The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Dog and Cat are friends

If Doctor Doolittle offered online courses in animal languages, I would take them all. He'd have many customers. Actually, all of us already know a few phrases in animal languages. We don't need Intro Dog to know that this dog is saying “I might bite! Check out these teeth!”

We don't need Conversational Cat to guess that this cat is saying “I'm prepared to fight, and while you're thinking about that, notice that I AM HUGE.”

We understand these bits of body language and so do they. Neither dog nor cat would think the other wanted to be friends. But these are generic phrases meant to be understood by many species. Normally canids and felids don't hang out together, and they don't understand most of each others' body language. What about households where dogs and cats live together?

You've probably seen households where cat and dogs get along. Sometimes they agree to ignore each other, sometimes they're civil, and sometimes they're friends.

So we knew this, but now there's a study that backs us up. (Look it up in Applied Animal Behaviour Science if you don't believe me.) Zoologists at Tel Aviv University observed households with both dogs and cats. They scored the relationships between the pets as amicable (friendly), indifferent, or aggressive. Many pets had friendly relationships, in which they played together, licked each other, or slept snuggled up. Neta-li Feuerstein and Joseph Terkel found that pets are most likely to become friends if they are under six months old when they start hanging out with the other species. It also helps if the cat was there first.

These dogs and cats learn to understand each other's body language better. Dogs and cats have some signals in common – like growling – but some signals have the opposite meaning in the two species. For example, bilingual pets know that rapidly moving your tail from side to side means different things coming from a dog or from a cat. When a dog wags its tail, that's a happy friendly signal. When a cat lashes its tail, the mood is very different, and the bilingual dog steps back.

The study found that cats were about as good at understanding Dog as dogs were at understanding Cat. When a dog rolls on its back, that's a submissive or deferential gesture, often a prelude to a friendly encounter. Cats living with dogs can learn to comprehend this, even though they use the same movement aggressively. When a cat rolls on its back, that's often preparation for grabbing you with their front legs and clawing the living daylights out of you with their hind feet. Which can also be a game.

The dogs and cats learn to understand each other's body language, not to use it. A dog may understand that the cat lashing its tail is saying "I'm outraged! I may pounce!" but the dog won't begin wagging its tail to show outrage.

The closest thing to an exception to this rule that Feuerstein and Terkel found is nose-to-nose sniffing. This is a friendly greeting gesture among cats. Dogs usually prefer a mutual start-at-the-tail sniffing procedure. But dogs who are friends with cats learn to do the nose-to-nose with them.

However, I would draw Feuerstein and Terkel's attention to the cat in this video, who appears to switch between languages, using Dog to threaten what I assume is a trespassing dog outside, then switching to Cat to greet a household member.

 

 Feuerstein and Terkel are the kind of researchers who worry about animals in shelters not finding homes. They conclude their scientific report by assuring us that it's possible to adopt both a dog and a cat. They think dog-cat friendships are particularly rewarding for the cats. Dogs are better able to relate to humans in their household as their pack, whereas a cat “seems to gain something from the presence of an additional animal,” showing more friendly behaviors. They particularly urge people with one cat to get it a dog friend to improve the cat's quality of life. If you do, I urge you to send me pictures.

 

Killdeer escape?

 

I had been trusted with the task of feeding the killdeer  chicks at the wildlife center. I put trays of food in the shorebird pen. Elaborate trays of shorebird dainties: freshly-thawed tiny invertebrates, insects, duckweed. I was careful to make sure no killdeer got out. It didn't seem hard, since the appalling sight of a human made them run, crouch, and freeze.  

 

But as I was walking back toward the main building, I heard a killdeer overhead. Nowhere near the shorebird pen. Now I was the one who froze.

 

Did I let one out? Oh no, did I forget to latch the door? Did they all get out? Oh no no no.

 

...sounds more like an adult killdeer – it's loud. And close.

 

Oh. 

 

*#^&+$%.

 

A mockingbird was atop a high pole, running through his imitations. Starting with some killdeer calls.

Giving me a pang of guilty fear. As if I need any more of those.

