New Mexico has had all three cases of plague in humans that have occurred in the United States this year, a New Mexico Department of Health press release reports.
Read the press release here. (Will open a PDF.)
The bacteria that causes plague is endemic in the southwestern US. Wildlife cases are so common that I don’t report them here, but those cases can be an important warning to locals to take extra care to keep their pets away from wildlife and to avoid flea bites, and for wildlife managers and researchers to take precautions as well.
Just such a warning is in place in Palomar, California, where ground squirrels at a campground have been diagnosed with plague.
Sure, you know all about roads and wildlife, but roads are not the only place that wildlife and human infrastructure can do bad things to each other. Two recent stories point out some of the more unusual ways that wildlife influences modern life, and how our modern structures influence the survival of wildlife. (Although that sounds so serious. One of these stories is “cute,” and the other has been mostly reported as “cute.”)
At first they were, like gray squirrels almost everywhere in the US, abundant to the point of being a nuisance, especially to people with bird feeders. Then they were gone, or almost so. When mange struck the gray squirrels of the San Bernardino Mountains in California, people noticed, particularly in the past year.
