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Posted: 13-09-2011 12:40 Post subject:

Probably eaten by an Orca.

Posted: 13-09-2011 18:36 Post subject:

Posted: 15-09-2011 09:13 Post subject:

Cat lost in Colorado turns up in New York
A pet cat that went missing in Colorado five years ago has been found wandering the streets of Manhattan, more than 1800 miles away.
7:00AM BST 15 Sep 2011

Workers at a pet shelter traced Willow the cat back to a family in Colorado, thanks to a microchip embedded in the animal's neck that they checked with a scanner, said Richard Gentles, spokesman for Animal Care & Control of New York City.
A concerned citizen found the brown, black and white cat recently prowling the streets on the East Side of Manhattan, and the animal was taken to the shelter.

Animal care workers do not know who was taking care of the cat, but Mr Gentles said one thing is certain - the pet did not travel half-way across the country on its own.
"The cat was in very good condition, clean, a little chunky," he said. "So obviously someone was taking care of her."

Willow belongs to a Colorado family called the Squires, and the animal apparently ran away five years ago during a home renovation project, Mr Gentles said.
The Squires could not be reached for comment late on Wednesday.

Animal Care & Control plans to soon fly the cat back to the Squires, after the animal passes a required screening test for communicable disease and to make sure it is healthy enough to travel, Mr Gentles said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8764115/Cat-lost-in-Colorado-turns-up-in-New-York.html

I'm not saying the cat did walk all the way, but if it had it would only have covered about a mile a day on average over the five years.

Posted: 24-10-2011 11:18 Post subject:

Kingfisher's record flight: Polish bird flies 620 miles to Suffolk
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 12:13 AM on 24th October 2011

A kingfisher has broken the record for the furthest migration of the species between the UK and the Continent, it seems.
The bird, found at the National Trust’s Orford Ness national nature reserve in Suffolk, is thought to have travelled more than 620 miles from Poland.
While kingfishers are a resident breeding species in this country, a small number migrate to the UK each year from the Continent, probably to escape areas with prolonged freezing conditions in winter, the trust said.

The kingfisher, which had been tagged, or ‘ringed’, in Poland, was caught by members of Landguard Bird Observatory as part of studies at the site.
Experts will now find out where in Poland it had been ringed and confirm the record.
The previous record set by a British kingfisher for migration was a bird ringed in Marloes, Pembrokeshire, and found in Irun, Spain – having travelled 603 miles.

Mike Marsh, volunteer ringer for the Landguard Bird Observatory, said: 'We catch a small number of kingfishers each year at Orford Ness, usually in the autumn, and previously assumed that these had been dispersing juveniles of fairly local origin.
'This will be one of the longest migrations among the kingfishers in the ringing database and we can’t wait to get confirmation of the record from the British Trust for Ornithology and hear about the Polish ringing scheme.'

Grant Lohoar, site manager for the National Trust at Orford Ness, a remote shingle spit on the Suffolk coast, said the length of migration was a great discovery - and one that was only made because the bird had been ringed.
'This highlights the importance of ringing as a tool for conservation which allows us to identify birds as individuals,' he said.
'Orford Ness is a really important stopover site for many migrating birds as they can refuel and rest on the marshes, in the reed beds or on the many lagoons we have here.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052673/Kingfishers-record-flight-Polish-bird-flies-620-miles-Suffolk.html#ixzz1bh1K0cVX

Posted: 15-02-2012 09:15 Post subject:

Tiny songbird northern wheatear traverses the world
By Victoria Gill, Science reporter, BBC Nature

Miniature tracking devices have revealed the epic 30,000km (18,640 miles) migration of the diminutive northern wheatear.
The birds, which weigh just 25g (0.8oz), travel from sub-Saharan Africa to their Arctic breeding grounds.
"Scaled for body size," the scientists report, "this is the one of the longest round-trip migratory journeys of any bird in the world.
The team reports its findings in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

"Think of something smaller than a robin, but a little larger than a finch raising young in the Arctic tundra and then a few months later foraging for food in Africa for the winter," said one of the lead researchers, Prof Ryan Norris from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

The species is of particular interest to scientists, because it has one of the largest ranges of any songbird in the world; with breeding grounds in the eastern Canadian Arctic, across Greenland, Eurasia and into Alaska.
Prior to this work though, it was not clear where the birds spent the winter.

