Doss has some serious, boring inventions and then a side-line in goofy stuff like the face feeder, which he came up with after a hummingbird hovered in front of his red bird.  “A hummingbird came out of nowhere and just hung there, two inches from my nose,” he says. “My immediate response was, I froze. I never forgot the experience. It was such a magical type of thing.”

Decades later, Doss took a professional welding face shield and covered it in a red pattern that hummers love. Then he put a rubber tube between the eyes to be filled with sugar water. The birds came. This isn’t the first attempt at a hummingbird helmet. This adorable video shows a little girl watching hummingbirds in the more popular variety–and initially flinching and scaring them away.

The face shield serves to draw hummers in (they love red) and to make humans confident they won’t get their eyes poked out. Hummingbirds are so agile, they’re not going to go bumbling into your face.

Doss says the tube was the hardest part to figure out. During the northern California spring, when three or four hummingbirds may be buzzing the helmet, he may refill it more than once a day. In winter he can skip a day.

The reason people are both fascinated with hummingbirds and frustrated in seeing them is their speed. They may only be there 15 seconds, but if they’re an inch from your eye, you can really drink up the details. “You can actually look into their eyes. You can appreciate their tiny little feet. They have the smallest feet because they never walk. You see markings, so you can see this one’s not that one. You see them feed, then back up and look left and look right.” While the person wearing the hummingbird helmet can distinguish between individual hummingbirds, the birds are oblivious to which person is behind the mask. That means, once the birds in your yard get used to eating from a red helmet, they’ll feel at home when your visiting friend wears it or they see some other guy wearing a helmet 100 miles away.

As he nears 700 of the $80 feeders sold–mostly in the US and Canada, although most hummers are in Latin America–there’s getting to be a chance that hummingbirds will start to recognize the feeders, which will make them even more fun to own.

Check out the “face to face” feeder

Painted lady butterflies–kind of a runtish, drab cousin of the monarch–are migrating through New York City. Look for mobs of the smallish orange and brown butterflies on cherry trees. (Update: They may also be Red Admirals,  Gothamist says)

One tree on First Street and Prospect Park West had hundreds of the butterflies, which migrate from Mexico, flitting around them last night. We went back to check what seemed to be the roost this morning. Nothing.

On the Prospect Park Audubon bird walk this afternoon, another woman said her backyard cherry was also swarmed with the little butterflies last night.

The painted ladies seem to be having a great year, thanks to wet weather in Mexico. KCET in San Diego reported last month that their area was seeing huge numbers owing to the bumper crop of “thistles and cheeseweeds.” The Urban Dictionary says that’s marijuana, but what they’re really talking about is a plant that looks like rhubarb, but without the red stems, and grows in vacant lots. You can see why they like NYC.

Even though the painted lady lives nearly everywhere in the world, we’re still not clear on the details of its annual migration, Everett D. Cashatt of the Illinois State Museum says. The Iowa State entomology department is tracking them. But they’re not supposed to stop much, so yesterday may have been our big, peak day.

Their more spectacular and easily recognized cousins, the Monarchs, are also plowing through the latitudes of New York and Chicago in the last few weeks, according to the citizen scientist map at Learner.org.

Read more about butterfly migration

Where to SEE HAWKS, OWLS & OTHER RAPTORS

Lanny Chambers, who runs hummingbirds.net says hummingbirders have been debating what’s going on with this freakishly early migration of ruby-throated hummingbirds and the consensus is that most of the birds are still sensibly waiting down south to be sure they don’t get caught in cold weather. In many other species it’s the young male pioneers that are always the ones wandering out early and far, hoping to get ahead. All of the manatees caught way up north in recent years, for example, have been males.

In hummingbird world, the males head north first to stake out a good territory. “I would be surprised if people were spotting females north of their normal ranges,” Chambers says. They have no reason to go early. They don’t have a regular mate or family structure; it’s every hummingbird for itself. The females “pick males that are the orneriest, nastiest” birds defending good territory, he says.

Another hummingbird tracker, Learner.org, has done a very cool animation of the migration data. Even though they employs school kids as citizen scientists–and so have a completely independent set of information–they show the same thing as hummingbird.net: a very early start to a migration, but the bulk of birds still hanging back in the south until it’s a sane time to head north.

