1. If you keep them inside, they will hatch early. Like in the winter.
2. Those cute little plastic bug cases won’t hold the babies or nymphs. They can get through the holes. The first year I only discovered they mantises had hatched when I  saw a mosquito-sized, strange looking bug on my dining room window. I spent days discreetly catching and releasing the dozens of mantises, trying not to alarm my husband, who is not as into this project as I am.
3. The mantis eggs are in a center core of the case, surrounded by hardened foam. It’s like an airbag around the eggs. Don’t worry if the foam gets hurt.
4. When the mantises hatch, they don’t start eating each other immediately.
5. You should still release the tiny mantises soon or they will eat each other.
6. If it’s too cold outside–or it is going to be–keep them alive with a fruit flies. Petco sells them by the jar in their disgusting-food-of-other-animals section by the reptiles. They will also need a wet sponge and your new fruit fly pets will also appreciate some rotting fruit.
   

   Tiny praying mantises pour out of the egg case.

This praying mantis lady is eating a bee.

I was shocked to find a praying mantis sitting on a flower in a Brooklyn park this week. How rare! Aren’t they endangered? Well, I was shocked again to find out that they’re nothing close to endangered–the IUCN (the union of concerned scientists that decides which species are threatened) hasn’t even been concerned enough to evaluate whether the common North American mantis is in trouble.

But that didn’t stop me–or my friend Gabriella or my toddler daughter–from enjoying the extremely unusual show of a four or five inch bug trying to hide from other insects, then pouncing on them.  And not in some kind of graceful swoosh. How do bees not notice this monster sitting on a flower? It would be like me not noticing a lobster the size of a bus.

Everything the praying mantis did was clumsy. The way she walked, jumped, flew. But she still caught two bees in about an hour. And when she did, she tore off the bees’ legs and shoved them into her mouth with the extra legs or claws that stick out of her jaw. It was like legs eating legs.

Our friend David came by and showed us how you can get the mantis to walk on your hand and pet its wings. He finds their brown, styrofoam-like egg cases from time to time in the park. So they’re not endangered or rare, just really freaky and fun to watch.

Praying mantis pulls apart a bee.

The dead bear cub placement comes just two weeks after another hunting advocate dream come true:  the NJ first fatal bear attack in NJ since 1852. I’ve been to the meeting in New Jersey over bear hunts as a journalist. Hunters scream that they need to shoot bears lest some naive suburbanite get killed. They claim that anyone who is against hunting is naive and if liberals should have to live with them in their backyards. (The bears in New Jersey tend to be in the more rural, conservative areas.)

What many New Yorkers may not realize is how frequently a wild predator released in Central Park comes up in the fantasy and arguments . Here’s a satirical post satirical post about petitioning the Wildlife Service to release wolves in Central Park since that was part of their natural habitat. But both Wyoming and Alaska lawmakers have seriously considered the joke proposal.

The NYPD Animal Cruelty Investigation unit was on the scene, the New York Post reports. The bear had blood in its mouth and was probably dragged to its location, the New York Times says. 

Who has access to a bear cub to plant in Central Park? Hunters and people who try to keep bears as pets. Hunting season in New Jersey isn’t until December–which is timed so pregnant females aren’t killed, which, by the way, is the opposite of what you would do to cut a population. It’s entirely possible that someone who kept the bear cub as a pet dumped it there. But why? If you don’t want to draw attention to a dead animal, then Central Park should be your last choice to dump it.

Dog howls to music: does he like it or hate it?

There are certain songs heard over and over on TV that every American human knows. And, it turns out, so do many dogs. There’s now a meme of internet memes: many TV songs have the magical property to make dogs sing.

People started documenting the mysterious property of the irritating Empire Carpet jingle to make dogs sing on YouTube in 2006. If you’ve ever lived in Chicago and wasted time on lousy TV stations, you know and loathe the phone number of Empire Carpet: 588-2300 Empire!  The Fogelnest Files recently revisited the phenomena, with a playlist of dogs being driven crazy by song of the now-national chain. But this internet meme  is just the beginning.

Now dogs are baying to 877-Cash, the song of J.G. Wentworth, which buys settlements and annuities. This seems like a natural progression for sing-a-long dogs. Wentworth has the same low budget style and the identical concept of repeating their phone number ad naseum.

Watch playlist of dogs singing to J.G. Wentworth

But now I see another trend that brings up all kinds of questions about the dogs’ motivation. Are dogs complaining about hearing the same commercial again? Or do they just like to sing along when they know the tune? Our dogs have been our unwitting laboratory research subjects when they hang out with us in front of the TV.

The new YouTube meme: Dogs singing to Law & Order Theme. This song isn’t annoying. It doesn’t have words or a pushy phone number. But, wow is it everywhere. And here’s another: Dogs sing to the General Hospital theme. Which, again, isn’t annoying, but is presumably something these dogs hear every day.

We’re never sure what makes dogs sing. Some bay at harmonicas, fire engines or horns. When we have our beagle meetups only about 20% of the dogs that are infamous for their howling ever sing. I wish I could figure out how to make them sing. So now I think they are just singing along to something they hear all the time and probably kind of like. Look at how much Logan the Poodle seems to have fun singing to Law and Order.

