once very common species that was successful over a very large area. The other signals the total loss of a very rare species that was NOT successful over a very large area. There are very different lessons to be learned from these very different stories.Most people are surprised to learn that most extinctions are of the latter type (fairly unsuccessful species in very isolated locations) and not the former (fairly successul species in fairly common locations). They are further amazed to discover that habitat loss is a much rarer cause of species extinction than the introduction of rats, cats, goats and pigs -- or of indiscriminate hunting. If you go through the IUCN Redlist of extinct species, for example, you find zeros for most countries (no known endemic species pushed into extinction), but incredible numbers of extinctions for such tiny islands as Mauritius (41 extinct species), Réunion (16 extinct species), Saint Helena (29 extinct species), French Polynesia (67 extinct species), and the Cook Islands (15 extinct species). In fact, these little spots of land, along with Hawaii, account for about 200 of the 812 species pushed into extinction over the course of the last 400 years.
Is the loss of an "unsuccessful species" a bad thing? I think so. But it may not be quite as horrible or as unprecedented as it is commonly made out to be. In fact it may be part of the order of things. After all, instead of a living at a time when there is a "biodiversity bottleneck," as some texts would have you believe, we are actually living at a time of incredible genetic diverity. As the folks at the World Resources Institute note, "Global biological diversity is now close to its all time high. Floral diversity, for example, reached its highest level ever several tens of thousands of years ago. Similarly, the diversity of marine fauna has risen to a peak in the last few million years." In short, we live in a very bio-diverse time, and with diversity will come a lot of failure which is every bit as much a part of Darwin's evolutionary equation as success (if not more so).
It's also worth remembering that even as we are losing species, we are also gaining them -- new types of chickens, pigs, apples, corn, and trees. New hybrids of canaries, geese, ducks, pigeons, cattle, horses, falcons, eagles, dogs and cats. And we are doing it with wild birds too.
The last time I flipped through a Sibley's Audubon guide to birds, I counted one extinct species of parrot (the Carolina parakeet), but 27 new species of introduced parrots that are found in wild flocks in the U.S. (65 species have been encountered in Florida alone). In California and Florida these wild-flocking parrots are already creating new hybrids. Wild parrot colonies are not just found in warm climates by the way -- they are found near my home in suburban Virginia, and in downtown parks in Seattle and Chicago. One hundred and fifty years from now my great grandchildren may find hybridized variations of these same birds listed as entirely new "American" species of parrots (the Sibley guide already notes the presence of many Amazon hybrids in Florida and California).
Food for thought.
