My flew into Edinburgh, Scotland, a few weeks ago and immediately took a cab to Dalhousie Castle and their falconry program. For a 9-day trip this was the one activity I went to the trouble of arranging beforehand. It was the thing my daughter was most excited about before and after the trip. And it was totally worth it.

Falconry Scotland offers you a chance to handle falcons, eagles, hawks and–get this–owls land on your gloved hand. We ended up showing up early, had coffee in the castle then came out to see the two falconers getting 37 birds out of their cages and boxes for the day. What was most delightful was how well the women knew each of the birds. Some birds wanted a cuddle, some keep-away from the keepers.

My daughter Ginger, 7, was particularly fascinated with a talkative barn owl. I mean, this bird chatted non-stop. I asked one of the falconers, Allie, if the bird was just hungry or what. No, she explained, that owl, named Jeanne, just likes being with people.

Eventually four of us went out in the field to do falconry. Again, the most amazing thing about this place is how much our falconer Allie knew of each bird and the back-and-forth she had with them. Allie explained the tail-swishing meant the bird was ready for flight. The Harris Hawk would easily–ever so delicately–land on each person’s gloved hand to eat the meat held between the fingers. Except when it came to Ginger. For Ginger the bird swooped around, every once in a while trying to steal the meat. Ginger laughed but held steady.

We gave up on Ginger doing falconry with that particular bird, who is sometimes afraid of children. Instead, Ginger got a fabulous consolation prize: she got to hold and feed the friendly owl Jeanne. I cautioned Ginger to keep her fingers away from Jeanne’s mouth, but Allie corrected me. This is a gentle bird and would only nibble affectionately. Which she did.

Americans don’t get to do a lot of hanging out with owls. Every once in a while you might see one at a falconry display (probably not flying) or, more likely, in a wildlife rehabilitation center. Birders have a self-important etiquette code of not revealing the location of owls in the wild.  But people are constantly wanting to see and even touch owls. (Japan meets this need with their peculiar owl cafes. Animal advocates say they’re skeevy because owls don’t want to hang out with humans or in cafes.)

Other places nearby like Elite Falconry actually go hunting. (They are mainly targeting game birds because rabbits are in trouble. Also, Elite Falconry breeds owls.) And there are even a few places in the U.S. where people can go do falconry (also usually at luxury hotels). But to get to become a falconer in the U.S., you have to go through many levels of training, permits and nonsense. So it is going to be a much stricter atmosphere. If you want to befriend an owl, best go to Scotland.

DSCF9304

	Cameron	Branson
Destination	Marianas Trench	Puerto Rico Trench
Depth	35,800 ft	28,373 ft
Craft	Deep Sea Challenger	DeepFlight Challenger
Material	foam	carbon fiber and titanium
Goal	visit the Mariana trench many times	reach depths of each ocean
Confidence in critters at great depths	“We’d all like to think there are giant squid and sea monsters down there,” he told the Times.	“We know there are gigantic things down there,” he told the Telegraph.
How vehicle moves	vertical, like a seahorse	with wings or flippers, like a dolphin

Luckily the world has more than one eco-minded, genius gazillionaire. Branson and his team hope to visit the Mariana, too, later this year in a different kind of craft. Branson himself will go down to the Puerto Rico trench. That’s the deepest spot in the Atlantic and is about 7,000 feet shallower.

Nobody is sure if anything could really survive that deep. It’s dark and that means not much plant life. It’s cold–and most creatures prefer the warm, shallow water like the mountainous waters that usually abut the sea trenches. Both land formations are formed by tectonic plates squishing and stretching the earth. And then there’s the incredible water pressure, which has made these explorations so difficult and dangerous.

Of course, we’re all hoping someone will find a whole herd of Loch Ness monsters down there. Or at minimum a giant squid. Certainly something better than the shrimp-like creatures Cameron got to see.

Branson is suitably enthusiastic, hoping his craft, which is bigger, can cruise and call in another sub to take pictures, will find something. He’s got a soft spot for fun creatures and has created a lemur haven, despite taking some slack from doubters.

