Of giant vultures, elusive marsupials & ‘cute’ marmots

                California condor                                      NYT pic

California condors, a variety of vulture and the largest flying birds in North America, can now be asked “Who’s your daddy?” since scientists’ recent discovery that “virgin births” happen among these endangered birds.  

The discovery came about only because condors have been closely watched and their births carefully documented as their population grew from 23 birds in 1982 to 504 birds in 2020.  That increase resulted from a concerted effort to breed condors in captivity.

Two male chicks were found to lack any paternal contribution in their genetic information – think, chicks hatching from unfertilized eggs – leading to condor mothers being linked with virgin births.  It’s called “Parthenogenesis,” a rare phenomenon among birds that’s more common among species like fish or lizards.   https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/california-condor  

Just whistle

Groundhog

Those of us familiar with groundhogs are usually satisfied to say something like “How cute!” (especially of their babies) and move on.  But these whistle-pigs or woodchucks, as they’re also known, have social structures and life styles that might surprise us.

They’re actually rodents belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots, and they’re lowland animals, unlike most other marmots, who live in mountainous terrain.   

A scientist who’s been studying groundhogs for years at a site in Falmouth, Maine, has observed, photographed, tagged and taken voluminous notes on groundhogs.  She has concluded they’re friendlier to relatives than unrelated others and they basically operate with a kinship-based loose community structure.

Baby groundhog

Groundhogs who opt to become outliers, living on their own, could miss the sentinel’s warning whistle to the community, signaling a nearby fox or some other predator.

Winter hibernators, groundhogs are often seen by homeowners as “varmints” and worse, although in justice to them, “Their digging helps aerate and enrich soil,” one scientist noted.   https://tinyurl.com/36jx8cx3

    Hide & seek

Koalas, one of Australia’s iconic animals, have always been elusive, but now they’re even harder to find – an estimated one-third of the country’s koalas have disappeared since the 2018 bush fires that “killed or displaced . . .3 billion animals, with thousands of koalas among the dead.” 

Drought, disease and deforestation – specifically, the paving over of their eucalyptus forest habitats -- have also contributed to the population drop.  Further, koalas’ small brains and slow movements make it

Koala with joey

easier to capture or kill them.

Now, scientists are trying to find out whether these marsupials – female mammals with pouches for their young – can survive after forests are charred, and at what elevation.  But koalas continue their elusive ways, making it still more difficult to find and count  them.  https://tinyurl.com/ypjb73fm

 

Elegy for the Giant Tortoises

by Margaret Atwood

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon
the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:
everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation
upon the giant tortoises
withering finally on a remote island.

I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can't quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there;
already the event
like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize,
plodding past me in a straggling line
awkward without water

their small heads pondering
from side to side, their useless armour
sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed,
lumbering up the steps, under the archways
toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,
the relics of what we have destroyed,
our holy and obsolete symbols.

 

(from Selected Poems. © Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Reprinted with permission in The Writer’s Almanac.)

A time out

As February finally ends, it’s time to organize photo and text files.  AnimalBeat II will be back after the spring equinox  (Sunday, March 20, 11:33 am).

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