 

If he'd noticed, I'm sure he would have thought it was funny. He would do it again. Which is why it's important to stay stone-faced around mockers. Which you probably know. Because you went to grade school too.

Stowaway bird

Red-tailed tropicbirds are aces of tropical Pacific skies. They're big white birds with striking black eye markings. Each has two ridiculously long red tail feathers in the midst of its normal white tail feathers (thus Phaethon rubricauda). They catch fish by plunging into the sea from a height and grabbing them. Also squid.

The tropicbird is one of those seabirds that usually doesn't bother with land. They fly or rest on the water. But that doesn't work when a bird is in that awkward egg stage, so they breed on islands. They like to nest colonially, let's say on a nice coral atoll, tucked under a bush, or in a niche between hunks of coral.

Sometimes, apparently, a bird looking for a nice flat atoll lands on the nice flat deck of a ship, and tucks itself into a niche between cargo containers, and sits there peaceably waiting for the rest of the gang to show up, unfussed that the island it has selected is moving, like Spidermonkey Island in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle.

Recently a tropicbird was found sitting zazen on a Korean cargo ship. When the ship arrived in southern California, the bird was brought to International Bird Rescue's San Pedro center, where she was found to be in good health. On a recent visit, I saw her there, resting on a mesh haul-out in a small private pool. She looked at us cheerfully. It seems that tropicbirds are among the island birds that have no fear of land animals such as humans.

Her pool was too small for plunge-feeding. IBR's blog has video of the tropicbird being fed fish. “Ah, they are grabbing my head. Yes, they are prying open my bill and inserting a fish. Ooh, there's a fish in my bill. Sweet.” The tropicbird swallows, sometimes with a little throat massage to urge the fish along, and sits placidly. It does not occur to her to reach a few inches forward and take another fish. That's not how she rolls.

Tropicbirds are aerialists but not distance fliers, so after tests came up negative for contagious diseases, and USFWS permission was received, the bird was put on a plane to Hawaii and then on another to Midway Island. There they put her in the water and off she flew.

Red-tailed tropicbirds breed on Midway, so with any luck she'll find a mate, and a nest site that doesn't shift coordinates, and will not depend on the kindness of Korean sailors, bird rescuers, and government agencies. Island tameness can be a disastrous feature for wild animals, but in this bird's case it worked out nicely.

Raven trading post

Bald Eagles are the specialty of the Alaska Raptor Center, in Sitka. It's an animal hospital in a forest. They treat 100-200 eagles a year, as well as other species. Many are treated and set free. Others have problems that mean they can't make it as wild birds any more. These generally go to zoos or become Ed Birds – used in educational programs of various kinds.

 

Some of the Ed Birds are in outdoor aviaries. When I visited this summer, one of the Ed Eagles, Volta, on a perch outdoors, became agitated when we passed by. My guide speculated that Volta remembered me unkindly from a previous visit.  (Although I am a friend to all animals, on that visit I was taking a course in eagle rehab, which involves doing a number of things that might displease a bird – captures, pedicures, beakicures, etc.) But it turned out that Volta was agitated about a wild eagle flying around the aviaries.

 

We moved on to view Gilly, an Ed Raven. Gilly came to the center in 1997, as Gilbert, a youth of three months with an elbow so shattered by a gunshot as to rule out wild life. Gilbert became an Ed Bird and at some point, I suppose, was revealed to be female. Gilly was in an outdoor aviary and gave us a haughty uninterested glance. She has a more complex life than one might guess an Ed Raven would have. She was once housed with two other ravens, but they are a couple, who demonstrated loyalty to each other by harassing Gilly, so she was given her own space.

 

Gilly has a wild friend, Romeo. He visits her frequently, so the Raptor Center thoughtfully put an extra-long perch in her aviary, which projects out through the wiring. Romeo can perch on the outside, and Gilly can perch on the inside, and they can sidle up to each other.

 

I do not know if Romeo and Gilly are romantically interested in each other. Ravens are fond of shiny things, and Romeo brings Gilly shiny things, and passes them to her through the wire. Gilly accepts them and passes Romeo bits of her food. She's no fool – she doesn't give him her salmon or her meat. She gives him vegetables and popcorn. Maybe she's concerned about his weight.