The only other manned mission to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench was in 1960 when the U.S. Navy sent oceanographers Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard down to the bottom. Near the bottom they saw a flatfish, but Walsh told ScienceFriday last week, biologists insist they really didn’t see it.

“Well, just before we landed, we spotted what we thought was a flatfish, a white flat – like a halibut or a sole, a foot long. And that was quite a sighting, if true, of a higher-order marine vertebrate in such – at such a great depth. And it was a bottom-dwelling type of fish, so it meant that it was where it belonged and that there was food down there and sufficient oxygen to support it. Now Jacques Piccard…and I were not ichthyologists. We were engineers. We were, if you would, test pilots of this vehicle trying to prove out its capability. So in the subsequent years, we’ve been advised by all kinds of scientists that we didn’t see that.”

But what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

The first crew never got a good look because they stirred up so much silt. Cameron had to head up early because of a technical problem. He hopes to return. His mission, backed by National Geographic, was always to get down there a few times.

Although the story of two rich geniuses racing in their private subs to the bottom of the ocean is delightful, really Branson didn’t plan to dive to the Mariana Trench himself.  His partner, Chris Welsh, is heading there (and, yes, the trip was delayed). Branson is going on the second of the five legs of the adventure, one for the bottom of each ocean. The Puerto Rico Trench is near a breeding ground for humpback whales (they like shallow, warm water) and plenty of other marine mammals and flying fish near the surface, NOAA has found.

The vessels are slightly different, but both plan on using little helper “lander” craft that go down first and drop bait. Welsh says on their blog: “The Virgin sub is excellent for large scale exploration and identifying areas worthy of more detailed examination, and Jim’s sub is perfect for detailed examination of those sites once found.”

For now let’s remember that not seeing something doesn’t prove it isn’t there. Animal tourists know to well that you can go to the exact location of a previous sighting and come up with nothing after a whole day of patient waiting. It’s as if human beings had only spent a few hours in Alaska and came back thinking it was just snow: it is mainly just snow, but there are also polar bears and walruses in certain parts. I’m just happy there are two gazillionaires willing to go looking for new creatures down there in the least explored place on earth.

Where to SEE WHALES

Read about Branson’s mission to save lemurs

SEE ANIMALS IN AUSTRALIA

If I could see any surviving animal on the planet, I’d probably pick a Tasmanian Tiger. Also known as a Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus),  it’s a cult favorite of animal tourists because it’s almost certainly extinct. But the almost has tantalized biologists and cryptozoologists since the last known one died in a zoo in 1936. It’s a semi-magical creature; many wildlife watchers may go see the new movie The Hunter, starring William DaFoe, just to see a make-believe surviving Tassie Tiger.

For animal tourists there’s one big question: do we get to see a recreated thylacine? Finding a live one would be thrilling; it would undo one of humankind’s great recent ecological mistakes. The filmmakers nicely sum up the thylacine’s history, including playing the film of the zoo creature pacing, which you can find on YouTube. That video is particularly haunting because it shows how recently the thylacine lived and how close we may have come to still having this creature that looks like a cat-dog-hyena-kangaroo hybrid.  The answer, happily, is yes, the movie has a thylacine. And it’s a plausible one, trotting in a forgiving mist. And there’s an overall environment, rah! rah! kind of message.

But this is by no means the movie wildlife watchers would make about the fantastic hope that a living thylacine represents. The movie has the soul-crushing plot of the 2001 novel by Julia Leigh that an amorphous European drug company hires a mercenary to kill the real last remaining thylacine. The company somehow knows where to find the animal and knows it secretes some magical, marketable chemical.

