Monthly Archives: June 2011

Connecticut Mountain Lion Struck By Car

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A mountain lion was struck and killed by a car on a Connecticut highway Saturday morning (June 11). News reports say Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection officials believe it to be the same animal that was spotted in Greenwich, Connecticut earlier that week. The reports also mention that it is likely a captive animal that escaped or was released.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the mountain lion extirpated from the East back in March. Captives roaming free and the occasional wild wanderer should keep the Internet humming for years to come.

See reports in the Hartford Courant, and NBC News.

Update: The Connecticut DEP press release.

Photo: Connecticut State Police/Ct. DEP

Connecticut Mountain Lion Struck By Car

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A mountain lion was struck and killed by a car on a Connecticut highway Saturday morning (June 11). News reports say Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection officials believe it to be the same animal that was spotted in Greenwich, Connecticut earlier that week. The reports also mention that it is likely a captive animal that escaped or was released.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the mountain lion extirpated from the East back in March. Captives roaming free and the occasional wild wanderer should keep the Internet humming for years to come.

See reports in the Hartford Courant, and NBC News.

Update: The Connecticut DEP press release.

Photo: Connecticut State Police/Ct. DEP

Fire, Water, and Wildlife

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There is fire in the West, while flooding continues everywhere else.

Two of Arizona’s four packs of endangered Mexican wolves are in the immediate area of the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona. An interagency team is monitoring the effects of the fire on the endangered wolves.

Read more in this press release from the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Or this very brief article from KPHO.

When flooding first struck the Mississippi River, there was also flooding in South Dakota and Vermont. The flooding continues there as well, prompting these two stories about flooding and wildlife.

The first, from the Greenfield (S.D.) Daily Reporter says that wildlife officials are asking the public not to rescue wildlife displaced by the flooding. They particularly ask people to leave fawns alone, since does can leave fawns for what seems to humans like a long time. Not sure how that relates to the floods. Wildlife officials all over the country are asking the public to do the same thing. Read more.

In Vermont, high water on Lake Champlain means that black terns — a state-threatened bird — probably won’t raise broods in the state this year. It is expected to be a rough nesting year for aquatic birds, and even ground-nesting birds may be effected by the flooding that hit the state last week. Beavers and muskrats are also dealing with the high water, and are seeking high ground, which is forcing them on to roadways more than usual.

The article ran in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre Montpelier Times-Argus, but is behind a paywall.

Update: Arizona Game and Fish has a Web page with information about the state’s fires and wildlife, including its impact on hunting and fishing in the area. It plans to update the site as needed:
http://www.azgfd.gov/w_c/fire_impacts_on_wildlife.shtml


Photo: a Mexican wolf in Arizona on a much cooler day. Photo courtesy of the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Invasives Are Food for Thought, But Not For Growth

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How do invasive species become invasive? There are a number of hypotheses, and sorting them out is vital to wildlife managers trying to lessen the invasives’ impact. One recent study, published in the journal Ecology, found that generalist plant-eaters, in this case insects, grew more slowly when eating a plant that was not native to their continent.

The plant was spotted knapweed, known to have at least one defensive chemical not yet found in plants native to North America. The researchers concluded that when it came to generalist herbivores and spotted knapweed, the “novel weapons hypothesis,” which says the invasives thrive because native predators are vulnerable to their unfamiliar defenses, seems to be the case.

The study is interesting for a bunch of reasons, but particularly because it offers some insight into the role of spotted knapweed in North American ecosystems. There are many implications, but let’s start with the trickle-up effect in the ecosystem of spotted knapweed consumers (moths, grasshoppers) that are smaller, but still abundant. That could really mess with the energy budget of their predators. Also, while we may think of the biggest impacts as coming from the invasive plant not being eaten at all, even when eaten, the sub-lethal effects of consuming spotted knapweed can echo through the food chain.

Read the whole article, and come to your own conclusions. It’s open access: http://www.esajournals.org/doi/full/10.1890/10-1230.1
Photo: A bee on spotted knapweed.
Photo credit: Cody Hough, college student and photographer in the Michigan area.

Colorado Combines Wildlife Department with Parks

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Coloradans are taking the newly created partnership between their state wildlife department with their state parks department seriously. This article in New West discusses how several Western states are looking to combine state agencies to save money.

What the article doesn’t mention, however, is that there are almost as many ways to organize the bureaucracy of wildlife management at the state level as there are states, or that many states in other regions already combine parks and wildlife, most famously, Texas.

I think it matters less where a state sticks its wildlife management function within its bureaucracy, than how the people of the state view their relationship to wildlife. That’s something that can’t be legislated.

For more, see: “Colorado Shuffles Parks, Wildlife Departments” in New West.

The Cicada Paradox

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Photo: Philip N. Cohen

As Brood XIX cicadas emerge in the South, you would think that local birds would be preparing for a once-every-13-years feast. But, rather than flocking in and chowing down, bird numbers decline in regions experiencing a periodical cicada emergence. These declines have been confirmed by the annual Breeding Bird Count (BBC) that takes place across the country in May and June.

Scientists at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, the University of Maryland, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture wondered whether the loud trill of the cicadas was drowning out bird calls, so BBC surveyors merely didn’t hear birds that were still there; whether something about the cicada emergence drove birds away from an area; or if birds experienced a true population decline during cicada emergence years.

In a study published in the journal Ecology, they compared various measures of bird populations in years of cicada emergence, and years without a cicada emergence. They also looked at those population measures in places where the cicadas could be heard, and in places where cicadas couldn’t be heard.

If it was just a matter of the surveyors not hearing birds among the din of the cicadas, the number of birds in the cicada areas would drop, while the number of birds in the non-cicada areas would stay the same. If the cicadas were driving the birds away, there would be fewer birds near the cicadas and more where the weren’t cicadas. Finally, if the number of birds declined similarly in areas with and without cicadas, then some other factor was at work.

The researchers used BBC data from the 1987 and 2004 emergences of Brood X, the periodical cicadas that live in the Mid Atlantic states. The data included whether or not the surveyors could hear cicadas at each data collection point.

They found that the number of birds declined similarly in areas where there were cicadas and areas where there weren’t cicadas within the Brood X emergence region. The findings strongly suggest a true decline in birds during these years.

What is causing that decline? The researchers could only speculate. But perhaps the mysterious environmental trigger that leads the cicadas to emerge every 13 years in the South, and generally every 17 years in the North, also influences the bird population decline — giving the cicadas the best chance of creating a new generation, without winding up as an avian snack.

Read the whole paper on the Cornell researcher’s Web site, here.

Read more about the current cicada emergence, here, in USA Today and on Nashville Public Radio.

Photo: Brood XIX cicada in Chapel Hill, NC, taken by Philip N. Cohen