The Cellar Image of the Day

The gray wolf is not an endangered species, globally speaking; there are a lot of them, there generally always has been a lot of them, all over the world. But they don't actually get along with humans like their canus family member Dog does.

So once humanity came on the scene, we reduced their number by 2/3rds. By the 1950s there were none left in western Europe, none in Mexico and almost none in the US. Typically there were actual government programs to kill the beasts and they can tell you the exact year the last wolf was killed in various countries.

But humanity has come around, and now the government programs protect the wolves, and they are coming back.

This May and again in July, folks in northern California noticed something on a trail camera. Hey, they said, was that a wolf?

So officials did what officials do, they collected some turds and measured some tracks, and said yeah maybe this is a gray wolf.

But they also put out a bunch more cameras, and last week...

A mating pair and five cubs.

The state of California now has gray wolves.

If there's just one fact I could beat into the skulls of the inevitable "kill it before we can't hunt any more deer!!" crowd, it would be easy to choose. Coyotes, which den in vacant subdivision houses in places like Glendale and whose urban diet includes up to 50% house cats and small dogs like Miley Cyrus's little ankle shark, DO NOT like wolves and will move out of a wolf-impacted area if they can. If not, they tend to be under more stress and less likely to have a damaging impact on human interests.

Fun little hunting-related fact I found out about Montana not long ago: there's a fella here who's been checking out and documenting road-kill deer for a lot of years. He's up to over 60% of young road-kill bucks showing obvious physical defects, many of them related to dental malformations and failure of testes to drop even in mature males. I've been watching nature documentaries since Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the Jacques Cousteau specials were hot news, and reading books about natural history almost as long. Predation doesn't cause increasingly prevalent dental, jaw, and gonad deformities, inbreeding and poor nutrition do. All those "wolves eetz EVERYTING I wanna shoot" hunters, in an ideal world, could be taught that wolves improve the overall health of the forest ecosystems, while coyotes are a legitimate danger to small pets and there are places with serious concerns about small children.

On the East Coast, we could use some Wolves, as we're overrun with White Tailed Deer. It's not unusual to see a dozen in my yard, and the road kill numbers are astronomical. Something like 60,000 a year on I-80 alone, and even in Philly proper they're a problem.
Coyotes have driven out a lot of the foxes, but I'm not so sure wolves are the solution for that.

For the state it's 315 per day.
I had posted it in a thread in the Cellar, along with the source, but I don't know where that was. I-80 is 313 miles of deer habitat with a million vehicle a year, 30% of them 18 wheelers. It goes through woods where the undergrowth is sparse and where there is undergrowth it's mainly shit tasting Laurel and evergreens. So the cornucopia of roadside/median vegetation, plus tons road salt, are irresistible.
Wiki

Quote:

In the United States, the state with the highest number of deer-vehicle collisions is Pennsylvania, with an estimated 115,000 collisions in 2013 causing $400 million in damage.[6] West Virginia is the state with the highest risk that a motorist will hit a deer while driving.[7]

Quote:

Mid-October through mid-December is the peak season for deer vs. vehicle collisions, and Pennsylvania is one of the nation's most active battlefields. State Farm insurance projects that about 115,000 collisions occurred in Pennsylvania in the year that ended June 30, 2013, and the average damage claim for that period was just over $3,400.

That works out to nearly $400 million in damage wreaked in the state by wayward deer, and that doesn't count the value of the gardens they devour before roaming onto the roads.

Pennsylvania is the undisputed leader in the number of deer-vehicle crashes, with Michigan a distant second at 77,000, according to State Farm. But West Virginia remained the state where a typical motorist stood the greatest chance of taking a deer in the headlights -- a 1 in 41 chance. Pennsylvania was fifth, with a 1 in 77 chance.

Quote:

I-80 is 313 miles of deer habitat with a million vehicle a year, 30% of them 18 wheelers.
It goes through woods where the undergrowth is sparse and where
there is undergrowth it's mainly shit tasting Laurel and evergreens.
So the cornucopia of roadside/median vegetation, plus tons road salt, are irresistible.

Yeah I know, put the sign some where else.

I read recently the deer in the headlights phenomenon may be caused by the deer's eyes seeing a different color spectrum that us. They don't see red/orange, but can see ultraviolet, so our headlights look muted gray, screwing up their depth perception even if they don't get blinded by a direct beam. Don't know if it's true but it's an interesting theory.

Do you know what happen when you introduce the Gray Wolf into an area where it becomes the apex predator?
It's gets the greenie tree huggers all fired up and they start making the politicians clean up the environment.
That results in global cooling and a new ice age.
Before you know it, Frank Reade is fighting for survival.
Is that what you want?

I have to give her credit for delivering her lines flawlessly. She sounded exactly like someone who believed that the DOT controls the migration patterns of the deer population.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Man, that's a lot. I mean, I knew PA had a pretty bad problem with it, but, I guess, I just never thought it out in terms of numbers. Dayum. It's still hard to get my head around those numbers.

Rumor has it that in the West, rabbits used to run towards headlights,
but cars were so efficient in killing them that the only survivors were
those that ran away from the lights.

PA is just experiencing a step up/down/around the White Tail's evolutionary tree.