DeFoe’s main character, Martin David, is kind of an opaque jerk, as you might suspect of a mercenary. Of course he has to have some redeeming qualities, but director Daniel Nettheim is pretty stingy in revealing any. Set in a remote, hardscrabble logging village, the movie has a backdrop of the kind of local loggers versus environmentalists conflict we see around the globe. Both sides are kind of horrible–the violent thuggish loggers and the hippy environmentalists. There’s some confusion over which faction is secretly allied with Big Pharma. But in general the parallel between the greedy drug company willing to wipe out a species that is beyond endangered and lumber companies eager to take out the forest is pretty clear. Along the way the drug company–or is it the lumber company?–commits a lot of senseless murders for which it will go unpunished. The trouble is that the killings seem so senseless that they border on implausible. And, wait, why does the big evil company need to destroy the thylacine for its potion? Just so no one else could get it? Are they that horribly powerful or just horribly plotted?

Published in 2001, the book is already a bit out of date in the YouTube era where a credible homemade video of a live thylacine would go viral and get the world media to descend on Tasmania.

The movie downplays the ongoing interest in finding the thylacine as a few tourists wandering through hoping to find one in a few hours. But huge rewards have been posted over the years–including one by Ted Turner and two rewards worth a total of about $3 million offered right now. prize right now. Sites like Where Light Meets Dark  obsessively track the post-extinction sightings, both Australia mainland (where it people wiped it out 2,000 years ago) and on Tasmania. The thylacine may be the first animal brought back from extinction if Australian biologists finally tease out viable genes from all the museum specimens, as they have been trying to do for over a decade. These interesting characters will have to wait for another movie.

I mean, I know the movie is called The Hunter and not The Thylacine, but it is relentlessly grim.

SEE ANIMALS IN AUSTRALIA

xazq	Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)
	Where to SEE ODD ANIMALS Coait, Prairie Dog, Otter, kangaroo, skunk, porcupine, salamander, snake, squid, pretty much anything rare

simitar oryx hunting

Laura Logan thanked hunters on 60 Minutes for saving endangered species by paying thousands of dollars to shoot them on canned hunts in Texas.* She gulped down the game ranchers’ argument that they are the only ones keeping animals like the scimitar-horned oryx, which is listed by the IUCN Red List as extinct in the wild, from disappearing from the planet.

That will surely come as a surprise to the other 199 institutions around the world that have been carefully breeding Oryx dammah since the 1960s.

Logan walks five miles to make critics of canned hunts look insane. But even then she doesn’t deliver. She lays a trap for Priscilla Feral of Friends of Animals, asking if it would be better if they were extinct than hunted. Feral doesn’t fall for it.

Logan; So, if the animals exist only to be hunted…

Feral: Right…

Logan: …you would rather they not exist at all?

Feral: Not in Texas, no.

She sidesteps the obvious ploy and says she’d just rather not see them in Texas. Not insane. If I said I’d rather not have the scimitar-horned oryx in my living room, does that mean I’m getting in the way of real conservation? No. Having a scimitar-horned oryx on my sofa or on a hunting ranch in Texas is completely irrelevant to its conservation. If hunting the oryx were really the only way for the species to survive, of course I’d support it. But it has nothing to do with species survival.

Logan lets the hunters conflate surviving and living in Texas. On the show and in online comments, they practically shout Gotcha! I just bagged a crazy animal person!

Logan lets hunters claim that they have the numbers on their side. They say the number or oryx will be cut in half –in Texas–by a new law that makes them illegal to hunt.

But just the raw numbers of oryx aren’t as important as the number in the international studbook. Texas ranchers thousands of oryx (how many nobody says). Only 110 are part of the international effort to save the species. They make up less than 10% of the studbook, a directory of breeding animals biologists keep to save the species. (Typically, individuals aren’t listed if they were too much like ones already in there or genetics are unknown.) The Texas population is so insignificant that the IUCN barely mentions them in its species assessment. There’s another 4,000 in private hands in the United Arab Emirates, where the Al Ain Wildlife Park and Resort (AWPR) is actually working with biologists, hosting conferences to figure out how to save the species. This giant family zoo in the desert, founded by Sheikh Zayed, who founded the country, is the real unsung hero in oryx conservation.

