Eyes on the Wild

[This post is unavoidably scatological:  if that’s not your thing, skip over the fifth photo and cut to the video…..]

Coyotes, Canis latrans, are nocturnal or crepuscular (one of my favorite words, meaning active at dawn and dusk) so I very rarely see them. Instead, I look for evidence.  It is easier in the winter; there are foot prints:

The prints make trails: these ones had a total of 10 trails converging on (or perhaps diverging from) a single cross-roads. I have no idea why; it wasn’t scent-marked, they didn’t seem to stop, but none of them missed that spot. It might have been one coyote going backwards and forwards on five different occasions, or 5 different coyotes each on their own mission. Use your imagination.

I’m pretty sure that at least two were around. This female had marked the trail with her urine, and you can also see that she was in season:

Underneath the apple tree, it looked as though two had come together. One spot of urine was female, visible at the bottom of this picture, and another lacked blood, so I think it was a male. The two marks were on the edges of a patch of snow that was trampled down by many, many coyote imprints, as if they had been there for some time, and I like to imagine it was a tryst.

A couple of weeks later, under the same apple tree, they had been feeding extensively. There was scat everywhere, and if you can bring yourself to inspect it closely (not everyone’s cup of tea), you will see a sliver of bone, lots of hair, and chunks of undigested rotten apple from the tree above.

We think of coyotes as predators and carnivores, but actually they are omnivores, as this scat makes abundantly clear.

So although I still hadn’t seen the coyotes, they were certainly there. I put up a game camera for a couple of days to see what I got, and meanwhile I heard them yipping at 3am, from just that area. In the morning, I checked the camera videos. (Ignore the date and time on the camera, I forgot to re-set it!).

The social unit for coyotes is an adult pair, and these look like nice fat healthy ones! Eastern Coyotes are bigger than Western ones, and they can weigh up to 40lbs. If they have mated, she will give birth in about two months, and I will keep my eyes open and report back..

Incidentally, the coyote population in Maine is booming, They only moved into the state in the 1930’s, and  there are now thought to be about 12,000 of them.

*With apologies to Mark Haddon, from whose wonderful book I have stolen my title.

 

In the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania, there is virtually no surface water in early October. The rivers are still there, but they are flowing underground, so they are called sand rivers.

Elephants find places where the water is near the surface, and create mud wallows:

and they drill deep artesian wells down into the sand to reach the clean water:

This is enough to drink, or have a shower:

But for other animals it is harder. Some get all the water they need from their food, but some, including lions, need to drink. So they wait till the elephants have moved on, and use their holes:

The few rivers that used to have year-round water, especially the Great Ruaha River itself, are now regularly dry for several months each year, largely because of over-use by upstream rice farms, which were originally financed by the African Development Bank. The consequences have been dire, with a substantial decrease in populations of the larger animals such as elephant, buffalo and lion.

https://www.ecowatch.com/great-ruaha-river-tanzania-2523947047.html

This remote Ruaha-Ruangwa ecosystem has long been famous for its large elephant populations but the combined pressures of water shortages and direct human aggression have resulted in a horrifying decline. In 2009, the population was 30,000,  before plummeting to only 8,272  in 2014, a 76 percent decline over five years. The largest single cause of this is poaching. (Figures from Great Elephant Census 2014).

However, there are reasons for hope.  The 2019 survey showed a big rebound, and the population is now thought to be stable at around 20,000 (although the survey area may be sightly different which makes it hard to compare the numbers directly.).

https://newsroom.wcs.org/News-Releases/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/13470/Massive-Wildlife-Survey-in-Tanzania-Points-to-Elephant-Recovery-In-Key-Landscape.aspx

[I find that right now I have two different strands that I want to write about. There are still stories left to tell from Tanzania, but here now in Maine it is deep winter, and that is both beautiful and timely. So I think I will oscillate between the two for the time being. Today, winter prevails.]

When snow is thick on the ground, food is scarce.  The Slate-eyed Junco, Junco hyemalis,  is a tiny bird, yet it somehow survives through the long hard Maine winter.

Some food sources are easy to see, like these apples rotting away on the tree:

Others are so tiny it is hard to imagine that they provide enough food even for a junco: this one is feeding away but on what?

A large area of snow beneath two gray birch trees was covered in what looked like wood-shavings:

These are the seeds of the birch tree, whose long slender catkin has blown down in the storm, and has been swiftly dismantled by the juncos:

Each seed is minute, with tiny wings, and two little antennae:

The gray birches growing a few yards down the stream have shorter fatter catkins,

and seeds with smaller wings (this seems to be a double-yolker!) :

They gobbled these up too.