 

They won't do this if you're standing right there. But if you're a few aviaries away, you can look through several wire walls and see Romeo arrive and the subsequent exchanges. I long for the Raptor Center to set up a RavenSwapCam.  

 

It may be love, it may be commerce, or it may be a happy mix of the two. In any case it shows the complexity of ravens.

 

 

Fearless wildlife

It was afternoon, not the best time for wildlife spotting. We were on a forest trail by the Wynn Nature Center outside Homer, Alaska. The first of us walked briskly around a bend, spotted a rabbit in a clearing, and froze.

The rabbit didn't flee. Perhaps it hadn't noticed him. Two more of us came tramping along, and Person One gestured for stealth. Obediently we froze, then sneaked forward to behold the rabbit noshing on a bush.

It was a young snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus). Since it was  summer, instead of the amazing white camouflage of winter, it  had brown fur.

Except for its giant feet. Those were white, and huge. Pearly clodhoppers. The puny lagomorph had feet so big as to appear burdensome. How is a young animal supposed to survive and elude predators if it has to tote such feet?

Its feet were ready for winter, when their hugeness will enable it to race across snow like a lightning bolt. Then the giant feet make snow- shoes look like a brilliant  idea instead of a terrible mistake.

It will need to race because it is so tasty and conveniently-sized, and lynxes  and owls and hawks and wolves and coyotes and simply  everybody will want to eat it. I assume it will know then that it needs to run away.

For this rabbit didn't seem concerned about eluding predators. It turned from the bush and looked at us with mild interest. It hopped awkwardly toward us and stared. “Oh, it's tame,” we thought. “It's probably wondering if we brought trail mix.” The rabbit hopped a little closer, surveyed us casually, and turned back to bite more leaves off the bush. Then it disappeared into a mass of bushes.

Back at the nature center we asked about the tame rabbit. They have no tame rabbit.

They said some young hares are properly alarmed by the sight of humans, and some just aren't. They also said hares are abundant now, on an upswing in their famously cyclical population curve. (In areas with lynx, hare population booms and busts are closely followed by lynx booms and busts.) That alleviated any worry that the bunny cluelessness we had witnessed portended an end to all bunnies, but didn't explain why some are so casual about people.

On YouTube, among many the hunting videos, you can find quite a few videos of such “eh, whatever” hares, often hopping through wilderness campsites, clad in brown fur with tremendous white feet.

 

What is it with these fools? People are notorious rabbit killers. We are monsters – fear us!

After we get a good look.

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Mightypants

 

I haven't been bitten by a rattlesnake, except in nightmares. Once in southeast Arizona it was close. For some reason I was about to clamber up a small rock face. It was hot, and insects were buzzing, and it suddenly struck my companion that one insect buzzing on the rock face might actually be a snake. Indeed, a very small rattlesnake on a very small ledge was issuing a warning so small that I had taken it for a bug's advertisement.

 I have been threatened by other rattlesnakes, but never at biting distance. Several times I have been part of a team making a rattler get off a nice warm back-country road where it was planning to bake for a while. Those snakes tended to rattle savagely when chased into the chilly brush, not realizing that we were trying to save their lives.

 

But rattlesnakes appear in my nightmares sometimes, and they are ferocious then, biting repeatedly, biting multiple persons, biting the worst possible body parts.

 

Since when I am mooching around rattlesnake country, I am usually wearing jeans, and subject to the derision of shorts-wearers, I was interested to learn that jeans provide partial protection against snakebite. Shelton Herbert and William Hayes, of Loma Linda University, writing in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, describe an experiment in which they induced rattlesnakes to bite “model human limbs” and measured the amount of venom injected if the limb was bare or covered with denim.

The model human limbs were latex household gloves filled with warm water and dangled from a snake hook. There were 15 rattlesnakes, large and small. Each session began with 5 seconds of “noncontact harassment,” type unspecified. (Waving the snake hook? Stamping on the ground? Taunting?) Then the model limb was thrust near the snake. They did this until the snake bit the model once, or until fifteen minutes had passed.

