The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

The Not Precisely Lone Prairie

While visiting Santa Fe recently, I read an interesting story in The New Mexican, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi. Some visiting Tibetan monks had been asked to bless the prairie dogs in Frenchy's Field, a large city park.

A colony of 50—100 prairie dogs lives in Frenchy's Field. An organization called People for Native Ecosystems looks out for their welfare, opposing negligent trenching activity at the park, and stopping incautious grading at a film shoot site.

(The film is Beer for My Horses, starring Willie Nelson, Toby Keith, and Ted Nugent. This spring, when told there were prairie dogs hibernating at the grading site, the film crew stopped grading and moved the equipment, expressing the hope that the “poor little fellows” would be okay. I feel sure Willie Nelson wouldn't knowingly hurt a prairie dog. And if Ted Nugent were to go after prairie dogs, his hostility would probably take a form more personal than reckless grading.)

Melinda Ewell of People for Native Ecosystems issued a press release saying that when the monks blessed them two years earlier, the prairie dogs reacted by “coming to the surface, moving closer to the monks and adding their voices to the chanting and prayers.”

Ah yes. Adding their voices.  

It happens that prairie dogs have a variety of specific calls that some people call language. They have distinct calls, or “words,” for “coyote,” “deer,” “red-tailed hawk,” “tall human in yellow shirt,” “short human in green shirt,” and, I suspect, “it's the biologist from Northern Arizona University again.” So I imagine that during the blessing two years ago the prairie dogs may have had quite specific things to add in their adorable little voices. Such as: “OMG! What is that noise? Who are those guys? What's going on? Look out! Monks! Monks to the north! Monks to the south! Monks peering down the burrow! Monks everywhere! Hide the kids!”

Two days later the paper covered the more recent blessing, running a photo of monks in snazzy golden yellow robes treading among golden yellow flowers. (The story had to compete with one about a plea for manure donations, but that had no photo.) Reporter Sarah Welliver did not question Ewell's description of the prairie dogs participating in the chanting, but observed, “This year, they were quiet during the ceremony.”

Yes, I think they stayed deep underground, so their subterranean chirping was inaudible.

“It's those Jehovah's Witnesses again – pretend we're not home.”

“I think they know we're here. And I don't think Jehovah's Witnesses wear orange.”

“Whatever. If I have to hear that verse about the little conies in the rocks again, I'll bite somebody. And then they'll say we're rabid.”

“That's from the Bible; that's Christians. I think these guys are Buddhists.”

“What, foot-washers?”

“No, no, no. Buddhists. Mom, you should listen to these guys. They're vegetarians like us. They might have a message of peace for all beings.”

“Like for owls and coyotes? I don't think so. You're not putting your nose above ground until they are gone. And I don't want to see you reading their literature, either.”

However, if this dialog took place, it was unreported, and the ceremony took place without disturbance.

 

On the way out of town I saw a prairie dog standing near the side of Highway 25, looking toward the passing traffic. Probably thinking about hitching a ride out of town, seeking freedom from religious persecution.

[photograph by Chin tin tin, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

A Bird for Each Shoulder

Sometimes people get sentimental about the nobility of animals. But it depends on the animal. Perhaps you saw the story of Yosuke, a pet African Grey parrot in Japan. One day he got out. As parrots do, he flew around for a few days and a few miles before landing and seeking human help. (“Free! I'm free! I can go anywhere I want! I fly, I soar! -- Hey, where am I? Where is everybody? Where's lunch? Oh no! Lost! I'm lost!)

The police picked up the bird, and an officer tried to chat, but the parrot wouldn't speak. He was deposited at a vet clinic, and after a while he opened up. “I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” he confided. He gave his address. The vet told the police, who found that yes, there was a Nakamura family at that address who had lost their bird. They said they'd been drilling Yosuke for two years on how to ID himself. (Smart. I never even thought of teaching my cockatiel, “I'm Ms. Beak-of-Steel McCarthy.”)

Mr. Nakamura contrasts with the last talking bird I read about in the news, a blue-and-gold macaw at a wildlife sanctuary in Warwickshire. Barney, formerly a lorry-driver's pet, is a classically foul-mouthed parrot who is no longer allowed to meet the public after telling “the local mayoress to f*** off.” He cursed some children. He cursed the vicar. Like Yosuke, he doesn't trust law enforcement, and told two police officers, “You can f*** off too, w******!”

Those asterisks were in the original. I am a simple natural history buff and can only guess what they stand for.