Heiko Schmaljohann, from the Institute of Avian Research in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, was a member of the team that carried out this study.
He and his colleagues visited the wheatears' breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada and fitted 46 birds with the satellite tracking devices.
"The [trackers] weigh 1.4g, including a harness that loops around the birds' legs," he told BBC Nature.
These data loggers recorded the bird's position twice a day for 90 days. Four trackers that the team managed to retrieve revealed that individual wheatears spent the winter in northern parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

The Alaskan birds travelled almost 15,000km (9,000 miles) each way - crossing Siberia and the Arabian Desert, and travelling, on average, 290km per day.
"This is the longest recorded migration for a songbird as far as we know," said Dr Schmaljohann.

Although the Canadian birds did not travel as far - approximately 3,500km - they had to cross the northern Atlantic Ocean.
"That's a very big barrier for a small songbird," Dr Schmaljohann explained.

Henry McGhie, a zoologist and head of collections at Manchester Museum described the birds' journey as "very impressive".
"We do see Greenland wheatears in the UK on migration, usually on the coast," he said.
"The amazing thing [about this study] is that it gives us a glimpse into the extraordinary lives of these tiny birds.
"When we see them, they're in the middle of a journey they do twice every year. When you think of the challenges they must face, you wonder how on earth they do it."

Dr Schmaljohann added: "[In the past] we totally underestimated the flight capability of birds in terms of migration.
"It seems that bird migration is limited by the size of the Earth. If the planet was larger, they would probably migrate even further."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17027565

Posted: 06-07-2012 08:19 Post subject:

Cornish choughs returned from Republic of Ireland: Study

The Cornish chough population, which returned to the county in 2001, came from the Republic of Ireland, a university study suggests.
Researchers at Aberdeen University took DNA samples from feathers to get a genetic fingerprint of the birds.

After being absent from Cornwall for 54 years, the species returned 11 years ago.
Dr Jane Reid said she was surprised by the finding as usually the chough was a "very, very sedentary" bird.

Feathers were taken from chough populations across western Europe, which allowed researchers to discover the Cornish birds' "true origins".
It was speculated that the birds had flown from "the closest launch-off points" of south Wales or Brittany, France.
"Genetic evidence now suggests the new Cornish ones came from some point along the coast of southern Ireland," Dr Reid said.

"Our study also showed that all the populations we sampled right though from Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Ireland, are really quite genetically distinct from each other, which suggests that typically there is very little movement between them."

Species protection warden for the Cornish Chough Project Katherine Lee, who runs a 24-hour protection programme for the birds, said the chough's return had "kept volunteers guessing for about 11 years".
Ms Lee said the return of the chough was of "massive importance" to Cornwall.

She said the year the birds had returned coincided with the foot-and-mouth disease crisis and claims that year the restrictions on public footpaths could have encouraged them to settle.

Choughs are a member of the crow family with a red beak and legs and an excitable high-pitched 'chi-ow' call from which it gets its name.
The bird is included in Cornwall's coat of arms alongside the miner and the fisherman, reflecting the bird's importance in Cornish culture.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-18721061

Posted: 16-07-2012 18:03 Post subject:

These kinds of stories make me so happy.

Posted: 30-08-2012 07:36 Post subject:

Koala surprises canoeists by hitching ride in Australia
28 August 2012 Last updated at 19:33

A group of canoeists on Australia's Gold Coast were surprised over the weekend to see a koala swimming near the bank of a river and even more shocked when it crawled into one of their canoes and hitched a ride.

Although it is not unknown for the marsupials to take to the water, experts believe the animal might have felt trapped on a tidal bank in Tallebudgera Creek and decided the canoe was its best way to escape.

Tom Santorelli reports.

[Video courtesy of Burleigh Point Outrigger Canoe Club]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-19399774

Posted: 30-08-2012 21:59 Post subject:

Awwwwww!

Posted: 30-08-2012 22:17 Post subject:

It is very awww! I have always liked koalas. But those folk are native Australians, I think, from their accents - they know better than to try and cuddle the bugger! Smile

Posted: 03-09-2012 16:56 Post subject:

Runaway dog mimics London commuters with solo train ride

Frankie the jack russell surprises owner by taking a rush-hour journey to the capital after sneaking out of his home in Kent

James Meikle
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 10.57 BST

Frankie the dog on his train journey to London. Source: YouTube.