Snakes are all different. Two snakes couldn't be bothered to bite at all. Five times a snake managed to get in two bites before they whipped away the glove. (Auditioning to be in my nightmares.)

  

Anyway, it turns out that denim makes it harder for rattlers to inject venom. About two-thirds harder. They still bit, but less venom got in. It sounds like their fangs got stuck. A lot of venom just came out on the denim. And the small snakes often didn't manage to inject venom at all. Perhaps there were “kinematic difficulties associated with venom delivery.”

 “Wearing long denim pants as an alternative to shorts may provide a simple, low-cost means of reducing the severity of snakebites,” say Herbert & Hayes.

Yay! (Although there are so many details missing in this paper. What kind of denim? Brand new? Stone washed? Acid washed? We're not talking jeggings, are we?)

 Herbert & Hayes speculate that the “protective effect might be even greater for the comparatively short-fanged elapid and venomous colubrid snakes, which warrants further study.” I am too busy to take up the torch and do that study, so let's just hope jeans thwart them too.

 Let no one tell you that jeans are not appropriate attire for every event. It is unlikely that you will encounter a bitter, frightened, or unhappy rattlesnake in most places, but it is still nice to know that you are prepared if you do.

 I intend to wear jeans in my dreams from now on.

 

Another can't-miss plan

Deer, bears, and chipmunks were excellent aspects of my summer camp experience. Then there was the frog relocation scheme. Sometimes – often – and I now realize that at these times we were probably supposed to be in the crafts A-frame or playing volleyball by the lake or rehearsing for the talent show – we would prowl the creek that flowed from Mosquito Lake, catching frogs. Catching frogs is hugely fun. Unless you are frogs.

We meant them no harm, and always released them. We just enjoyed the hunt, and pitting our amphibian-capture capabilities against their mammal-eluding capabilities. Sometimes amphibians won, sometimes mammals won.

 Frogs have a tactic in which they leap off a bank (often with a charming croak or yelp), dart to mud at the bottom of the creek, and freeze in place, holding their breath. This can work well to prevent detection, especially if there is enough mud to bury the frog. In Mosquito Creek, there was often insufficient mud, and we would crouch on the banks, only a few feet from the frog, staring at it as it hunkered in plain view on the creek bottom. The frog would regard us from lovely gold-laced eyes, perhaps thinking itself triumphantly hidden. 

 Slowly, slowly, the frog hunter would lower a hand into the water, slowly so as not to alarm the frog, not to trigger its motion-detecting neurons, though still visible to it, and slowly slowly maneuver to be close enough to snatch it. Ha!

 Then you have a frog, and after you have admired its beauty, what to do?

 A pool in a stream is made more beautiful by a frog on its banks. Some pools had two or three frogs, riches indeed. It seemed to us that if a pool with one frog was good, and a pool with two or three frogs was great, a pool with, say, twelve frogs would be completely fabulous.*

 We found the finest frog pool on the stream, and rearranged it to be even better, and then went up and down the stream capturing frogs and relocating them to the perfect pool. They would swim to the bottom and hide themselves and we would go off in search of more frogs.

 We'd return, expecting to find the pool thickly jeweled with frogs all around its gorgeous banks. But no. Maybe they were still hiding. We would release our latest prisoners and try again.

 But to our chagrin, all frogs immediately repatriated themselves, so we were never able to achieve our dream of a heavily befrogged pool. (I know. We were ten.)

 Fortunately frogs weren't involved when we invented a new game, Army Corps of Engineers.

 

(*Or, as we eloquently phrased it, really neat.)

   

 

 

 

 

Shared food, shared beds

Trying to get close to deer is one thing. There were some animals in that forest that it was wiser not to get close to, and others who thought it might be good to get close to us. Bears were in the first category – we were afraid of them – and luckily not in the second category.

 One camper went off by himself, and just about bumped into a bear. Terrified, he ran away. Terrified, the bear ran the other way. When the kid stopped running he was seriously lost. When the camp noticed he was gone, there was a huge search. There was even a helicopter. He was located and rescued the next day. (How this played out for the bear we never knew. But definitely no helicopter.)

