Welcome to my blog.
In May, we were wishing Bobi a happy birthday, his thirty-first – by far more birthdays than any other dog had ever celebrated. We’re sad to report that there will be no more, as Bobi has passed on after three decades.
The depth of human tragedy attendant to the Hamas-Israeli war leaves little emotional bandwidth for animal welfare, but animals – dogs, cats, and other pets – still need care. Animal rescue goes on, within and near Gaza, even under extremely dangerous and stressful conditions.
Since 2007, marine biologists and interested amateurs have been observing a curious behavior of humpback whales called “kelping,” in which the giant cetaceans seem to be playing with seaweed. Now researchers from Griffiths University in Australia have looked into the phenomenon; their study appears in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has taken nearly two dozen animal species off of the endangered list, and that’s bad news because it means there’s no hope for them. The animals – one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish, and eight types of mussels – are too far gone to warrant protection.
Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.
Female frogs, specifically the European common frog, deploy a number of strategies to ward off hyper-amorous males, including faking their own deaths. Researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin publish the sex-averse findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The bears have eaten and the people have spoken. The winner of the 2023 Fat Bear Week is an empty-nest mom named Grazer 128. The zaftig beauty beat out the competition at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where she won the final round in a landslide – 108,321 votes to 23,134.
The UK’s Natural History Museum has announced its annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners. Top marks go to French marine biologist-photographer Laurent Ballesta, who captured on film a gold-colored horseshoe crab patrolling the sea floor off Pangatalan Island, Philippines, closely followed by three tiny golden trevally fish.
A bear in Tennessee had an awful August and September as he spent the entire time with a plastic jug stuck on his head. Finally, on October 3, rescue angels were able to tranq the little bear and remove the thing, which turned out to be part of an automatic pet feeder.
We’ve talked about the mad scientists trying to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth before, but now a Belgian company wants to go a step further and produce edible meat from the long-dead creatures. Startup Paleo has a patent pending for this macabre product.
Commander, Joe Biden’s 2-year-old German shepherd, has been removed from the White House after biting a Secret Service agent, at least the eleventh such incident since Biden took office in 2021. Commander may now join Major, another biting shepherd, who was exiled to Delaware last year to live with the president’s friends.
When the US government came within a few hours of shutting down last weekend, alarmed citizens across the republic wondered if the shutdown would cancel a crucial government function: Fat Bear Week.
The mighty bald eagle, which had not been seen in Gotham for about a hundred years, has found purchase on Staten Island, where at least four adults and a dozen offspring now call home.
A research team in southern Thailand has discovered a new species of tarantula with a dazzling feature they describe as “a blue-violet hue resembling the color of electrical sparks.”
A deep sea live video stream captured several minutes of the delightful “Dumbo” octopus, placidly swimming near the seafloor of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
A female peregrine falcon sank her talons into a much larger brown pelican mid-flight, and photographer Jack Zhi was on hand to capture the attack on film. The image, among the 23,000 entries submitted to the Bird Photography of the Year contest, is so good it was the Overall Winner and it took the gold in another category, Bird Behaviour.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo think they can decipher the emotional states of chickens based on the birds’ vocalizations. It sounds borderline silly, but the scientists are quite serious.
The Clydesdale horse – featured in Budweiser commercials since forever – will no longer have their tails lopped off, according to the brewer. The move to discontinue “tail docking” comes as the company faced pressure from animal-rights activists and veterinary groups to end the cruel practice.
It’s been a year since African cheetahs were brought to India in an attempt to reintroduce the species that had been extinct on the subcontinent for 70 years. So far the project is going … not great.
A scent-detecting dog named Dory has been sniffing out the location of sea turtle eggs on the Florida coast for the past five years or so. Researchers monitored her uncanny ability and found she was better at it than the human volunteers who normally scour the beaches.