Chambers says that some hummingbirds probably try to head north early every year, but storms stop them. They just go hide in the bushes. Hummingbirds are tougher than their delicate frames suggest, he says. “They can take a night or two of temperatures in the teens,” he says. “Twenty degrees isn’t a problem. They may be uncomfortable, but they’ll be okay.” Their main food isn’t flower nectar (or the Kool-Aid like drink people put out for them); it’s bugs.

Don’t take their early migration as a sign of global warming, the apocalypse or even of a hot summer. Hummingbirds spend the winter in Mexico and Central America, so they have no notion of what the weather is up here before they take off across the Gulf of Mexico. Studies show they go by hours of daylight, Chambers says.  “Ruby throated hummingbirds have been arriving on the gulf coast exactly when they always do,” he says. “This is a pattern that just doesn’t vary.”

Read about the hummingbirds that came early or never left at all

Check out hummingbird.net’s very cool advice on attracting hummingbirds and using feeders

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

SEE ANIMALS IN THE NORTHEAST (NY, NJ, MD, MA, ME, NH, VT, CT, RI, PA)

Manta ray off Hawaii by Steve Dunleavy

The giant manta ray (Manta birostris) just got an upgrade. It’s now listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, so maybe it’s patchwork of local protections will gel into some international cooperation.

The Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) gaves rays the boost Nov. 25 because their population fell 30% in the last decade and 80% since the 1940s.

Its big problem isn’t being delicious; people generally don’t want to eat them. The manta ray has gill rakers–combs to get food out of the water–that are dried and served as tea in Chinese medicine for a range of iffy ailments from rashes to circulation and immunity. The Ray of Hope compares their problems to those of sharks targeted for mystical shark fin soup. Fishermen turn to rays after they’ve wiped out sharks. Their meat is used as a filler in shark fin soup.

The ray’s dried gills are the big prize and the new rule means the world will start tracking the trade. Scubazoo reports finding ray’s gill rakers readily in markets in Sri Lanka, with dried tea selling in several spots in $80-$140 per kilo, again depending on size and quality. That’s a lot of money, but still not as much as manta rays bring in if we let them live and just let animal tourists come look at them. As Scubazoo points out, researcher Chas Anderson estimated last year that manta rays are worth about $4,000 each in tourism to the Maldives.

Here's what people are killing giant manta rays for

The IUCN says fishermen target manta rays in the Philippines, Mexico, Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Tanzania and Indonesia.

The ray got help from Ecuador and NGO Equilibrio Azul, which in turn was assisted by the Manta Ray of Hope project, run by WildAid and Shark Savers. They’ll release a report in December on the decimation of manta and mobula rays.

Where can you go see manta rays? Many of the same places you see sharks.  Check out the Manta Ray & Whale Shark Research Centre

SEE ANIMALS IN AFRICA

Wild Burros / By Al_HikesAZ Alan English CPA

Rick Perry’s biggest hunting worry is the nasty name of his land, but horse lovers have a bigger problem with him. His wildlife officials have been shooting wild burros–again–to make way for bighorn sheep hunting on the Rio Grande. They stopped after public outrage in 2007, but a Freedom of Information Act request shows they’ve shot at least 47 this year, many with AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

AR-15, anti-burro weapon

The recent FOIA documents show two parks employees, Drew Hufstedler and Barrett Durst, somewhat methodically looking for and killing burros. But then  Jaime Sanchez, a Dallas County game warden, went out a few times mid-summer with an AR-15.  Not a particularly efficient shot or bureaucrat, on June 22 he only hit his target with six of nine shots from a .308 and may have only killed one burro–you can’t tell because from his paperwork. Then on the  Fourth of July Sanchez fired this semi-automatic version of an M-16 seven times to take down two burros. Some of his other paperwork is late–not that there’s any repercussion.

The big is to clear Big Bend Ranch State Park for big horn sheep, which hunters pay big money to shoot. A change.org online petition, already signed by nearly 100,000 people, asks Texas to knock it off. Not the adding sheep part–the shooting of the mules. Since there’s not real solid science that they even interfere.

Texas has been working with hunters to bring bighorn sheep to the park to shoot. The Texas Bighorn Society describes it as hard-working volunteers restoring a native species. Hunters argue burros aren’t native and compete with big horns and foul the water supply.

