Baboon

There are five different species of baboons. All of them live in Africa or Arabia. Baboons are some of the world's largest monkeys, and males of different species average from 33 to 82 pounds (15 to 37 kilograms). Baboon bodies are 20 to 40 inches (60 to 102 centimeters) long, not including substantial tails of varying lengths.

Baboons generally prefer savanna and other semi-arid habitats, though a few live in tropical forests.

Like other Old World monkeys, baboons do not have prehensile (gripping) tails. But they can and do climb trees to sleep, eat, or look out for trouble. They spend much of their time on the ground.

Baboons are opportunistic eaters and, fond of crops, become destructive pests to many African farmers. They eat fruits, grasses, seeds, bark, and roots, but also have a taste for meat. They eat birds, rodents, and even the young of larger mammals, such as antelopes and sheep.

Four baboon species (i.e., chacma, olive, yellow, and Guinea) are known as the savanna baboons. These animals form large troops, composed of dozens or even hundreds of baboons, governed by a complex hierarchy that fascinates scientists. Males use shows of physical power to dominate rivals, and troop members spend endless hours carefully grooming one another to remove insects and dead skin.

A fifth species, the hamadryas baboon, lives in the hills along the Red Sea coasts of Africa and Arabia. These cliff-dwelling baboons disperse to forage during the day and reconvene in much smaller groups at night.

Cactus Cat

Around 100 years ago, there were tall tales of mischievous felines known as cactus cats in the sprawling deserts of the southwestern US and northern Mexico. About the size and shape of house cats, these critters were covered in needles, and cactuslike growths protruded from their tails and ears.

The cactus cat fed off the juice of cacti but not in the way you might think. It would slash the bottom of a cactus and allow the juices to collect, but instead of drinking, it would move on to the next cactus and do the same thing. Over several days, it would make a circuit.

By the time it reached the first cactus, the juices had fermented into alcohol. After chugging the alcohol, the cat would saunter drunkenly into the night, yowling loudly, slashing at anything in his path, and leaving prickling welts cowboys after stumbling into their camps. Unfortunately, the cactus cats’ frequent inebriation made it easy for the cowboys to supposedly hunt them to extinction.

Time to protect the amazing octopus

Octopuses are extraordinary and fascinating animals and one of the most intelligent of all invertebrates. Scientists are increasingly producing evidence that they are sentient creatures. Yet they are given little or no legal protection from suffering. But, at last, that is starting to change.

Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish are a type of animal called cephalopods. A new law governing the use of animals in experiments in the EU will, for the first time, provide some protection for these animals in the same way as for vertebrate animals such as monkeys and mice. And about time too.

Fascinating creatures

So what do we know about these illusive animals of the sea? Well, a few interesting basic facts: there are over 300 known species of octopus, they have four pairs of arms and three hearts!

The challenging environment in which cephalopods live and their lifestyle means that they need to be capable of complex and flexible behaviours. For example, as they are active predators octopuses need to explore, remember their environment and understand the behaviour of other animals including their prey.

It is therefore not surprising that studies have shown that octopuses easily learn new things, simply by observing other octopuses. They can also solve problems they would not encounter in the wild such as unscrewing the lid of a container to get at prey inside.

Tool users

One of the most interesting recorded natural behaviours of octopuses is their use of tools. Researchers only recently observed veined octopuses in Australia using halved coconut shells as tools, by scooping them from the seabed, carrying with them and later using them as a shelter when needed. This is the first reported case of tool use by an invertebrate animal.

Thwarting predators

Common octopuses have a wide array of techniques they use to avoid or thwart potential predators. If there is a place to hide they can squeeze their soft bodies with no internal or external skeleton through impossibly small cracks and crevices where predators can’t follow. Or they can choose to jet off at speed by expelling water through their mantles. They can also improve their chances of escape by obscuring an attacker’s view and dulling its sense of smell by releasing a cloud of black ink.

If all else fails, they have beak-like jaws which can deliver a nasty bite, and venomous saliva which is mostly used for subduing prey. Even if a predator manages to bit off one of their eight arms they can re-grow it later with no permanent damage!

Parrots can reason

Parrots are known to be highly intelligent birds but until now it had not been proved that they can reason.

We know that humans and other great apes do it. Now a parrot has shown it can use logical reasoning to work out where food is hidden.

Sandra Mikolasch of the University of Vienna's Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Austria and her colleagues first checked that seven African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) had no preference for two types of food, seeds or walnuts.

Each parrot watched a researcher hide a walnut under one opaque cup and a seed under another. Then the researcher hid the cups behind a screen, removed one of the treats and showed the bird which one had been taken. Finally, the screen was removed to see if the parrot could work out which treat must remain, and under which cup it must be.

Only one of the parrots, a female called Awisa, was able to do this. She chose correctly in three-quarters of the tests – 23 out of 30.