It’s amazing to see CBS News just take up the hunting ranches’ fight. In Australia, where hunters are doing the same thing, reporters are at least asking questions about ethical hunting. “For me, to see these beautiful animals shot by these madmen is a tragedy. They are extinct in the wild. It’s like shooting a Sumatran tiger or a white rhino. It’s disgusting,” said tycoon Warren Anderson, who bred them.

Logan doesn’t even bother to question the canned hunting ranch assertion that they employ 14,000 people in Texas or the bizarre claim that “Texas has more exotic wildlife than any other place on earth.” First off, that’s not something to be proud of. Second, it’s unprovable and vague propaganda. Are we talking individual animals? Species? The hunted animals are on fenced, ranches, not running wild. So then do farm animals count, too? Or pets? If we’re talking individual animals, then the number or starlings and sparrows alone in New York or many states would eclipse Texas’ antelope numbers.

Here are some other numbers Logan doesn’t bother to bring up. Wildlife watchers spend more more than hunters. Even in Texas. According to the last Fish and Wildlife Survey, animal tourists spent $2.9 billion wildlife watchers (table 69) compared to just $2.2 billion by hunters (table 59).

Again, animal lovers are happy to talk about the real numbers.

	Where to SEE BUFFALO, Bison and Wisent
	Where to SEE DEER (and anteloope and reindeer)

* Think I’m exaggerating? Logan actually said: “How did thousands of Texas ranches become home to the largest population of exotic animals on earth? It’s thanks to trophy hunters like Paul, who come here in the thousands to hunt these animals every year, sold on the idea of an African hunting experience in Texas.”

Some love seeing them, others fear they are taking over. Best  line in the show: “It’s like most stories of kangaroo attack stories, critical elements have got left out,” the researcher Don Fletcher says, debunking some anti-kangaroo hysteria.

What’s fascinating is what it says about how we universal the drama of an overgrown native species is. It’s nearly identical to our deer issue. Suburbs ate the animals’ habitat and now the animals are eating the suburbs. The population is only checked by car accidents because hunters wiped out their only predators–in Australia, dingos.  The once rare  creatures have grown  into a nuisance. Officials started shooting them in the name of saving the environment. Animal tourists protested. In Canberra they wear adorable kangaroo masks and costumes and in one case a baby in a Bjorn. The government started working on contraceptives.

Maybe we humans are just destined to play out this drama. The only character missing is the American hunter who yells about why we really need to shoot all these horrible deer/kangaroo–while quietly pushing to keep up their numbers so there will be more  shooting fun.

Where to see wildlife in Australia

Map of major world migration flyways from wetlands.org

Will wild animals spread radiation away from the dead zone around Japan’s nuclear power plant? Humans haven’t even been allowed back in within 20 km to pick up their cars or keepsakes. But wildlife doesn’t recognize the border.

Air: The East Asia-Australia Flyway is one of nine major bird migration routes that birds hop on in the world. Birds fly a migration superhighway from Siberia to Australasia. BirdLife says 50 are globally threatened.

Wild boars in Japan have been tested with six times the safe level of radiation

Land: Many farm animals in the area like pigs died because they were confined in stalls, a recent BBC story on a holdout farmer showed, but some escaped and have had feral piglets.  Yomiuri Shinbun says that wild boars have been tested and found with 563-3221 becquerel of radioactive cesium per kilogram of meat from wild boar’s head–some well above the standard of 500 that’s considered safe for humans to eat.

Sea: Whales, dolphins, tuna and other fish migrate in and out of Japanese waters. In the spring Nature predicted sea creatures that live permanently off the coast were the worst off.

Now that time has passed, the disaster turns out to be about twice as bad as Japan thought in the spring, The Scientist reports. But it will be a long time before we figure out how badly wildlife will be impacted and how far they may spread the radiation. The area around Chernobyl has become an odd wildlife sanctuary, one of the few places wolves thrive unperturbed. It may be this tragedy ends up leading to a similar land and sea wildlife haven.