The seed is about 2mm across, and 2000 seeds weigh about one gram. The amount of nutrition in these seeds is about 5 Kcal/g, and a junco needs 28 Kcalories per day to survive in the winter, so it needs to eat more than 5g of these minute seeds, or 10,000 seeds. Of course, its diet is varied, and other foods offer more calories, but you can see why it never stops eating. To get my 1500 Kcalories a day I would need to eat 300g of these seeds, or 600,000 seeds. I think I prefer good bread, good cheese, and a glass of red wine.

Sources: 

The calorie data on birch seeds is based on white birch seeds, and is taken from Grodziński, W., & Sawicka-Kapusta, K. (1970). Energy Values of Tree-Seeds Eaten by Small Mammals. Oikos, 21(1), 52-58. doi:10.2307/3543838

The calorie data on juncos is taken from Seibert, H. (1949). Differences between Migrant and Non-Migrant Birds in Food and Water Intake at Various Temperatures and Photoperiods. The Auk, 66(2), 128-153. doi:10.2307/4080440

I am responsible for the maths!

PS How to weigh a junco, from a 2020 article in Nature on the work of Pamela Yeh:

” A dark-eyed junco being weighed: “We have a digital scale,” says Pamela Yeh. “We’ve put a bird head-first in the cup, and it’s dark in there, so he doesn’t move very much.”

 

Apart from eating, trunks are good for a multitude of other things:

Scratching:

Making friends

Wrestling matches:

And when you are all grown up they are good for protecting and corralling your baby:

The multipurpose trunk can also be used to make noise, loud noise! Here are three different types of trumpeting from the Elephant Voices website:   https://www.elephantvoices.org/elephant-communication/acoustic-communication.html

But the best trick of all is to use the trunk as a snorkel, to breathe underwater. This video shows what I mean:

There is an astonishing underwater video out there of a snorkeling Asian elephant in deep water in the Andaman sea, but it is part of a tourist show, so I am not confident that the elephant is being properly treated, and I have chosen not to link to that video.

According to Rudyard Kipling, this wonderful trunk is all the crocodile’s fault…

 

[This is my 200th post. I wonder when I will run out of natural wonders to share?]

Learning to use your trunk is tricky. Young elephants, like young children have to practice their fine motor skills.

Everybody knows that a trunk is an elongated flexible nose (it is actually the nose fused with the upper lip), and indeed if you look at it from underneath, the anatomy is quite clear, including the two nostrils, which go all the way up! And it can still be used to sniff out two sweaty tourists in their jeep.

To nurse, you have to get it out of the way, so your mouth can reach the teat:

But the trunk comes into its own when you need to reach the water at the bottom of a hole that your mother has dug deep in a dry sand river (an underground river):

You kneel down, suck up the water, then squirt it out of your trunk into your mouth. You can no more drink it through your trunk than we humans can sniff water up our noses and down our throats. Occasionally you get sand by mistake, but that’s fine if all you want to do is cool down:

The African (but not the Asian) elephant’s trunk has two flexible “fingers”, that can grasp things tightly:

As you get older, you become so dexterous that you can pick tiny leaves and flowers off almost bare spiny bushes:

 

Next time: It’s not just for eating and drinking.

P.S. For the technically minded amongst you, the elephant’s trunk, like our tongues and like octopus arms, is a muscular-hydrostat. (Kier and Smith 1985). It has no bones to keep it stiff. It is a cylinder of fixed volume, so to make it longer, you must make it thinner. It has longitudinal muscles, and transverse muscles, and bending it requires the use of both. So a baby elephant learning to use its trunk to pick leaves is a bit like a baby human learning to use its tongue to make speech sounds. 

 

 

 

[I hope you enjoyed your break from my blog posts, and the first 2020 posts’s 7000 mile detour back to Maine. I am not quite done with leopards, though. No self-discipline, really.]

This leopard in the Serengeti had two teenage cubs, and they were returning from hunting early one morning. She rubbed herself against an overhanging tree to scent-mark her territory, sniff another leopard’s scent, or maybe just scratch an itch:

Then she moved towards a large rock formation, where she had stashed the kill:

This shot gives a better sense of the rocky outcrops the leopards  favor; they are the perfect place from which to mount an ambush of an unwary passing prey animal:

And here is the mother again, posing like a 1930’s Hollywood starlet, except that this coat is truly hers :

A different leopard, but I couldn’t resist the Eartha Kitt vibe:

The IUCN classifies the leopard as Vulnerable, and the fur trade is one major threat to their survival. Apart from international buyers, local people use the skins as ceremonial garb, so a project is trying to encourage the use of synthetic furs instead, and seems to be having a surprising amount of success:

https://www.panthera.org/furs-for-life

Still,  I yearn for the days when there was a balance between wildlife survival and local traditions, undistorted by the outside demand for skins.

[This has to be done today, I feel, even though I am in the midst of an African series of posts. Normal service will resume soon. And Happy New Year! ]

On New Year’s Eve in Maine we were in the midst of a two day snowstorm that brought us 12 glorious inches of pristine snow for 2020. As soon as it ended, I went for a final snowshoe of 2019. There are old apple trees behind my barn,

with last fall’s fruit still hanging on the higher branches, and on the ground underneath.