As with similar studies using apes, not all parrots could solve the problem. The other parrots chose more randomly, suggesting they hadn't worked out what was going on. It seems that parrots, like apes show individual differences in their abilities to reason.

"So far, only great apes have been shown to master this task," says Mikolasch. "So we now know that a grey parrot is able to logically exclude one possibility in favour of another to get a reward, known as 'inference by exclusion'."

The confirmation that parrots can reason adds to our already considerable knowledge about their complex mental abilities. The term ‘bird brains’ couldn’t be further from the truth. The more we learn about these fascinating birds the more one must surely question how long it will be generally viewed as acceptable to keep them as pets, imprisoned in cages for our own reasons.

Tragic inevitability of latest zoo deaths

We may deplore the latest announcement that captive wild animals held in a European zoo have been killed – but we should not be surprised. Copenhagen Zoo, which caused a worldwide outcry last month by killing and publicly dissecting 18-month giraffe Marius, has now killed four lions to make way for a new male.

According to the zoo, it made “a change” in the lion pride because it had received a new male lion from Givskud Zoo, also in Denmark, as a means of preventing inbreeding at Copenhagen. The new dynamic of the pride would have put existing members, and potentially the newcomer, at risk of aggression. Which meant that four of the existing pride simply had to go.

As I said when interviewed for an excellent BBC Radio 4 documentary,The Report, broadcast in the wake of the Marius episode, at least Copenhagen Zoo was honest about its highly objective approach. Other Danish zoos are equally open about the “breed and cull” strategy promoted by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), although the same cannot be said of British zoos.

EAZA members subscribe to the organisation's breeding programmes, with a studbook for each species involved. An EAZA spokesman once told us at OneKind that:

“The unnecessary culling of animals is of course avoided wherever possible; however, sometimes the greater good of the population as a whole is better served by allowing the animals to breed rather than engaging in birth control. In a limited number of cases it is then necessary to cull the resulting offspring.”

That was in the context of the culling of red river hog piglets in Edinburgh Zoo in 2010 and 2011. This latest example shows that the strategy extends beyond the culling of surplus offspring (who are often given names and feted as adorable at the time of their birth). This is pragmatic, pre-emptive population management.

And it is not confined to Denmark. From conversations with European studbook keepers, researchers for the BBC programme reported on the deaths of healthy giraffes, hippos, zebras and Arabian Oryx in members of the European breeding programmes, including UK zoos.

According to The Report journalist Hannah Barnes, EAZA does not publish records of healthy animals that have been culled, but an estimate was given of somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 animals being "management-euthanised" in European zoos in any given year. Speaking on the programme, one zoo spokesman suggested that the numbers game was misleading because “you know, most of those animals were rats or mice or something like that.”

Rats or mice or something like that. For OneKind, every sentient individual has intrinsic moral value and we have asked zoos questions about management culling with far less success than the BBC. The response is invariably that population management and ensuring healthy genes are very complicated matters. We get that. But what still perplexes us is how the approach can be justified at all, given that even the healthiest zoo populations are still living in captivity. Successful reintroductions are rare and it must be asked whether creating an international “Ark” of wild animals who will never live in the wild is a valid purpose for breeding them at all.

Grouse shooting opens to industry spin

The press and media are full today of predictions of a bumper year for grouse shooting, as the season opens.  Plenty of healthy well-feathered birds are waiting in the heather to be startled into the sky by lines of beaters, and then shot as they fly, fast and low, over the waiting guns.

Hopefully, most will be cleanly killed. Those that are only wounded will be retrieved by pickers-up and despatched to end their suffering.

OneKind opposes sport shooting for a number of reasons. First, we just don’t get it - why is it fun to spend a day killing hundreds of living wild creatures? It’s a rhetorical question of course, and on one level we might feel we should just be tolerant and let others make their own ethical choices about how they spend their money and their free time.

But that’s before we consider the cost of grouse shooting. Not only the money that is expended, although that is considerable. Scottish Land and Estates put a “really good” day’s driven grouse shooting for eight or ten people, killing around 200 birds, at around £15,000, while a cheaper walked-up shoot without beaters, killing around 40 or 60 birds, would work out around £2,000 for the day.

Not only the environmental cost either, although many point to the unnatural effects on the environment when heather regularly burned so that the grouse can have a supply of young shoots to feed on – a practice said to threaten to release millions of tonnes of carbon locked into the peat bogs, not to mention the loss of wild animals trapped in the fires. Then there are the large quantities of lead shot discharged, the restrictions on public access to land (in England at least), and the scarring of landscape by roads built to allow shooters and keepers access to the moors.

No, the cost that concerns OneKind is the cost exacted of our native wildlife, sentient individuals every one of them. In addition to the thousands of birds directly shot, there is a huge toll of collateral harm to our wild creatures so that the grouse can thrive, fly up and be “harvested”. Our own field officer watched a gamekeeper beating trapped crows to death in a cage on a grouse estate, and I have literally lost count of the reports of rare, legally protected birds of prey such as buzzards and red kite being found in the vicinity of poisoned baits on grouse moors.