Where to See Wildlife in Asia

Finkel notes that other blind people have done it and scholars have known about it since at least 1749. In the 1940s Karl Dallenbach proved humans could ecolocate at Cornell. Yet remarkably little practical work has been done on human ecololation for the vast improvement it could make in the quality of life of the blind–not to mention enhanced perception for sighted humans. (You’d think, if nothing else, the military would do some research.)

Kish teaches Finkel a simple use of ecolocation. Kish posted on Men’s Journal that it could be widely adapted: “It is true that perhaps 10% take it to an extreme level, like bike riding through obstacles and such, but most are able to use it to increase their navigation abilities notably.”

What set Finkel apart was that he was set free to explore and develop the skill while other blind people are socially discouraged.

He came to it on his own, intuitively, at age two, about a year after his second eye was removed. Many blind children make noises in order to get feedback — foot stomping, finger snapping, hand clapping, tongue clicking. These behaviors are the beginnings of echolocation, but they’re almost invariably deemed asocial by parents or caretakers and swiftly extinguished.

A few scientists are working on the potential. New Zealand sonar expert Leslie Kay developed a device called Bat K-Sonar, that makes sounds from an attachment to a blind person’s cane and special headphones to hear the echoes. It uses bat-like, directional pulses that can distinguish distance and the kind of object.

But Kish, formed a group World Access for the Blind that methodically teaches the blind to ecolocate and is the most serious effort to date to put this long-forgotten human skill to use.

Finkel helpfully explains that you already use some form of ecolocation every time you hear the direction of a sound. Our hearing is much better than our sight, Finkel explains: “We can see less than one octave of frequency. We hear a range of 10 octaves.”

Now he’d like to experiment with bringing human ecolocation capabilities up to the bat level. Making bat clicking sounds is pretty easy with a machine. But the catch is getting the human ear to hear them. Kish thinks it could be done with an implant, but tragically doesn’t have the $16 million to try.

Actually, two boosts. We need a way to create batlike sound waves, and we need to be able to hear those waves. In pursuit of these goals, Kish has spent time in

“It becomes as ridiculous for blind people to run into a wall as it is for sighted people,” he once wrote in his FlashSonar manual.

Read about Boston University’s research on ecolocation

Check out World Access for the Blind

Look at Bat K Sonar

Coyote in Trap

Nova Scotia amazingly still paying a $20 coyote bounty

They hope to kill 4,000 this year, which many local residents think is absurd. Paying bounties to promote hunting and trapping largely went out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s and is blamed for all kinds of ecological havoc. Chronicle Herald

Poachers bring cut Finland’s wolf population by up to  16% in one year. Now only 150 left. YLE

South Dakota votes to allow ranchers to run down coyotes on snowmobiles. Peta

Where to Go See Wolves

Wild bald eagle tries to woo captive at Orange County Zoo

A wild bald eagle–presumably male, but nobody knows–is lurking outside the enclosure of Olivia, the zoo’s 6-year-old bald eagle, who is non-releasable. Discovery

Russia’s Antarctica Lake so far not turning up much

Russian scientists haven’t yet pierced Lake Vostok, the largest frozen Antarctic lake and a big mystery since it’s been cut off from the rest of the world for maybe a million years. American scientists don’t want them to in case they mess it up, NPR reports. But the BBC says that finding anything interesting is unlikely. The best chance was for there to be warm sea vents, but the ice they’ve broken so far doesn’t show any evidence of that.

Chronic boat speeder has to forfeit boat after killing manatee Miami Herald

Sea World trainers won’t have to get in water with orcas

Sea World is debuting a new show that won’t require trainers to get in the water with killer whales, which have sometimes killed them. Orlando Sun-Sentinel

Parrots mostly left-handed, Australian researchers find. They favor their left eye and claw. Telegraph

New Mexico wants to protect science teachers who teach anti-science. WIRED

10 southern soft shell turtles were dumped in NJ; four froze; six are at Popcorn Park Zoo

