Category: Cats
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Long ago, starter birdwatchers in an Arizona desert spotted a huge black bird. Perched commandingly, unimpressed by puny humans. Could it be – a raven? In the desert? Weren't they forest wilderness birds? A handy bird guide said the raven was “Common only in the Far North and in the West, especially near heavy timber.”…
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If Doctor Doolittle offered online courses in animal languages, I would take them all. He'd have many customers. Actually, all of us already know a few phrases in animal languages. We don't need Intro Dog to know that this dog is saying “I might bite! Check out these teeth!” We don't need Conversational Cat to guess that…
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Researchers in the Serengeti were quantifying the hunting behavior of female cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus). They measured the proportion of the day spent hunting, hunts started per hour, proportion of hunts which were successful, and time to complete a hunt. They recorded the age of the cheetahs' cubs if any, and how her hunting behavior changed…
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Even if they have never seen a cat and their parents have never seen a cat, the smell of cat hair fills a young rat with horror. You can easily measure aspects of this. For example, if they smell a cat in the “play chamber,” normally exuberant young lab rats won't play as much, an…
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A tiger's scientific name is Panthera tigris. There are several subspecies, though not so many as there used to be, and one is the South China tiger, Panthera tigris amoyensis. It's said to be the “stem tiger,” the one from which other subspecies diverged. (Which doesn't imply that it has stayed unchanged since then.) Sadly…
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The Italian wolf, Canis lupus italicus, is doing better than it was before. In the 1970s there were guessed to be only about 100 wolves surviving in the mountainous parts of Italy. Now there are more like 500 or 600 and they're fanning out into France and Switzerland. An Italian wolf likes to hunt medium-sized…
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It's hard work being high on the food chain, and predators are always looking for labor-saving ways to catch prey. In national parks in Kenya, the lions have not only gotten blasé about trucks full of ecotourists, they've started to use them as cover. They'll sneak around behind a vehicle and then rush out to…
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Often when a cat does something in secret, it's a wicked thing. A certain cat belonging to a relative recently discovered how to enter a lidded hamper full of clean folded laundry, urinate on the laundry, and leap out without knocking over the hamper or otherwise being detected. Until my relative wanted a clean shirt.…
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