Iconic eagles are not safe either, with a ringed, named, satellite-tagged golden eagle poisoned in the Angus glens last November. Over the last six years, according to RSPB Scotland, another four eagles, a red kite and seven buzzards have been shot, poisoned or trapped on sporting estates in the Angus glens alone. In January 2013, the nest tree of a pair of white-tailed eagles was felled. In England, the hen harrier population is reduced to a fragile three breeding pairs, due to persecution.

The industry protests that these are the actions of a few rogue estates and individuals and that may be true, but the effects are still appalling. In numerical terms, raptor persecution pales into insignificance compared with the onslaught conducted against mammalian predators such as foxes, stoats and weasels and against hares that can pass ticks and disease to the grouse. Thousands of these animals, and plenty of non-target species such as badgers and otters, are caught in break-back traps or in the slow cruelty of snares.

A petition to the UK government calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting has already gathered 13,000 signatures. If that appears too drastic a step, there is undoubtedly a case for shoots to be licensed to provide sanctions for the most egregious wrongdoing, as the Scottish Raptor Study Groups and the RSPB have recommended. OneKind would support such a move, as soon as possible. And an alternative to banning shooting would be to educate our young people about the sentience of wild animals and to persuade landowners that, with nature tourism worth billions to the UK economy, alternative uses for our magnificent landscape are both feasible and desirable.

Yellow-Headed Blackbird

The Yellow-Headed Blackbird is an attractive resident of marshy areas throughout Western North America -- particularly the prairie regions.  Unfortunately their 'song' doesn't match their pretty feathers.  Rather than a lovely trill, the blackbird lets out a rather nasal squawking sound.  Ahh well, at least they look nice.

We were driving through Nanton, Alberta and saw a large number of the birds sitting on top of cat tails in a large marshy area (one of which is shown in the photo).  Oddly enough they were the only ones we spotted on our entire trip from Calgary to Cranbrook.  After a bit of research, we learned that they like large marshy areas -- the males are territorial, so the area must be large enough to host a few of them (at least if you want to spot them).  They tend to live in loose colonies so require enough territory for at least a few males.

We also noticed that the red winged blackbirds that usually dominate the ponds and fence posts near our home seemed to cower every time their slightly larger yellow-headed cousins let out a squawk.

While taking photographs, I was "swooped" by one of the males (apparently I ventured a bit to close to his territory so I quickly backed off).  Yellow-headed blackbird males are very territorial, though they usually only swoop at other birds that enter their area (not soccer moms with cameras).

Distribution/Location

General:  Yellow-headed blackbirds live in Western Canada and the United States in marshy areas.  They are particularly fond of cattail marshes.  In Canada and the Northern US, they migrate south during winter months (they're easy to find from April to September, but don't stick around for our harsh winters).

Description - male:  The yellow-headed blackbird is 8 to 12 inches long.

Bright yellow head and chest with the remainder black (thus the name "yellow-headed" blackbird).  Feet, legs, eyes and beak are black.  There is a streak of white on the wings, that is most noticeable while in flight.

Description - female:  The female is much different than the male.  The body is brown with a yellow chest.  There are hints of yellow on the face.  The beak and legs are dark grey to black.  The females are quite a bit smaller than the males and lack their white wingbars.

Description - young:  When immature, the birds are similar in coloring to the females.

Feeding:  Diet consists of insects and seeds.  Their marshy habitat has an abundance of insect life.

Habitat:  Cattail marshes, croplands and shoreland vegetation.

Nesting:  Yellow-headed Blackbirds breed in colonies.  Males typically have 2 to 3 mates, though particularly energetic males can have 5 or 6.  Needless to say, the females do most of the work raising the chicks.

The female builds the nest, which is a bulky, open cup made of leaves, stems, and grass, and lashed to cattails or other plants growing over the water.  The female uses wet vegetation to weave a nest which tightens and strengthens as it drys.  The female typically lays a clutch of 3 - 5 eggs each year which they incubate for 12 days.

The female provides most of the food for the young, but the male may help feed the young of one of his mates. The young leave the nest 9 to 12 days after hatching, but stay nearby, close to the water, until they can fly, about 9 to 12 days later.  The female feeds the young for a few days after they fledge.  Females typically raise one brood each season but may raise two.

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Enemies:  The main enemy of the Yellow-Headed Blackbird is the Marsh Wren (surprisingly, it's a much smaller bird).  The wren competes for nesting space and will attack the blackbird's eggs and young.

Crows and grackles also raid the nests to feed on the eggs and young.

Migration:  Migrate south to winter in the southern United States and Mexico.  Only found in Canada from April through September.  They migrate during the day in loose flocks.