Mule lovers look at it as a bunch of yahoo hunters inserting sheep to have fun and make money. Van Atta says burros don’t interfere with bighorn, which, even if they were uproariously fun to shoot, might not really be native. The sheep and burros usually live at different elevations and if there’s a drought burros can dig water holes other animals use, she says.

Ram moving to Big Bend for hunters

The public first found out about shooting wild asses in 2007, when park workers told on state officials, which ended in a big investigation and a plan not to do it again, or at least be more discreet.

The testimony showed that State Parks rirector Dan Sholly and regional director Mike Hill just went out and shot at least 71 burros, at Big Bend State Park whenever they were in town for a meeting.

Meanwhile, complex manager Luis Armendariz tried to get the USDA to trap them, but they refused. Armendariz says the shooters referred to themselves as the “Yosemite mafia” and that one cryptically told him: “I have gotten rid of 15 of your problems.” Some burro carcasses were found shot in the belly–an unethical way of hunting that leaves the animal to linger in pain. Workers said the hunters seemed to use helicopters to shoot the mules.

“Shortly after that, Parks ordered them to take anything out of the gift shop that has anything to do with burros,” says Karen Van Atta.

To no one’s surprise, an internal affairs investigation found that it’s powerful wildlife officials had not committed animal cruelty or done nothing wrong. The findings say they didn’t use helicopters or shoot unethically–but the whole thing is by affadavit so I don’t see any way that they even confronted the men with the evidence. They just took their word on it. They don’t comment on using helicopters to shoot burros, so the report officially concludes they didn’t.

The shooters, all qualified marksmen, claimed they weren’t doing it for fun, just to make way for the trophy hunting of bighorn sheep. Shooters tried to claim that the burros were just abandoned pets of a recent parks manager, but Van Atta found evidence that predates the manager.

Horseback Magazine reported in February that state officials had resumed killing burros and also audad sheep. Wild Burro Protection League founder Marjoree Farabee went down to the park, which is on the Mexican border, and “discovered …that at least 46 more of these remarkable animals have also been wasted.”

Burros, as you may recall, were introduced by Spaniards 500 years ago. Americans have used and abused their remnant populations to haul mining supplies, amuse unethical hunters and make into dog food. But starting in the late 1950s, Americans got a little nauseated by the abuse and eventually passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.

The act offers burros flowery compliments, calling them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West…an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.” It generously promises “wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death.” But then it limits protection, so it only applies on certain western lands. The Bureau of Land Management, which is pretty much rancher-owned and operated, can still capture and/or kill them. And apparently, so can the state of Texas under Rick Perry.

Where to SEE WILD HORSES and horse sanctuaries

Monarchs at Robert Moses Beach, Oct. 5, 2011

On a beach just outside New York City limits Barbara discovered hundreds of monarch butterflies one day in 2005. Since then she’s been hooked on the spectacle and returns every year at this time to look for the roost.

“I sat on the railing by the boardwalk and thousands of monarchs flew over my head, it was very surreal. After a couple of hours of watching them I followed them to the pine trees where they were roosting for the night, Never before and never since have I witnessed so many. In 2010 the monarchs returned by the hundreds and this year over the past 3 out of 5 days they are making a huge appearance.”

Barbara is now one of thousands of Americans who report their butterfly sightings on Journey North, an educational site that tracks all kinds of migrations. Most people don’t know that monarchs migrate or gather like birds on their journey across thousands of miles to California, Mexico and Florida. Lately citizen scientists are tagging them and mending wings with tape to help track their mysterious migration, which has been disrupted by a lack of their favorite food, milkweed.

1. Check Journey North to see where and when they visit your area. They’re flying south ahead of the freeze, which can kill them. Unlike, say, cranes who only live in a few spots, you can spot monarchs anywhere. You’ll have better luck along the routes and keeping up with the migration wave. Overnight roosts are now in Texas and Oklahoma and 5,000 spent the night on Assateague Island, VA (better known for wild horses).

2. Go out after a rain. “the best migration and roosting days are after a rainy day(s),” Barbara says.

3. Check all around an area where you’ve seen them. They like to eat milkweed, which grows by water, and they like to sleep in evergreens. “They don’t always roost in the same trees. These past three days the wind was out of the  east and they roosted in the pine trees near the dunes and ocean. When the wind is out of the west they appear to roost more in the pine trees near the main road.”