Commuters know the drill. Brisk walk to the station; dash across the platform; hop on to the train; scurry down the aisle to find a suitable seat.

Frankie the jack russell showed a middle-aged dog can learn new tricks by behaving like a regular on the 6.56am to London.

The six-year-old family pet marked his birthday last week by setting out on an incredible rush-hour journey after sneaking out of his home in Gravesend, Kent, after his owner left for work.

There was a 1.6-mile (2.6km) trek to the station and an all-too-brief free ride, before he was caught and put on a leash by train manager Richard Cheeseman as the high-speed Javelin service from Maidstone West to London St Pancras neared its destination.

Thanks to a contact number on his collar, staff were able to phone owner Jane Abbott, 47, who had been frantically searching for her missing pet. She said: "I normally get greeted by Frankie when I get up, but not this morning. I looked all over the house and the garden but there was no sign of him … What we don't understand is why Frankie chose rail. He's never been on a train before."

While Abbott and her 22-year-old daughter Stephanie had to fork out £59 for the trip to fetch their wandering companion, Frankie dodged the usual penalty fines for being caught without a ticket.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/29/frankie-jack-russell-london-train

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That statement - "What we don't understand is why Frankie chose rail. He's never been on a train before." makes it strange. Was he following what humans do? Does he have some residual memory from a past life of getting on a train? Is he the littlest hobo?

Posted: 25-01-2013 08:54 Post subject:

This is fascinating:

Dung beetles guided by Milky Way
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

They may be down in the dirt but it seems dung beetles also have their eyes on the stars.
Scientists have shown how the insects will use the Milky Way to orientate themselves as they roll their balls of muck along the ground.
Humans, birds and seals are all known to navigate by the stars. But this could be the first example of an insect doing so.

The study by Marie Dacke is reported in the journal Current Biology.
"The dung beetles are not necessarily rolling with the Milky Way or 90 degrees to it; they can go at any angle to this band of light in the sky. They use it as a reference," the Lund University, Sweden, researcher told BBC News.

Dung beetles like to run in straight lines. When they find a pile of droppings, they shape a small ball and start pushing it away to a safe distance where they can eat it, usually underground.
Getting a good bearing is important because unless the insect rolls a direct course, it risks turning back towards the dung pile where another beetle will almost certainly try to steal its prized ball.

Dr Dacke had previously shown that dung beetles were able to keep a straight line by taking cues from the Sun, the Moon, and even the pattern of polarised light formed around these light sources.
But it was the animals' capacity to maintain course even on clear Moonless nights that intrigued the researcher.
So the native South African took the insects (Scarabaeus satyrus) into the Johannesburg planetarium where she could control the type of star fields a beetle might see overhead.

Importantly, she put the beetles in a container with blackened walls to be sure the animals were not using information from landmarks on the horizon, which in the wild might be trees, for example.

The beetles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected on to the planetarium dome, but coped just as well when shown only the diffuse bar of light that is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Dr Dacke thinks it is the bar more than the points of light that is important.
"These beetles have compound eyes," she told the BBC. "It's known that crabs, which also have compound eyes, can see a few of the brightest stars in the sky. Maybe the beetles can do this as well, but we don't know that yet; it's something we're looking at. However, when we show them just the bright stars in the sky, they get lost. So it's not them that the beetles are using to orientate themselves."
And indeed, in the field, Dr Dacke has seen beetles run in to trouble when the Milky Way briefly lies flat on the horizon at particular times of the year.

The question is how many other animals might use similar night-time navigation.
It has been suggested some frogs and even spiders are using stars for orientation. The Lund researcher is sure there will be many more creatures out there doing it; scientists just need to go look.
"I think night-flying moths and night-flying locusts could benefit from using a star compass similar to the one that the dung beetles are using," she said.

