20-Apr-23, 08:02:42 AM
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Other Nature Related Information / Falcon Web Cams / Re: Pa & S2 - Netherlands
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on: 25-Sep-11, 07:18:15 PM
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Update:
S2 Week 38
Gemert, September 24, 2011
At the end of next week, the peregrine S2 will once again visit the vets Caroline Hommers and Dirk Riemersma. Once again X-rays will be taken, and these images will be used to consider whether the pins can be removed. S2 will be anesthetized again, which does entail a certain amount of extra risk. There is still a small chance that the peregrine S2 can heal from her injuries.
At the moment, she is obviously still in the care of the bird sanctuary. The peregrine falcon is now receiving less food; she needs to lose weight, and if she is hungry enough to attack the prey eagerly, this is an indication that she is not being given too much food.
Hopefully we can end next week with positive messages, including pictures and movies of S2.
Thanks for your support.
VWG Gemert
Wonder what it means by "still a small chance" that S2 will heal from her injuries?
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Other Nature Related Information / Other Nature Web Cams / Re: Lily, the Black bear Cam
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on: 24-Sep-11, 07:55:58 PM
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Just before bear hunting season opened, several research bears had radio-collars and ribbons put on them to protect them from being killed. Hope wouldn't keep hers on and now she's been missing for a week and there are fears she has been killed by a hunter.  Update September 23, 2011 – 8:27 PM CDT.
by Lily the Black Bear on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:42pm
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Losing Hope
We are still waiting for information from the Department of Natural Resources about any young females that might have been registered from this area. Meanwhile, we heard back from a hunter who began baiting in this area shortly before Hope disappeared. We know this hunter would not shoot a radio-collared bear. He wrote that he passed up Jo and her cub and Ursula and her two cubs—bears whose GPS locations showed them at his bait—but he didn’t mention Lily or say whether or not he had killed Hope.
We had checked his bait site earlier in the season and it wasn’t being used. On the 15th, we began to see Jo, Ursula, Lily and their families frequenting the area. When we drove by the site on September 16, we found fresh signs of baiting—a well-used trail leading to the bait site. We couldn’t walk in to check more closely because that could be construed as hunter harassment. We hoped for the best. Hope shortly went missing.
Lily's family bedsite near large white pine -- log in foreground torn open as they searched for grubsYesterday, we downloaded Lily’s GPS locations for that time period and retraced Lily’s steps to look for clues. We found a well-used bedsite only 140 yards from the hunter’s bait site.
We know from walking with bears at this time of year that it’s not unusual for cubs to leave their sleeping mothers and forage up to half a mile away. We suspect that may be what happened. Hope—possibly with Faith—may have ventured into the bait site. The hunter would not have known this big yearling was still with her mother—still nursing along with her younger sister. He would not have known it was Hope.
We don’t want to jump to conclusions, which is why we waited to hear from the hunter and are still waiting to hear from the DNR, which won’t happen now until Monday at the earliest.
So when we got a call of a young bear treed near Ely, we took a look. It wasn’t Hope. It was a pair of cubs we had received a call about yesterday, too. The neighborhood had secretly enjoyed seeing the mother with cubs. The residents became worried when a hunter began baiting nearby. Shortly, the cubs were repeatedly seen alone. Today, they were up trees where the landowners had not seen them before, and they called hoping they had found missing Hope.
We feel like we did when June and her cubs went missing back in 2005. We feared she had been shot. That was the first experience like that for Sue, who had spent hundreds of hours with June, and she felt the huge loss until June’s signal was picked from an airplane by DNR researchers over 15 miles outside her usual area. We feel like Lynn did when he homed in by airplane on the radio signal of a deer he had walked with for over 2 years as it grew up and had a fawn. He had raised the deer on a bottle until she would come to his call. Then he released her into the wild and watched her integrate with wild deer, even becoming the leader of wild deer she grouped with in a wintering area. When he spotted the deer from the airplane, she was lying dead, having escaped from the hunter with an arrow through her. He couldn’t talk about it, not even to his wife Donna, for nearly a week until he had his own emotions sufficiently in check to tell about it.