4. If you want to give something back to the monarchs, plant some milkweed for them to make up for habitat loss. If you can’t find seeds in your area, check out Milkweedseeds.com or LiveMonarch.com, where you can get a pack for $3.

Read about Brooklyn’s Best Butterfly Bush

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Brooklyn Park Slope House with an attractive butterfly bush

Ok, I haven’t compared all of the borough’s butterfly bushes, but this one on 8th Avenue between 1st and Garfield Streets lately draws a crowd of monarchs and astounded people.

When I stopped Monday there were six butterflies and two other families, plus a woman passing by who said “there’s always like six butterflies hanging out there.”

Most of the year butterfly bushes are as desolate as hummingbird feeders. (Though I did see one of those in my yard last week, too.) Butterfly bushes usually feel like a scam, as if someone is selling eucalyptus trees, telling you koala bears will come.

But right now is the big monarch migration, so around New York City you might be able to see a gang of monarchs (Danaus plexippus), the only butterfly to make a long-distance roundtrip migration. Journey North, a teacher-coordinated migration site, tracks the butterflies journey along two major paths–to Mexico and California. Most monarchs east of the Mississippi go to Mexico, but the population that tracks the coast (the ones here in New York) go to Florida, where they either winter or jump off for a flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

Once citizen scientist even spotted an overnight roost with 200 monarchs at Robert Moses beach. And last week on Sept. 27 the group reported: “at least 800 Monarchs on the move. This is conservative as the tally includes a bit more than 700 in flight plus what were actually well over 100 on flowers (mainly on non-native flowers, it seemed).”
This week and last seem to be the best times to see monarchs around New York City.

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Giant Armadillo caught in camera trap

Camera traps are proving to be the best way to see the vanishing giant armadillos (Priodontes maximus), which used to be all over South America, but are now quite elusive and vulnerable to extinction. Hardly anybody has bothered to examine the lives of the giant armadillo, so we don’t know how many are left, just that they’re becoming bush-meat, dying on the way to collectors and getting run out of their burrows by deforestation.

The BBC reports that an expedition by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) turned up some great pictures of the animal after a 10-week expedition with motion-sensor cameras in the Amazon.

As unusual and rare as the giant armadillo is, it isn’t a chupacabra, yeti or Tasmanian tiger. Biologists know it survives. They’re just not sure how. It’s one of those animals that might be listed as more endangered–if data weren’t as scarce as the animal.

The IUCN Red List classifies as vulnerable. (From 1996 to 2006, it was endangered; I’m not sure how it got upgraded. A 2004 journal describes it as “vulnerable at the very least,” with a drop of 30-50% in the last few decades.) They don’t survive when the land is developed and don’t reproduce in captivity. Since they can weight up to 70 pounds, they’re popular with subsistence hunters.

Everywhere it is found, it is hunted for its wealth of meat, and for some indigenous peoples it is their primary source of protein. Despite its broad distribution, its actual occurrence is rarefied and sporadic from site to site….most likely to be found in the llanos of Guyana and the region surrounding the Chaco of Paraguay and Argentina…Virtually nothing is known of its reproductive parameters;

But even if it weren’t under assault, the giant armadillo gives animal tourists a high degree of difficulty. They refuse to live in a convenient hot spot. Instead, they are loners, spread over vast range of mostly remote jungle. They live in underground burrows. And they come out at night to eat ants.

But some have stumbled on them accidentally. A couple YouTube videos showcase the giant armadillo, captured either like the one here by chance. Or by going on a special expedition in Peru to track one into a burrow, like Michael Drake did as part of Forever Fauna.

Check out the hooves! Captured on a YouTube video.

Where to SEE WEIRD ANIMALS Coait, Prairie Dog, Otter, kangaroo, skunk, porcupine, salamander, snake, squid, pretty much anything rare

SEE ANIMALS IN LATIN AMERICA

This is one of the increasing number of “holidays” that completely lack tradition, festivities or fun. Even if you like turtles–and who doesn’t?–what can you do to celebrate them or help them in any way?

–Move them to the side of the road, the side they were headed to. My cousin Andy Johnson saved this soft-shelled turtle on Sanibel last week.