Druglord’s serval moves into CT kids’ museum

A serval (small wild cat) who spent years beholden to a NYC drug dealer, now is living well in suburban West Hartford, CT, at the Children’s Museum after getting cared for by Dyckman’s Wildlife Control in Mahopac, N.Y. Chicago Tribune

Five-foot African monitor lizard prowls LA HuffPo

The long, sad story of the CT chimp that ripped off a woman’s face

Dan Lee tells the much longer and sadder version of the story of Travis, the popular pet chimp who bit off the face of one of his caretakers. The disturbed woman who owned him treasured his dangerous, isolating company after the deaths of her husband and daughter. New York Magazine

Southern soft-shelled turtles found dumped in NJ

A woman found 10 soft-shelled turtles by the side of the road near the Passaic River in West New York, NJ. Four had frozen to death. The rest would have if she hadn’t stopped and gotten them to the Popcorn Park Zoo, which hopes to move them back south. Wildlife officials are offering a reward; they presume they were someone’s idiotic idea of a pet. LA Times

Estrella, Mexican gray wolf shot in December, had pushed the species forward

The Mexican gray wolf shot by poachers in December in New Mexico had done her best to help her species survive. She was 13 and had raised 22 pups, nine of whom had pups of their own. There’s a huge reward for her shooter, but like most Mexican wolf shootings, it will likely go unpunished. Colorado Springs Gazette

Mercury in San Francisco Bay fish traced to two mining sources

A new kind of “fingerprinting” of Mercury shows that the kind minnows are eating in San Francisco Bay come from two, maybe three, main sources. Researchers trace the toxin to “historic mercury mines to the south and a different fingerprint coming from historic gold mines to the north.” Science Daily

Kangaroos slaughtered by millions

Two reports on kangaroos show that 3 million adults and 1 million joeys are slaughtered a year. Advocacy for Animals

The Daily Show: Mississippi town finds state values birds more than black history

Wyatt Cenac visits Turkey Creek, MS, which freed slaves founded. Not that MS cared–they bulldozed a cemetery and nearly wiped the town off the map. Until Mississippi Audubon came to the rescue, pointing out the value of the area’s birds. The Daily Show: Bird Like Me and Audubon

Young morticians offer therapy dog at funeral home

A Zanesville funeral home has a sweet yellow lab, Wilson, to comfort guests. The couple that runs Fawcett, Oliver, Glass and Palmer Funeral Home got him from a shelter and are training him to be an official therapy dog. Zanesville Times Record

Sea Shepherd says its found the Japanese whaling fleet again AFP

In a late Friday news dump, the BLM squashed Madeleine Pickens’ plans to save wild horses by neutering them and creating a sanctuary in Nevada. The agency–which wants to capture and euthanize the horses–says the plan lacks details, water and forage. Ok, so then how about just putting fewer horses? Pickens says she was blindsided.  LATimes, Madeleine Pickens

Where to See Wild Horses

GA won't charge the hunter who set up this online poaching rig

Georgia yahoos offer online poaching with shotguns on the ground

Georgia and Homeland Security don’t bother to charge a guy with poaching even though he set up a remote control 6-shotgun system to kill feral hogs (and anything else he wanted). Augusta Chronicle and Wildlife News

Whales off Wales

Wales hopes new fin whale sightings will lead to whale watching industry. Wales Online

Sharks in Queensland flood waters

Bull sharks (a dangerous kind) have been spotted in the flooded streets of Goodna. Queensland Times

Where to See Wildlife in Australia

Tasmanian Devils move to Australia sanctuary

The hope is to have them survive the contagious cancer that is wiping out the wild devils. Wildlife Extra

Coyotes may have made it to the last U.S. stronghold, Long Island

A coyote in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, NYC, may be the first to colonize Long Island.– Coyotes, Wolves and Cougars

Patrick Burns (Terrierman) on the British versus American Kennel Clubs

The British club now has rules against incest and wants to limit the number of litters a female dog can produce. They’re hoping to limit the product and keep prices up. The AKC doesn’t see the need for restrictions on breeding close relatives or dogs with genetic problems. Dogs Today