.

Wait. In fact, stop the fucking car.

Pennsylvania has mule deer?

I couldn't find any info on the interweb about a Pennsylvania mule deer population.

I'm just learning all kinds of shit today...

They're a minority, so we try to get them on welfare, and keep them out of sight, so they don't get uppity.

Pennsylvania has mule deer, then.

How? I mean, I assume re-introduction?

I swear to God, the longer this day gets the more confused I become. I'm about to quit.

I always keep a couple in the fridge. They were transplanted like the Elk, very small number.

So...

The state that runs over 115,000 deer/year, in it's infinite wisdom, sat down, had a meeting, and said "We don't have enough deer. Let's bring some more in from out of state. Yep, more deer, that'll do it.". Not only more, but, bigger, deer, on top of that.

I would assume they had a reason, probably dietary or disease resistance, like they did for Elk. Deer are browsers and Elk are grazers, so if you want to knock down grass, and let seedling trees survive, Elk is more gooder. Not much has come of it but they do succumd to our apex preditor now and then.

The car insurance companies will shit when the Meeses arrive, they've made their way into southern Connecticut already..

Aren't the moose susceptible to that brain worm the whitetails spread? As long as we are way overpopulated with white tails we won't get many moose. Which brings us back to wolves, bring 'em on.

Do not fuck with moose.

When I had regular business dealings with my friends in Alaska, it was common for a moose/vehicle collision to leave the vehicle in worse condition than the moose. Hell, I've heard more than one story where a moose totaled an F-150. That is a *lot* of mass on each side of the collision. Moose dies, truck's a wreck and the driver is lucky if he doesn't go to the hospital.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Griff

Aren't the moose susceptible to that brain worm the whitetails spread? As long as we are way overpopulated with white tails we won't get many moose. Which brings us back to wolves, bring 'em on.

Quote:

During roughly the past decade, the moose population in northwestern Minnesota has plunged from 4,000 animals to just 100. Moose numbers are declining fast in northeastern Minnesota, too, and as far away as central and southern New Hampshire.

Of course, parasites and wolves have always been around. So �something must have changed in the last decade and a half that makes the moose more susceptible,� Carstensen says. Climate change is a prime suspect, since Minnesota has experienced a series of warmer winters�but many scientists don�t think temperatures have warmed fast enough to cause such a steep decline. Adding to the perplexity is the fact that moose are doing just fine in Quebec, Ontario, Alaska and Maine. The thriving population in Maine is especially important, because the state is home to an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 moose, more than the other lower 48 states combined. �It�s a really mixed bag across Canada and the U.S.,� says Lee Kantar, the moose biologist for Maine. �You can�t have Quebec right next to us with increasing moose populations and have this talk about doom and gloom.�

Quote:

The leading threat in New Hampshire, where the moose population has declined as much as 40 percent in some areas during the past three years, seems to be the winter tick. Warmer winters and less snow cover mean that more ticks survive to lay eggs when they finish feeding on a moose and drop to the ground. As a result, tick numbers are up. �The ticks are literally carpeting these animals� bodies like shingles on a roof,� Rines says. �It�s enough to make you run screaming through the woods.�

Rines, Pekins and others have counted more than 100,000 ticks on a single moose.

I think I've mentioned this:

Once upon a time, Mom&Popdigr vacated in the north-east. When they got up closer to Maine, they started seeing these signs at almost every county line: "[xx number] People Killed In Moose/Car Collisions since Jan. 1st". They even saw more than one store with signs at the door like: "This Store Has Lost [xx number] of Employees To Moose/Car Collisions".

Some (hopefully) interesting factoids on deer and other critters...

Freight trains in moose habitat attach huge chevron-shaped steel pieces to the front of the lead locomotive, because a bull moose in breeding season is aggressive enough to stay on the tracks with its head down and wait for the "challenger" to come to him. No, he won't survive...but he can derail the train in the process if it doesn't have a 'moose kicker' on the front.

Recent molecular DNA research shows that the mule deer may be a hybrid between whitetails and the Sitka and Columbia black-tailed deer. Some research also suggests that the majority of this hybridization took place as recently as 8,000 years ago.

In some eastern seaboard areas where hunting is strictly forbidden and the forest isn't stocked with nutritious plants, deer overpopulation has led to worse things than vehicle hits and garden destruction. Some areas are so short of trace minerals and other crucial nutrients that deer will gnaw fresh roadkill and have been filmed eating live songbirds!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQOQdBLHrLk It follows a fallen baby that's too young to fly, ignoring its parents' mobbing and then just randomly grabbing and eating the grounded bird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q91dUtDYkU (dead ones, too)

I've only seen still shots of adult and subadult whitetails gnawing on large roadkill, and I'm not doing an image search for that because I'm sure there's a relevant watchlist I don't want to land on! The solution isn't supplementary feeding or further protection from hunting, but the eastern US seems to have a serious concentration of people who think the value of a wild animal is measured in how cute it is. I've got a strong enough stomach to watch the documentary series Infested, and what a colony of (legally protected from all harm save natural predation and provable accidents) squirrels can do to a home and the family living in it is both disgusting and terrifying.