 I didn't see bears there myself, but sometimes we saw bear signs. Once when we went on an overnight hike, a bear dropped by, removed a locked cabinet from a tree where it had been hung, tore it open, and ate our cornflakes. I was astonished, since I had a low opinion of cornflakes. Why bother?

Other animals were more willing to get close to campers. A certain chipmunk commandeered a camper's sleeping bag, probably because the camper was storing quasi-illicit candy and snacks in there. The stuffing also pulled out well and quickly made up into a splendid chipmunk bed.

 When the camper got in her bag and discovered the chipmunk, the chipmunk did not flee. It was willing to share. But when the camper attempted to evict the chipmunk, the chipmunk was annoyed, and bit, and we all found out about the whole sordid story, and rabies shots were insisted on. 

Have I mentioned what a great camp this was? There were wild animals, and there was drama.

 

Act casual, act vegetarian

I figured out how to get close to deer at summer camp. It was a great camp, where we slept outside and cooked our own meals. A wilderness camp, except not the kind where they force you to belay off things.

 The forest was full of black-tailed deer (Odocoileus columbianus), including does with fawns. I had never seen so many, never so close. In the fall, there was hunting in this forest. As we campers blundered along, deer would fling up their heads, stare, and take off running and bounding.

I ached to get closer. I tried freezing when a deer spotted me. I would freeze, they would freeze – and then they'd run. One day, instead of freezing, I looked away, leaned over and examined a manzanita bush, tugged at a leaf, pretended to eat it. I glanced around and the deer were still there. After a while they put their heads down and started eating again. They'd look around from time to time, but stayed calm.

This casual attitude turned out to be the way to allay their fears. Don't stare like a predator, don't go out of sight (like a lurking predator), just act like a fellow grazer. I may have hammed it up unnecessarily, assessing and rejecting leaves, snorting daintily, looking around wide-eyed for mountain lions, shaking off hypothetical flies, but if the deer thought I was emoting too much, they didn't say.

 Herbivores often hang out with other species of herbivores. There's safety in numbers. The deer didn't think I was a deer, but they did seem to think I was a creature behaving in a way they understood, a non-dangerous way.

 I tried moving closer, browsing as I went. That worked too. It was shocking how close they'd let me get. But then I'd get too close, and my un-deerlike nature would become too obtrusive, and they'd sail away.

(All I wanted to do was get close. But if I had gotten closer, I would have wanted to pet them and scratch them at the base of their ears. And if they had let me do that, I would probably have tried to pick ticks off them, and move their ears around like antennae picking up station KDOE, and the next thing they knew I would have been trying to get them to chase sticks. I do see that they had to draw the line somewhere.)

 People have been trying to get close to deer for predatory purposes for a long time. Before guns came to North America, getting within bowshot of deer was something people schemed to do far more often than they do today.

 Apparently just acting innocent wasn't enough, because Indians across the country had developed this to a high art. They had deer outfits. Made of deerskin.

 Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, (previously blogged about) described how the Choinumne who partly raised him did this. “[T]hey prepared the horns and hide of the deer and placed them over themselves. The head of the deer was hollowed out and was fitted over the head of the hunter. The skin covered the back of the hunter.”

 Then they went into their vegetarian act. “A short stick was carried in the right hand and was used to imitate the forelegs of a deer when the hunter bent forward. The bow and arrows were carried in the left hand. He would imitate a deer feeding and rubbing his horns on the brush, and many other actions of the deer, until he approached quite close to the game. Sometimes the hunter would work an hour to get just ten feet closer to the deer.”

 Here's an illustration of how the Timucua, of what's now Florida and Georgia, did this.

 In The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, a Pomo woman talking about the hunting exploits of her grandfather, says “My grandfather said he put the deer head on when he want to go out hunting. He used to go out among the deer.”

 Apparently the deer let him get close, but they couldn't quite figure him out. “The deer wanted to smell his behind.”

 Yes, yes, a hazard all spies and double agents face. What to do, Mr. Bond? “He always just turn around and sit down.”

 There are modern bowhunters who also wish to get close to deer. While I am only slightly informed on this subject, I gather they generally have high-tech bows. They dress in camouflage, not in deer suits. And like me, they don't get so close that they have to sit down.