Category: Technology for animals
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Red-tailed tropicbirds are aces of tropical Pacific skies. They're big white birds with striking black eye markings. Each has two ridiculously long red tail feathers in the midst of its normal white tail feathers (thus Phaethon rubricauda). They catch fish by plunging into the sea from a height and grabbing them. Also squid. The tropicbird…
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Pier 39 on the San Francisco waterfront is an open mall, with music, performers, a merry-go-round, people who will do a caricature of you-with-an-enormous-head, and stores for the left-handed or sock-mad. There's an aquarium and a marina. You can catch a ferry. The pier was originally for commercial shipping. Then it was redeveloped as a…
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Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls. This one is airy, with many escape routes. As we walked to the door, a barn owl (Tyto alba) silently flew out. A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel…
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The experimenters were trying to enliven the lives of zoo animals while simultaneously gathering data. As often happens, not all the data they gathered was in the categories expected. As Hal Markowitz recounts in Behavioral Enrichment in the Zoo, date (1981), he was trying to set up a game for mandrills (Papio sphinx) in a…
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La Dolce Vita di Lampo Lampo slept in the station at Campiglia Marittima, a busy railway junction. In the morning he'd jump on the train to Piombino and walk Mirna Barlettani to school. Then he'd take the train back to Campiglia. When the Turin or Rome Express stopped in Campiglia, Lampo would gaze meaningfully…
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Here's another stellar dancer, a little corella or bare-eyed cockatoo, Cacatua sanguinea, dancing to Ray Charles's Shake Your Tailfeather. He does everything except shake his tailfeather and lift his feet. Brilliant dancers that Frostie and Snowball are, their performances may not be the most we can expect from cockatoos. As discussed in Becoming A Tiger,…
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It's one of those igloo-shaped doghouses. The pioneer brand is Dogloo. (Naturally, it was an aerospace industry spinoff.) It's the time of year for baby goats – kids – at my sister's farm. They popcorn all over the place, all day, and at night they like to sleep in a heap. In the igloo. My…
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On Monterey Bay, a tour boat laden with wildlife photographers spotted a sea otter. The boat headed over. When they got close enough to point their cameras at the otter, the otter pointed a camera at them. Enrique Aguirre got the shot that shows the otter with the videocamera. As Stephanie Pappas wrote in the…
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For a story on a pit bull rescue organization, I was visiting Kim Ramirez. Kim has two dogs, and she was fostering a third, Spyder, a worried young dog who had been confiscated from the Michael Vick dog-fighting operation. I was there to meet Spyder, since the Vick dogs were celebrities. I also met the…
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To attract wildlife, we've historically offered water, food, and salty snacks. Hunters and ecotourists can both be found hanging around waterholes. Some people put out bird feeders to watch birds. Others put out cheap corn to attract deer year-round so they'll be available in hunting season. Animals have always been drawn to salt licks. That…
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