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All in Animals
In December 2023, marine biologists in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf came upon an unusual sight: an octopus riding on the back of a shark. The team was looking for “workups,” or feeding frenzies, according to University of Auckland professor Rochelle Constantine.
It took Guinness World Records several months of counting, but finally it’s official: last fall the German town of Regensburg hosted the largest gathering of dachshunds ever. An estimated 897 of the long-eared, stump-legged wieners paraded through the medieval town while their humans marched alongside, many dressed in festive top hats and lederhosen.
A US influencer in Australia was filmed snatching a wild baby wombat from its mother last week, and the resultant outrage nearly got the woman deported. Samantha Strable of Montana, a self-described “outdoor enthusiast and hunter” who goes by the name Sam Jones on Instagram, has since issued a (tepid) mea culpa of the incident.
It takes patience, luck, and a lot of skill to capture memorable images of wildlife, where subjects tend to be in constant motion. Photographer Maruša Puhek of Slovenia has all three attributes, but her prizewinning shot of a pair of deer galloping across a snow-covered orchard was the result of a happy accident: she didn’t have a zoom lens with her for the money shot.
In January, birder and photographer Bill Diller photographed an odd sight: a brilliant orange-red snowy owl, a creature that is normally snow-white with a few flecks of brown. The colorful bird, seen in Huron County, Michigan, has since been dubbed Creamsicle or Rusty by other owl enthusiasts – but no one knows what caused the unusual plumage.
A pet deer has been confiscated in Pennsylvania. Tammy Shiery of Fayette County says that she and several neighbors raised the 2-year-old deer from the time they found him as a fawn, but the Pennsylvania Game Commission says that’s illegal.
Last week the Centers for Disease Control released some startling information about the bird flu virus, namely that it can be spread between cats and humans. The data appeared briefly online, then vanished.
A giant schnauzer named Monty with a pronounced beard and a jaunty gait wins Best In Show this week at the Westminster Dog Show. The 5-year-old had reached the final round in the previous two years; he finally won it all, besting an impressive field of competitors.
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington announced the birth this week of a rare, endangered Malayan tapir calf. The new arrival is only the second tapir born at the zoo in its 120-year history.
A rare winter storm last week hit Florida’s panhandle, catching many humans unprepared. Also unaccustomed to the frigid temps were hundreds of endangered sea turtles, whose metabolism shut down when their habitat gets too frosty.
Last year zoology students at Berkeley were surprised to learn that every living mammal indigenous to California had been captured on film except for one, the Mount Lyell shrew. That omission became a mission for Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes, along with wildlife photographer Vishal Subramanyan, who ventured out into the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains to find the elusive shrew.
The miniature donkey called Perry – short for Pericles – died last week in Palo Alto at the age of 30. Perry’s claim to fame was as the model for the gabby character “Donkey” in the movie Shrek.
The National Zoo in Washington shut down this week when five inches of snow blanketed the capital, but a couple of its residents were delighted by the diversion. Qing Bao and Bao Li, the giant pandas who just arrived here, cavorted like schoolchildren in the white stuff.
The Wild Felid Advocacy Center in Shelton, Washington remains closed after20 of their big cats succumbed to the avian flu last December The sanctuary home to rescued cougars, bobcats, and other wild cats, announced the news on Facebook.
“Pish for thee, Iceland dog! thou prick-ear'd cur of Iceland!” Thusly Shakespeare described the Icelandic sheepdog more than 400 years ago (Henry V, Act II). Now the UK’s Kennel Club will formally recognize the breed, and it’s high time. Long before Shakespeare, the dog was celebrated in the Icelandic Sagas a thousand years ago.
The winner of the UK’s ugliest dog contest is Muppet, a 12-year-old Chinese crested pooch from Peterborough. Bev Nicholson, the dog’s proud owner, says Muppet is a “wonky little rescue dog” that is “beautiful inside and out.”
Photographer Milko Marchetti happened upon a squirrel in a public park in Ravenna, Italy, so he snapped a shot of the rodent halfway in (or out) of a hole in a tree. “This photo had an effect on me and made me smile a lot in that moment that I clicked the button,” he says. “I knew I had to enter it into the competition.”
We usually think of pollinators – the yentas of the animal kingdom that “marry” male and female plants by transmitting pollen between them – as flying insects, birds, sometimes bats. Biologists have now identified another unusual matchmaker in the field, the Ethiopian wolf.
The day will come when the albatross named Wisdom, the oldest wild bird in the world (by a staggering amount) no longer completes her annual migration to Midway Atoll, never again takes a mate, builds a nest, or starts a family. Today is not that day.
A pygmy hippo calf entered the world in Scotland a couple weeks ago, far from its natural stomping grounds of the forests and swamps of West Africa. Born at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland's Edinburgh Zoo, the baby girl has been named after the national dish, Haggis.