Hope was/is special. If she really is gone, we can say that she had so much more to teach. We wonder how Faith feels with her buddy gone. We wonder how Lily feels. After her hormone problems were resolved, she became a devoted mother again, playing, nursing, and looking out for Hope as well as Faith. She gave up food for herself to let Hope and Faith have it. Now she has no choice but to move on without Hope, and we guess that is all we can do, too. We want to believe she is okay somewhere and maintain a glimmer of hope. But the email from the hunter made that hope very slim. It’s true she wasn’t collared, but we had hoped that Hope’s story would play out. We had more to learn from her.
We don’t know what to say. We suspect that some of you would know exactly what to say and could say it very eloquently, but we would rather you didn’t say it on Lily’s page or on any page associated with the research or the Bear Center. We thank you all for your cooperation.
Glenn and Nancy spent the rest of yesterday and most of today monitoring Cookie to make sure she stayed away from the beehive. She did. Instead, she headed toward the area where she denned last winter. She is undoubtedly pregnant, so she should den any day now. The landowner took precautions beyond the electric fence he and we put up around his hives. He found a bigger electric fence and put that up, too. He very much cares about his bees. In fact, he told us that he stayed up all night after finding Cookie at the hives that first evening. He couldn’t help falling asleep about 5 AM. When he awoke about 6:30 AM, he found that Cookie had been back and damaged a hive. He said he cried like a baby. We appreciate his working with us instead of just shooting her when he first saw her the evening before.
Braveheart managed to remove her radio-collar again (!), and we were lucky to get an opportunity to replace it. However, the new collar doesn’t have a GPS unit yet. When we visited her to give her a GPS unit, she wasn’t in a mood to accept it. We’ll try again. Braveheart is the typically calm bear that was featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune a couple years ago. But as bears slow down for hibernation, there are times when we hesitate to push them too hard. Any person or bear has limits.
On the bright side, all indications are that the other bears are fine. We are noticing movements that let us know some are headed for dens. We’ll all rest easier when they all ‘go to ground’ –another term for ‘denning.’[/color][/i] |
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Other Nature Related Information / Other Nature Web Cams / Surprising news about Mei Lan, the first Panda cub born at Zoo Atlanta!
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on: 22-Sep-11, 07:33:15 PM
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Thursday, September 22
We recently received some surprising news from our colleagues at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding about Mei Lan, the first giant panda cub born at Zoo Atlanta. She is actually a he, and it seems that he was incorrectly sexed when he was a cub. Mei Lan has lived at the Chengdu Research Base since February 2010, and our colleagues there have noted the appearance of testes.
Giant pandas are normally sexed as infants during early health checks. This can be difficult to do correctly, and it helps to have some practice. Mei Lan was sexed during his first veterinary exam when he was 19 days old by a staff person from the Chengdu Research Base and Zoo Atlanta staff. This is later than would normally be done at the Chengdu Research Base, and it’s more difficult to do if the cub is more than a few days old. We waited longer to do Mei Lan’s first exam, because Lun Lun was a first-time mother and we didn’t want to do anything that might disrupt the excellent care she was providing for Mei Lan.
Close examination of the anogenital area is needed to determine the sex of a giant panda cub, and a male’s testes do not descend until he is over 3 years old. Prior to this, there is no obvious external cue to sex. As a result, young giant pandas are occasionally sexed incorrectly, which was apparently the case for Mei Lan. We plan to recheck the sex of our other young giant pandas, Xi Lan and Po, during their next scheduled physical exams.
Although it’s strange for us to think of Mei Lan as a male, the good news is that this does not change how he was cared for and managed while he was growing up here in Atlanta. We all recall that his birth on September 6, 2006, was a monumental event for Zoo Atlanta, the City of Atlanta, the Giant Panda Species Survival Plan, and thousands of you, his fans, from around the world. He was the only giant panda cub born in the U.S. in 2006, and there was nothing we would have done differently if we or the staff from the Chengdu Research Base had known sooner that he was a male. He still would have been transferred to the Chengdu Research Base when he was 3 years old, and he will still be an important part of the breeding population there. So while this news does come as a big surprise, we’ll all just work on getting used to the fact that Lun Lun’s and Yang Yang’s firstborn was a son, and that son may have a bit of an odd name (Mei Lan roughly translates to Atlanta’s Beauty) for a male. I don’t think he’ll mind. I’ll bet Lun Lun knew all along. Too bad we couldn’t just ask her!
Rebecca Snyder, PhD
Curator of Mammals 
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