But for the time being, Dr Dacke is concentrating on the dung beetle. She is investigating the strange dance the creature does on top of its ball of muck. The hypothesis is that this behaviour marks the moment the beetle takes its bearings.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150721

Posted: 31-01-2013 08:56 Post subject:

Homing pigeon 'Bermuda Triangle' explained
By Rebecca Morelle, Science reporter, BBC World Service

The mystery of the "Bermuda Triangle" of the homing pigeon world may have been solved.
For years, scientists have been baffled as to why the usually excellent navigators get lost when released from a particular site in New York State.
But new research suggests the birds are using low frequency sounds to find their way around - and they cannot hear the rumble at this US location.

The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
The lead author of the paper, Dr Jonathan Hagstrum, from the US Geological Survey, said that the birds were creating "acoustic maps" of their surroundings.
But some other researchers said the theory was controversial and there was much debate over how homing pigeons navigate so efficiently.

The puzzle of the vanishing pigeons began in the 1960s.
Professor Bill Keeton from Cornell University was trying to understand the birds' astonishing ability to find their way home from places they have never previously visited.
He released birds throughout New York State, but was surprised to discover that whenever the pigeons were released at Jersey Hill, near Ithaca, they became disorientated and flew about aimlessly.

This happened again and again, apart from on one occasion on 13 August 1969 when the birds' navigational prowess returned and they flew back to their loft.

Dr Hagstrum has now come up with an explanation.
He said: "The way birds navigate is that they use a compass and they use a map. The compass is usually the position of the Sun or the Earth's magnetic field, but the map has been unknown for decades.
"I have found they are using sound as their map... and this will tell them where they are relative to their home."

The pigeons, he said, use "infrasound", which is an extremely low-frequency sound that is below the range of human hearing.
He explained: "The sound originates in the ocean. Waves in the deep ocean are interfering and they create sound in both the atmosphere and the Earth. You can pick this energy up anywhere on Earth, in the centre of a continent even."
He believes that when the birds are at their unfamiliar release site, they listen for the signature of the infrasound signal from their home - and then use this to find their bearings.

However, infrasound can be affected by changes in the atmosphere.
Dr Hagstrum used temperature and wind records taken from the dates of the various experimental releases to calculate how the sound would have travelled from the pigeons' base to Jersey Hill.
"The temperature structure and the wind structure of the atmosphere were such in upstate New York that the sound was bent up and over Jersey Hill," he explained.

This meant the birds could not hear it and got lost - apart from the day that the birds found their way home.
He said: "On 13 August 1969, there was either a wind shear or temperature inversion in the troposphere that bent the sound back down so it arrived right back at Jersey Hill on that day, and that day alone."

Dr Hagstrum thinks that disruptions of infrasound may also explain other homing pigeon puzzles, where large numbers of pigeons lose their way, such as a race in 1997 across the English channel where 60,000 birds veered off course.

He admitted his work was "controversial", but said: "This doesn't prove it by any stretch - but it puts out a new idea, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the best explanation of what pigeons are doing, because it explains what has been going on at Jersey Hill."

Others have put forward different ideas for how pigeons find their way, suggesting that the birds use smell, visual clues or the Earth's magnetic field, or even a combination of all of these.

Tim Guilford, professor of animal behaviour from the University of Oxford, said: "Whilst there is disagreement about the details, what we know from a large body of experimental evidence is that access to atmospheric odours is usually necessary, and often sufficient, to explain pigeons' navigational performance from unfamiliar areas, when combined with the time-compensated Sun compass (on sunny days) and perhaps a back-up magnetic compass (on cloudy days).
"When birds become familiar with their wider surroundings, however, they start to depend increasingly on topographical features (probably visual) forming habitual routes home across the landscape."

He said that Dr Hagstrum had used an "interesting approach" and that it was valuable to explore new ideas.
However, he added: "Given the volume of evidence for other mechanisms, infrasound seems unlikely to be the whole explanation."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21262170

Posted: 31-01-2013 17:51 Post subject:

If only they had gone with a title of "Birdmuda Triangle" Wink

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21262170

"The mystery of the "Bermuda Triangle" of the homing pigeon world may have been solved.

For years, scientists have been baffled as to why the usually excellent navigators get lost when released from a particular site in New York State.

But new research suggests the birds are using low frequency sounds to find their way around - and they cannot hear the rumble at this US location.

The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The lead author of the paper, Dr Jonathan Hagstrum, from the US Geological Survey, said that the birds were creating "acoustic maps" of their surroundings."
...

Posted: 01-02-2013 01:58 Post subject: