It’s another snowy owl year. The last time a snowy owl influx made news was the winter of 2011/2012. Not so long ago.
Read this blog post from the Vermont Center for Ecological Studies,
this blog post from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, featuring eBird data,
or this press release from the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
Photo: Great snowy owl at Port Mahon – November 29, 2013. Photo: Chris Bennett/DNREC
Nashville Public Radio reports that two timber rattlesnakes with heads deformed from a fungus have been found in Tennessee. It’s unclear who the wildlife biologists who are reporting the fungus are (state? university?), but the story quotes Ed Carter, head of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and TWRA biologist Brian Flock.
Read the Nashville Public Radio story here.
A condensed version of the story was distributed by the Associated Press. Read it on the WBIR website, here.
The rattlesnake fungus has devastated the rattlesnake population in neighboring New Hampshire, so the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife isn’t waiting around to find out what’s going on with its own rattlesnakes, which are only found in one area in the western part of the state.
Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department rattlesnake project leader Doug Blodgett says in a department press release that lesions have been found in rattlesnakes last year and in several other species of snakes in the state.
Read the Vermont Fish and Wildlife press release here.
Photo: Vermont Fish & Wildlife biologist Doug Blodgett carefully examines a timber rattlesnake icheck it for signs of snake fungal disease. Photo by Tom Rogers, Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department.
Thirty bats from New York and Vermont, some of which were visibly infected with white nose syndrome (WNS), were moved to a specially-prepared military bunker in Maine to spend the winter. Nine bats survived, a higher percentage than would have been expected if they had been left in the wild. Those bats were returned to the locations where they were found.
“We learned a lot from this experiment,” said Vermont Fish & Wildlife bat project leader Scott Darling in a department press release. “These bats were visibly infected before being placed in the bunker, so we wouldn’t have expected many of them to survive in their natural cave environment.”
Read the Vermont Fish and Wildlife press release here.
Read the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Northeast’s blog here — with many wonderful photos. (Scroll down a bit to get to the main story about the bunker and WNS.)
Read a guest post on the USFWS white nose syndrome blog from the assistant manager at the National Wildlife Refuge where the bats wintered here. (With the same photos, and a link to a Flicker page.)Read an article from the Rutland (Vermont) Herald here. (But be warned that its articles go behind a paywall in a week, sometimes sooner.)
And in related news, here’s a report from the Barre/Montpelier Times-Argus and Rutland Herald, about further WNS research in Vermont this winter. (It may also disappear behind a paywall.)
Photo: The bunker door at the Aroostok National Wildlife Refuge in late March. by Steve Agius, courtesy USFWS
Read the Vermont Fish and Wildlife press release here.
See the story of Fox/ABC news here.There was lot of other coverage locally, but no additional information.
Video monitoring by refuge staff at the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge captured footage of a Canada lynx on March 1 at the Nulhegan Basin Division in Brunswick, Vt. The camera was set up by refuge intern Andrew Butler as part of an ongoing monitoring effort, and has detected lynx on three separate occasions.
This indicates that lynx – a federally threatened species – are breeding in northern Vermont!Learn more.
Monitoring began in the winter of 2012 when Vermont Fish and Wildlife and refuge staff conducted winter track surveys, documenting a family group (adult and kittens). This past winter, wildlife biologist Rachel Cliche and Andrew continued conducting winter track surveys and documented another family group.
The Nulhegan Basin Division contains large tracts of spruce fir forest that supports snowshoe hare, the lynx’s main prey, and thus, provides the best lynx habitat in Vermont. However, predictions of…
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There are lynx sightings in Vermont and a new bobcat management plan in New York.
In New York, the bobcat management plan offers a road map for managing the species over the next five years. Bobcat numbers in the state are up, the report says:
All indications, including harvest trends, suggest that bobcats have increased in abundance here and in surrounding states, and observations have become more common in recent years. Based on analysis of harvest data, we estimate New York’s bobcat population to be approximately 5,000 animals in areas where regulated hunting and trapping seasons have been in place since the 1970s. Estimates are not available for populations expanding into western and central New York.
Because of this, the plan includes opening some new areas of the state to bobcat hunting and changing the bobcat hunting season in other areas for the sake of consistency. The report also mentions investigating the possibility of reestablishing bobcats on Long Island, in the urban southeast corner of the state.
In Vermont, it’s the rural northwest corner of the state that is seeing an increase of lynx sightings, according to the blog of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northeast Ecological Services.
A total of eight lynx track intercepts were recorded during two survey efforts in February and March. The track patterns and genetic analysis indicated three to five distinct individuals, some of which were traveling together.
The animals traveling together were likely a mother and her young, the blog says, which suggests a breeding population in the area.
Read the entire blog post, here.
Photo: Lynx track, courtesy Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department
Vermont has long lagged behind the other New England states in bald eagle populations. Even when bald eagle populations in neighboring states recovered to the point where they had dozens of nesting pairs, Vermont was still not home to eagles that were successfully raising young.
That changed in 2008, when a single pair fledged a single chick. In 2009, the state did its best to help a second breeding eagle pair that lost their nest when the tree it was in fell down. Now, just four years after that first eagle fledged, 23 eagles were fledged in 15 Vermont nests this year, reports the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Read the Vermont Fish and Wildlife press release, here.
Read Vermont’s bald eagle recovery plan, here.
On an August day 17 years ago, eight Minnesota junior high school students on a field trip caught 22 frogs in a farm pond. At least half of the frogs had some abnormality, mostly in their hind legs. The conscientious teacher reported the group’s finding to the state. Dutiful state scientists surveyed wetlands across Minnesota and found at least one hotspot of frog abnormality in every county in the state.
What have we learned about frog abnormalities in the last 17 years? Quite a bit, actually. There appear to be several causes, and sometimes the causes pile up to create a high rate of abnormalities. The causes also seem to vary by region.
Here’s a comprehensive overview of the situation in Minnesota from Minnesota Public Radio. You can read or listen, here.
Vermont also experienced a high rate of frog abnormalities back in 1995, but the interpretation there is a bit different than it is in Minnesota.
Read this article from The Outside Story, a syndicated nature column, about frog abnormalities in Vermont, which includes a nod to the lack of abnormalities in New Hampshire. Read it here.
Are you finding abnormal frogs? A fantastic resource for state biologists evaluating frog abnormalities is the Field Guide to Malformations of Frogs and Toads (with Radiographic Interpretations) by Carol Meteyer of the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center.
Find the 20-page PDF here, including lots of photos and x-rays (aka radiographs).
Photo: Frog with abnormality, by David Hoppe, courtesy of US Geological Survey
Bats in Vermont are not wearing haute couture gowns, and they are not perusing fine art in Philly, but they are still benefiting from a fashion show and an art show in those locations.
In Vermont, the state Fish and Wildlife Department is the beneficiary of a bat-themed fashion show featuring six local designers. Scott Darling, Vermont’s bat biologist, will be on hand to explain the impact of white nose syndrome on the state’s bats.
Read this Associated Press article in the Bennington Banner. You have to scroll to the bottom of a bunch of jumbled-together stories.
In Philadelphia, a show of bat-themed art is benefiting Bat Conservation International. The show, called “Empty Night Skies,” has already raised thousands of dollars for the organization, according to Philadelphia Weekly, and runs through June 13.
Read the article in Philadelphia Weekly for the details, but be prepared to hold your nose through the first few paragraphs. (Does this guy even know any kids? Today’s generation was brought up with Stellaluna, and in general, thinks bats are cool even — or especially — if they think bats are creepy.)
Photo: Our own bat art, made from a photo of a gray bat from the US Fish and Wildlife Service
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In Vermont, residents have reported seeing colonies of little brown bats. Over the last five years most of the state’s little brown bats had been wiped out by white nose syndrome (WNS). In Pennsylvania, an abandoned mine appears to have 2,000 healthy bats.
Read the Associated Press article here. (It’s the better story.)
Read the Washington Post article here.
More good news: The Center for Biodiversity reports that Congress has directed that $4 million from the endangered species recovery fund go towards white nose syndrome research. But Congress has allocated for WNS before, and then reneged. It will be truly good news when research actually gets funded.
The Center for Biodiversity press release.
Photo: Scott Darling, Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, in the early days of the WNS crisis. Photo property of State Wildlife Research News. (Permission required for reuse.)
There is fire in the West, while flooding continues everywhere else.
Two of Arizona’s four packs of endangered Mexican wolves are in the immediate area of the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona. An interagency team is monitoring the effects of the fire on the endangered wolves.
Read more in this press release from the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Or this very brief article from KPHO.
When flooding first struck the Mississippi River, there was also flooding in South Dakota and Vermont. The flooding continues there as well, prompting these two stories about flooding and wildlife.
The first, from the Greenfield (S.D.) Daily Reporter says that wildlife officials are asking the public not to rescue wildlife displaced by the flooding. They particularly ask people to leave fawns alone, since does can leave fawns for what seems to humans like a long time. Not sure how that relates to the floods. Wildlife officials all over the country are asking the public to do the same thing. Read more.
In Vermont, high water on Lake Champlain means that black terns — a state-threatened bird — probably won’t raise broods in the state this year. It is expected to be a rough nesting year for aquatic birds, and even ground-nesting birds may be effected by the flooding that hit the state last week. Beavers and muskrats are also dealing with the high water, and are seeking high ground, which is forcing them on to roadways more than usual.
The article ran in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre Montpelier Times-Argus, but is behind a paywall.
Update: Arizona Game and Fish has a Web page with information about the state’s fires and wildlife, including its impact on hunting and fishing in the area. It plans to update the site as needed:
http://www.azgfd.gov/w_c/fire_impacts_on_wildlife.shtml
Photo: a Mexican wolf in Arizona on a much cooler day. Photo courtesy of the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
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