Arthur Rothstein; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs DivisionA car chased by a so-called “black blizzard” in the Texas Panhandle in March 1936.
“The Dust Bowl,” a new documentary from Ken Burns, revisits the “great plow-up” for wheat crops and the crippling drought that followed in the Thirties. [PBS]
A helicopter begins dropping poison bait in the Galápagos Islands as part of a broad effort to exterminate 180 million nonnative rats that are threatening unique bird and reptile species there. [Associated Press]
A week before negotiators gather for a climate change conference in Qatar, a World Bank report outlines the devastating projected impacts of a seven-degree rise in temperature, particularly for poorer nations. Meanwhile, researchers advance the argument that the current United Nations structure for negotiations obstructs progress. [Reuters, Nature Climate Change]
A coyote hunting contest in New Mexico that infuriated animal rights advocates ends without major disturbances. The owner of a gun shop south of Albuquerque had offered a shotgun or automatic rifle to the hunter who killed the most animals. [KOB.com]
Kevin Moloney for The New York TimesJay Stewart, an independent nuisance wildlife trapper, in 2009 with one of the small-caliber rifles he uses to selectively shoot coyotes in the affluent Denver suburb of Greenwood Village. He was hired by the city to trap or shoot coyotes that do not seem afraid of humans.
Only a few decades ago, Wile E. Coyote in hapless pursuit of Road Runner may have been the most readily conjured image of Canis latrans, the coyote, for most city dwellers. But increasingly, residents of urban and suburban areas are having firsthand experience with coyotes in their own yards, parks and neighborhoods.
Coyotes now inhabit every state in the country except Hawaii, eating mostly rodents, rabbits, and fruit while making their homes between apartment buildings and in industrial parks and popular recreation areas in metropolitan areas from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco. Recent research suggests that coyotes could prove to be just the first of a wave of larger carnivores — bears, cougars, and wolves — moving into residential areas.
Washington Department of Fish
“There’s a number of things that coyotes really find to their liking in suburban communities, more than adjacent wild areas,” said Robert Timm, a wildlife specialist and the director of the University of California’s Hopland Research and Extension Center. Food set out continually for a pet or stray cat, fallen fruit left in the yard, a small dog running off-leash or a cat allowed to wander the neighborhood, a bird feeder stocked year-round — all of these things can attract coyotes. Read more…
Taal Levi; Yiwei WangResearchers say that when plenty of red foxes are around to eat mice, the incidence of Lyme disease seems to be lower. But when coyotes drive out foxes, the incidence of the disease is higher, they say; coyotes eat mice but tend to spread out.
Deer ticks are aptly named, in a sense; a Northeastern deer can carry over 1,000 of these ticks on its body. But as far as humans are concerned, the ticks might be more relevantly called mouse ticks. That’s because white-footed mice and other small mammals, not deer, are now known by scientists to be major carriers of Lyme disease.
Bruce Museum CollectionThe white-footed mouse.
Lyme disease is spreading in the Northeast and the Midwest, and according to the national Centers for Disease Control, the number of annual cases over the past decade has been increasing. However, no one is quite sure why. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tried to figure out what is driving the proliferation of Lyme disease in human populations by studying populations patterns in animals that interact with ticks. Their study suggests that large predators like coyotes and foxes that aren’t typically associated with Lyme disease transmission may have a big impact on the spread of the disease.
The life cycle of deer ticks depends on interactions in the entire ecosystem in which the ticks dwell, said Taal Levi, the study’s lead author, who did the research while a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Cruz and is now an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York.
Ticks rely on “bloodmeals” from other animals to move through their three life stages: larva, nymph, and adult, Dr. Levi said. When the ticks hatch into larvae, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, is not present. Read more…
Mark WeckelCoyotes in a New York City park. Researchers declined to disclose the location but said they had cameras in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
In March 2010, a wild coyote led the police on a chase through Lower Manhattan. The vagabond was ultimately caught in a parking lot in TriBeCa.
It was just one of many coyotes that have wandered into the city over the years. At least four others were sighted the same year, in Harlem, near Columbia University and in Central Park. They’ve also been seen in Los Angeles, Chicago and in the Boston area.
The growing presence of these top predators in New York City has piqued the interest of researchers, who say that coyotes in human territory might not be such a bad thing.
“What happens is that when there’s a top predator, it will help control other levels of the food chain,” said Mark Weckel, an ecologist and doctoral student at the City University of New York. Read more…
In Monday’s paper I write about the psychological factors that play into attitudes toward wildlife conservation. I point out that large cat species in general are far less hated then predator canid species — for example, wolves, coyotes, and wild African dogs.
My article, pegged to a conference on saving the tiger that opened on Sunday in St. Petersburg, Russia. focused on both larger endangered cats and larger endangered canids, mostly the wolf. These are all species whose populations have been decimated over the last century, largely by man. First humans erode their habitat through farming and ranching, and then they shoot and trap the animals to prevent them from killing livestock. Tigers are also poached for their parts, which are thought to have medicinal and sexual healing powers in Asian cultures.
But as several readers wrote in to point out, human development has not touched all carnivores equally. Slightly smaller carnivores like the leopard and the coyote may have even benefited from having some of their larger competition wiped out. Read more…