As a reminder to those living in bear country, Parks Canada has just released this video of a grizzly bear playing in the snow. It may not feel like it in many places, but spring is here and the bears are up and active. After spending several months in a dark den, you can almost feel the joy of this bear as he cavorts in the spring sunshine!
While this website does deal with carnivores, there is a lot of other interesting wildlife in the world. When this heartwarming video came across my desk, I just had to share it. The behavior of this rescued whale clearly expresses joy and exaltation. It made me cry with a big smile on my face.
With the possible exception of the bobcat, North American coyotes are the most successful carnivore species on the continent.
Both of them are generalists, eating whatever is easiest to catch and most abundant at the time. They are also highly adaptable to changing conditions.
Once the clever coyotes equated cities with abundant food lying around for the taking, they began to spend more time at their city addresses. Many major cities now have Urban Coyote projects, working to understand these rapidly adapting carnivores, and educate the public.
Our local paper recently had a very long article about our own city-dwelling carnivores, with some great advice from local researchers at the University of Calgary.
As dog owners, we have come into contact with coyotes many times. We have bird feeders in the yard that attract rabbits to the spilled feed, and naturally coyotes follow the rabbits. We’ve even had a coyote in our fenced back yard, and as we have no alley, we still have no idea how he got in there. None of these encounters led to problems because we understand coyote behavior, and remained calm.
Coyotes are wild animals, and if you share your habitat with them, educate yourself about these canids. Think of coyotes as a symbol of our North American heritage. They’ve survived since the ice ages, and should be admired for their endurance not considered a pest on your landscape. After all, they were here first so who is the interloper?
See also:
On the Loose – Urban coyotes thrive in North American Cities
At this point, I’m not really sure why we thought having a website was a good idea.
Trying to keep up with all the changes from the mighty Google is daunting enough, but when you get hacked, or attacked by malware, you are basically starting from scratch. We’re all squeaky clean again now, and have taken steps so it doesn’t happen again.
So. Here we are with our new look, and we hope you like it. We will be adding more animal t shirts as the months go along, so we hope you’ll keep checking in to see what’s arrived.
We also promise to get back to blogging about carnivores and other wildlife species on a regular basis. If you sign up for email notice on the right, you won’t miss even one of our scintillating posts…
Let us know what you think of our new site, and if there is anything you would like to see covered in our blog!
This is the last of our current round of carnivore quizzes, but we had a lot of fun with it! Our critter this week is likely the biggest challenge we’ve thrown at you yet – we’re thinking about just leaving it unidentified until someone guesses correctly.
And this would be…?
Last week’s mystery critter was one of our favourite animals – a Maned Wolf from South America. Read more about these unusual members of the Canidae Family on the IUCN Red Data List.
Update January 2013
This beautiful little feline is an Oncilla Leopardus tigrinus from Central and South America. One of the smallest wild cat species in the Americas, you can read more about them on the International Society For Endangered Cats website.
Lammergeier or Bearded Vulture (Wiki).
In the high mountains of southern Europe, Africa, India and Tibet lives a large bird that exists on a diet of bone.
The Lammergeier, or bearded vulture, eats almost exclusively the bones of dead animals – up to 90% of their diet is bone. They are the only vertebrate in the world with this diet, and their extremely acid stomach allows them to digest entire bones overnight.
This huge bird is 95-125 cm (37-49″) long with a 235-280 cm (91-110″) wingspan. Like other members of the vulture family, the Lammergeier is a clean-up master.
They soar across vast areas to locate animal carcasses and skeletons. When gathered around an animal carcass, Lammergeiers must wait until other species have eaten their fill. Unlike other vultures, these birds have feathered heads and do not dig deep into the carcass. They have to make do with the leftovers, and as a result have developed the specialty of bone-eating.
If the bones are too big to eat at the kill site, the vulture picks them up in his talons and flies to a favored bone-breaking site, when he either cracks them against a passing rock, or drops them onto the rocky surface. This bone-breaking action can be carried out as often as 30 times before the bones are small enough to digest.
Once the bone has shattered, their narrow, pointed tongue is an excellent adaptation for extracting the highly nutritious bone marrow. Lammergeiers weigh between 5 and 7 kg (11 and 15 lbs), and eat about a tenth of their body weight in bone every day.
As if a diet of 90% bone and bone marrow wasn’t unusual enough, researchers in Spain have found these birds select the bones with the most fat. Their study of bones left behind versus those taken, and the use of monitoring cameras set up at nest sites, determined the bones left had significantly less fat than those taken. Even in the nest, they sifted through the pile and took the richest bones with the most fat. These specialist birds extract about 13,000 calories per bite-sized serving, which provides plenty of energy for soaring over huge areas.
For an occasional change of diet, live tortoises are also dropped onto rocks to crack them open.
The Greek playwright Aeschylus was said to have been killed in 456 or 455 BC by a tortoise dropped by an eagle who mistook his bald head for a rock. This was thought to be a myth until someone sighted a bearded vulture dropping a tortoise from height onto rocks. If this incident did occur, the Lammergeier must be a likely candidate for the “eagle”.
For a specialist eater, I’d say they’ve got the market cornered. It’s not like there’s a line up of other birds wanting to steal their yummy greasy bones.