These are a magnet to a variety of animals, like this deer who had walked by some time earlier, while the snow was still falling fast*:

Back to the tree: beneath the boughs I found the debris of a life and death struggle.  From a distance, here is what I saw.

It was a recent incident;  the snow had only tapered off in the past hour, and these crisp marks had been made after it stopped. The story begins with the round disturbance at the top right, then the drag marks, leading to the denouement at the bottom left.

This is a close-up of the top right: look at the circular wing marks.

A hawk* has dropped down from the tree onto some small victim, and in fact you can see where the bird disturbed the snow on the branch of the tree above, as she perched in wait:

Having grabbed her victim, there is a short tussle as she gets a good grip and drags it leftwards.

The mouse or vole would have been under the snow, and she would have located it by ear.  A single tiny smear of blood part-way along the drag marks was the only evidence of violence.

Then here is a close-up of the final left-most disturbance: she lifts the rodent up,  and takes off, mouse-tail dragging across the snow, and her wingtips just grazing the snow in the top left-hand corner.

One tiny mammal that never made it to 2020.

* I’m pretty sure the earlier pair of tracks are just deer tracks coming and going, at different speeds. The following morning 20 feet away I found fresh tracks with the gait pattern like the ones on the left in the earlier picture, with the same roughly 5 foot stride, and a clear deer imprint in the bottom of each:

**I can’t be sure what type of hawk this was. The hunting method is typical of a Broad-winged Hawk, but they don’t over-winter round here. Red-tailed Hawks and Cooper’s Hawks have both been seen in the general area this December, so it could have been one of these, but Cooper’s Hawks prefer small birds as prey. There’s a small chance that it was an owl, not a hawk.  Barred Owls overwinter in Maine, and occasionally hunt in the daytime.  If anyone can be more definitive, let me know.

 

[Regular readers will I hope forgive me for another leopard post, and indeed it will not be the last. But I’m taking a break now for the holidays, and will be back in January.]

Leopards are solitary denizens of the secret places. Rock piles, thick brushy woodland, overhanging limbs high in an acacia. Quite unlike lions, who will casually lounge around in groups in the open grasslands.

So leopards are harder to see, unless the Ruaha evening light provides a convenient silhouette.

This young female watched us suspiciously from high in the tree, trying to decide if it was safe to stay or safer to come down and leave the area:

That elegant tail is not just decorative.  It acts as a counterweight when climbing, and when dragging its kill up into the tree.

After a while the leopard returned to her high perch, draped languidly over a branch:

but without taking her eyes off us:

Their concealing habitats are places to hide their prey, which they drag into bushes and up trees where the much larger lions and hyenas are unlikely to find it (or them).

Leopard eat a huge range of animals, including tricky things like porcupines, and under certain circumstances they will even kill and eat other leopards. This rather grisly video was filmed in the Serengeti this year:

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000161-4cfb-d807-a9f3-4cfb29cc0000

*My title is from Jeremiah 5,6 the Darby Bible version published in 1890. 

Such a name to live up to!  The Goliath Heron Ardea goliath, is the largest living heron. It stands 5 feet high, nearly as tall as me. Its wingspan can reach 7ft 6in (my arm-span is only 5ft 4in, about the same as my height).

They stalk the shallows or the weedy banks, moving with a stately, ponderous gait. They are largely solitary, and because of their size they have few predators.

This one struck at a tempting mouthful, but missed, and then in embarrassment at such a public failure, he did a sort of shimmy, stuck out his elbows and and fluffed up his gorgeous feathers:

And tried again, to no avail.

Their huge size means they can catch and, eventually, eat very large fish. Watch this video, but be warned it takes a LONG time to swallow its humongous catfish :

They have a variety of calls, described rather wonderfully by www.oiseaux-birds.com as “similar to raucous barks of an old dog. Its calls include croaks, squawks, growls and gurgles. They are mostly silent outside breeding season.” I could only find one recording, made when the bird was flying overhead in South Africa:

Happily, they are not endangered, and are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Agamas, or dragon lizards, are a family of lizard species widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. Some have spectacular coloring. The Mwanza Flat-Headed Rock Lizard, Agama mwanzae, has acquired the nickname of the Spider-Man Lizard: one look at this male, and you will see why:

For purposes of comparison his namesake can be seen here:

Agamas are insectivorous, and the male is usually the flamboyant one. Here is a male of a different but related species, the Red-headed Rock Agama, Agama agama, who seems to have mistaken this tree for a tall thin rock:

And this is a male blue-headed Southern Rock Agama (Agama atra) , which I saw in Uganda a few years ago. This is their breeding coloration.

In all of these species, the females are rather dull!

The closest relatives of agamas are chameleons, famous for their ability to change color.