Two African Greys at the sanctuary have picked up these effective phrases from Barney. The Daily Mail reported that sanctuary owner Geoff Grewcock says the three birds sit around swearing. “It sounds like a builder's yard, with all the abuse flying about.” A fourth bird, Sunny, shrieks “Shut up!” when the cursing starts, but they ignore him.

According to the Sun, Grewcock hopes to clean up Barney's conversation by making him listen to documentaries and “posh Radio 4.” As a simple American, I can't even guess what that means Barney will be saying next.

The contrast between nasty rowdy Barney and articulate well-informed Mr. Yosuke Nakamura reminds me of a dog encounter I witnessed. On Market Street in San Francisco, a woman with a white cane was led along the sidewalk by a guide dog, a golden lab. They were near the curb when a pickup truck pulled up at a red light. Two dogs in the back of the truck glanced down, saw a dog below, and instantly began barking loudly. (“Hey! A******! Get away from our truck! Back off, flea-bus!”)

The startled guide dog, suddenly assaulted by hostile sound from above, shrank in terror. The woman with the cane knelt and put her arms around him as the dogs in the truck kept yelling. The driver of the truck looked back, saw what her dogs were doing, and started frantically banging on the back window, yelling at them to stop. Her dogs, encouraged that she was joining the ruckus, barked even harder. (They could have used a bird like Barney to ride shotgun.) Finally the light changed and the truck drove away.

The hard-working guide dog, who had devoted his life to service, stood on the sidewalk trembling. The idlers in the truck, loudmouth jerks who threatened others for the fun of it, zoomed off into the West, probably congratulating each other on effective pack-work and flinging beer bottles into the gutters.

It was a moral scene suitable for a Hogarth engraving. (Okay, I know, like I spend so much time looking at engravings. It would be perfect for Goofus and Gallant.)

The Dangerous Lives of Treeshrews

I was reading Tupai: A Field Study of Bornean Treeshrews by Louise H. Emmons because that is the kind of thing I like, and learned about the absentee maternal system found in some treeshrew species.

First I should say that treeshrews are the same as tree shrews, and the closing up of the word is probably meant to indicate that they don't really live in trees and they're not really shrews. This is a case of TC, Taxonomic Correctness, like the argument that you should call a starfish a sea star because it's not really a fish. Oh please. But a big issue about treeshrews is whether they're descended from very primitive primates and so are our distant cousins, or whether the connection goes further back so that the primates and the treeshrews are both descended from the clade Euarchonta, making them even more distant cousins. I have no opinion on this.

In the absentee maternal system the mother treeshrew builds two nests (yeah, in trees). They are far apart. She puts her babies in one and she sleeps in the other one when she's not racing around snuffling through the leaf litter and catching bugs. Every other day she secretly visits the babies, taking a different route each time, and nurses them. When she's not there the babies lie still and don't make a sound. If an intrepid wildlife biologist like Louise H. Emmons takes a baby out of the nest, it lies silently in her hand with its eyes closed.

One day when they are old enough the mother treeshrew drops by as usual, but instead of just nursing them she takes them out and shows them Borneo. Here's a bug, here's a little trail, here's what you do when you hear a scary noise -- there's another bug! Let me see you grab it! She brings them with her on her rounds and protects them while they learn the business of treeshrewing.

According to a report from the wild, the babies were "shaky" the first time they came out of the nest hole.

The reason treeshrews do this has to be that it makes it much less likely that predators will find the nest and eat the babies by observing the mother. (That's the sort of creepy trick that jays and crows do, for example.) And obviously it's very convenient for the mother treeshrew. Which makes me lean toward the idea that treeshrews aren't primates – what baby primate holds that still for that long?

Like other wildlife biologists who write books for general audiences, Louise H. Emmons tries to find a balance between the stuff working scientists mostly do, and the stuff that people are actually interested in hearing about. Most of the work of wildlife biology doesn't involve playing peekaboo with baby gorillas, swimming with whale sharks, or filming hippo hijinks. It involves data sets. Perhaps Emmons leans too far in the direction of hard science, because her best story was walled up alive in an appendix. (I read appendices so you don't have to. Or at least I skim them.)

In Appendix 1, Emmons explains why a trapping data set is incomplete.

In the January trapping period, a group of elephants went through the study area, systematically destroying man-made objects (rain gauges, signs, trail markers, etc.). They stomped on seven baited traps but interestingly did not step on one that contained a treeshrew, while flattening the two on each side (trapping in January was curtailed, and this month is excluded from most data).

The elephants spared the tiny prisoner! Of course I think they did it because they felt compassion for the treeshrew, but I realize that there is also a compelling quality to  the explanation that they did it because they didn't want to get their feet sticky.