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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

What’s odd about this movie is that it was seen as idiotic even in its time. Burl Ives plays Cottonmouth, the head Irish hobos in a gang that shoots birds to sell their feathers and wrestles for which hut they get to sleep in.  Christopher Plummer is the idealistic newcomer who gets hired by the Audubon Society to go after turn-of-the-century poachers. Trouble–and romance–ensue.

The movie was so implausible that it effectively ended writer/producer Bud Schulberg’s career, Turner Classic Movies says. Clearly, Schulberg had hoped this would be spectacular–with Nicholas Ray as director–would have some impact. But Ray showed up under the influence of drink or drug or a suicidal woman whose bra he wore to a meeting. So Schulberg eventually fired him.

At the time the conservation theme was controversial and you can imagine this movie could have been an environmental To Kill A Mockingbird.

But you can hardly notice the conservation issues behind all costumes and characters that would have fit right into Gilligan’s Island. A then-famous clown Emmett Kelly and a stripper Gypsy Rose Lee played parts. I swear, there’s a guy who wears a sailor’s dress uniform and drinks booze from a coconut. Some raw nature footage is dropped into the film–as if the righteous Christopher Plummer character  rows a canoe past a flock of roseate spoonbill, a swordfish, an otter, then frowns as he sees an alligator chomp down an egret. Heck, if wildlife so abundant we wouldn’t need to save it.

SEE ANIMALS IN FLORIDA

At the end of July, we had our daughter, Ginger Sylvania Vinzant Lidsky.

She will be raised with much love and gratitude by us and the beagles.

Like many couple we fall into the unexplained infertility category. There’s no known reason why it never worked before–or why it worked on that day the beagles came home. We had originally planned to be embarking on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to South Africa on that day. But, once we got word we were approved for the beagles it helped seal our decision to put off the trip. We tell Moxie and Huckleberry all the time that they are our good luck charms and without them, the course of our lives would have run differently and we wouldn’t have Ginger.

We probably wouldn’t have adopted two institutionalized, totally unhouse-trained beagles if we knew we were going to get pregnant. But, I like to think that opening our lives to fun and chaos played a part in getting pregnant.

 Read more about our beagles

The current Wildlife Center of Texas represents what many urban rehabilitators are hoping to become: a professional outfit the public can turn to when they find orphaned or injured wildlife.  Executive director Sharon Schmalz started saving native animals in her backyard after a 1984 oil spill.

She and a team of other rehabbers, who, like rehabbers overall, are mostly women, built up the operations. They partnered with the Houston SPCA (which sends them wild patients) and Texas A&M University School of Veterinary Medicine. They got some funding from oil companies like Shell and Citgo (still no public funding available, even though wildlife is a public asset). And in 2007 they moved into their new building.

They’re on track to take in 8,500 patients this year, up from 7,000 in a typical year, because the drought is putting extra stress on animals.

“We’re really in the middle of Houston, so people ask, how do you get so much wildlife?” Schmaltz says. “But we’re also in the middle of the migration path.”

Their typical customer is a bird–dove, mockingbird or blue jay–but they also see pelicans and herons, who visit the coast.

“We get things people find in their backyard,” says operations manager Margaret Pickell. That means the usual suspect mammals–possums, rabbits, racoons and squirrels. But they’ve also treated trickier patients, like otters, beavers and bobcats. And they even treated a hooked, endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle found on a street (probably dumped there).

Check out the Wildlife Center of Texas

SEE ANIMALS IN TEXAS

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

Nutty Narrows Bridge

Longview, WA, isn’t content to have one fabulous squirrel bridge. Starting at the first annual Squirrel Fest this August, they may add a new squirrel conveyance every year.

As we’ve covered earlier, Longview whimsically set up an elaborate  squirrel bridge in 1963. Some dismal practicalities forced the town to move the bridge to an out of the way rodent crossing. But last year  a visionary local group known as the sandbaggers restored the The Nutty Narrows Bridge to its place of prominence and honor.

Come August, the town will install a second bridge. And, better yet, start a contest of bridge design with hopes of putting up another fancy bridge next year, says Norma Davey. So far the squirrels seem to be adapting fine to the bridges moving. “We sent out a notification notice,” she says. “And they seem to be fine with it.”

Oh please, let one of the engineers study the famous BBC experimental squirrel obstacle course. Researchers gave squirrels with a food supply, then made squirrels solve a problem to get to it. After they learned to, say, crawl through a tube, they’d add another challenge, then another. In the end the squirrels would ride in cars and take jumps to get to the food.

There are a lot of universally appealing events cluttering up the August 6 schedule, but squirrel fans will focus on these highlights:

Kids’ stuff: Kids wear costumes and I hope a lot of of them are squirrels. They’ll hunt for nuts, eat cupcakes with puffy peanuts and hit an acorn piñata.
New squirrel bridge: City’s new copper bridge unveiled.

Chainsaw carving exhibition: Artist carve squirrel-related pieces. The town already has a huge squirrel sculpture to honor the original bridge builder, Amos Peters.

A few towns around the country have started celebrating their black or white squirrels. But Longview didn’t have any help from novelty squirrels. They just have their own goofy enthusiasm–and now a fun squirrel festival.

Where to Go to See Odd Squirrels and Squirrel Attractions

Where to See Animals Out West