–Don’t keep them as pets

–Don’t eat turtle soup

–Be careful with your plastic bags around the ocean. Silly turtles mistake them for jellyfish.

–Don’t eat shrimp from other countries–or Louisiana. Turtles get caught in shrimping nets and drown. Shrimp boats catch 1.8 million tons of marine life every year, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program says. Conservation groups fought a long hard battle to get the U.S. to require turtle excluder devices on fishing boats in our waters and later on anybody we import from.

Some didn’t care. TEDS cut mortality, but only by 20-40%, not the 90-95% biologists were expecting if they had full compliance, SeaTurtle.org says. Louisiana even banned its fisheries police from busting fishermen and many suspected fishermen weren’t using them after the gulf oil spill, the New York Times reported. Far more turtles than usual washed up dead. They didn’t show signs of oil; instead they showed signs of drowning in fishing nets. Some had shrimp in their throats (something they don’t usually eat). And results this year show the same, the Times reported. Meanwhile, Mississippi tightened its rules. Nobody would want to punish Louisiana fishermen after all they’ve been through, but their state’s rules aren’t fair on Mississippi fishermen, other Americans or turtles.

Just last month Sea Turtle Conservation urged people to contact NOAA about enforcing the excluders. In 2010 the U.S. even banned imports of wild-caught shrimp from Mexico, but let them in seven months later.

Seafood watch comes up with some alternatives to imported shrimp; they rate wild-caught and farmed U.S. shrimp as “Good Alternative,” with pink shrimp from Oregon, and spot prawn from British Columbia as “Best Choices.”

Where to SEE TURTLES & TORTOISES

SEE ANIMALS IN THE SOUTH (AL, AR, GA, KY, MS, LA, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)

Nine-banded Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus)

Roughly one in three Americans who have leprosy got it through an armadillo, research from the National Hansen’s Disease Laboratory published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds.

Before this, we pretty much thought people only caught leprosy from a leper. Those partial to eating armadillos insisted there was no way to catch the debilitating disease from their game meat. About two-thirds of the 150-250 new U.S. cases each year are in people who have lived overseas.

Researchers learned in the 1960s that leprosy strikes armadillos–the only other animal besides humans (and a few odd immuno-compromised monkeys). Armadillos are part of a strange superorder, Xenarthra, which includes sloths and anteaters. They all have have tricky joints and slow metabolism. Discovering the armadillo link was crucial because the leprosy bacteria is so fragile you can’t really grow or study it in the lab without an armadillo.

A few anecdotal reports suggested a link, but the range and population of the armadillos are vast and number of U.S. cases so tiny, that it seemed improbable.

But researchers were curious: the area there the most armadillos are infected– low, coastal wetlands from Texas to the Mississippi-Alabama border–overlaps with most of the inexplicable human cases.

“In those areas, 20% of armadillos are infected,” says Dr. Richard Truman, head microbiologist, National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, LA. “But if you go outside that area, 100 miles inland, few or no animals are infected.”

The program, which works with LSU and has an armadillo farm of 140 animals, isolated a strain of new strain of  Mycobacterium leprae in 28 of 33 wild armadillos and 25 of the 39 U.S. patients.

They were only able to interview 15 patients and about half recalled an armadillo encounter. Not that people wouldn’t remember handling an armadillo, but it can take five years for the disease to show up.

Hunting armadillos is still a redneck sport. Lots of destitute Americans ate these “Hoover hogs” in the Depression. And they’re a staple in South America. One study patient said he’d hunted and eaten them. The exact method of transmission is unclear. It can probably go from armadillo to person to person. The bacteria won’t survive cooking and 99% is killed by freezing, says Dr. Truman. It can live a couple hours on a lab slide or a couple weeks in wet soil.  And Dr. Truman thinks you would need repeated exposure. (The vast majority of humans are genetically unlikely to get it anyway.) So, if you must eat an armadillo, just cook it first. And wildlife-watchers and wildlife rehabilitators should be just fine.

SEE ANIMALS IN THE SOUTH (AL, AR, GA, KY, MS, LA, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)

Where to see animals in Texas

Where to SEE ANIMALS Coait, Prairie Dog, Otter, kangaroo, skunk, porcupine, salamander, snake, squid, pretty much anything rare