Bear defeats engineers

The New York TImes has a very interesting article this morning on a shy middle-aged black bear (a female of course) that has consistently defeated a state-of-the-art bear proof canister.

Zoo bears couldn't crack it, but this one could.

Now other bears are catching on.

Read about it here.

Deportation of another little visitor

He was minding his own business and so was I.

He was a baby, barely 14 inches long, waiting for the lizards to become active.

I was searching for Fred's dog logs around the garden for proper disposal further away.

I saw him just as I stepped over him. Whoa!

I got my camera.

As I took these pictures, I remembered Professor Joe Hall's legendary bare-handed rattlesnake capture.

He was leading a group of undergraduates on a field trip to Marin County (or maybe it was Napa County), when the class stumbled on a very peaceful rattlesnake on the trail.

It was completely motionless and stretched out like a crooked stick, and its tongue wasn't to be seen.

It was sleeping

The professor studied it for a few moments, and then slowly reached down.

No one knew what he was doing until he pinned the snake by the neck.

He impressed the hell out of us.

This little guy also looked asleep, but his tongue was working. He was peaceful, but he wasn't asleep.

I got a gallon plastic bottle and prodded him into it with a stick.

Then I released him in the woods half a mile away.

I picked the place carefully because I like rattlesnakes.

Ken Stager, 1915-2009

Stager during WWII. 

Photo probably taken in Myitkyina District, Upper Burma.

Kenneth E. Stager died a few weeks ago at the age of 94.

I treasure the opportunity I had to meet him.

Tracking him down wasn't easy. In retirement he was too busy to answer letters. I can't blame him.

When I wrote to him in 1998, I was intensively researching biological exploration of pre-independence Burma.

Stager had been a soldier in the China-Burma-India theater during WWII. His job was to collect birds and mammals, screen them for trombiculid mites, and prepare them as voucher specimens for the United States Typhus Commission.

What does that have to do with war?

Well, there was a race going on to crack the epidemiology of tsutsugamushi (Japanese: dangerous bug) disease, or scrub typhus.

The disease took more lives than combat, and sore-covered typhus survivors were in for a long recovery.

Solving the epidemiological riddle would give a leg up to either the Japanese or the allies.

 

Japanese regimental picture from Upper Burma, WWII. 

Photo probably taken after the British and Indian evacuation of Burma.

(Author's collection)

I knew little about the Typhus Commission back in '98, but Stager's specimens in the Smithsonian's National Museum stirred my imagination.

Each was a piece of history and part of a story that I wanted to know.

I found that Stager was living in retirement in Los Angeles, but my telephone messages were never answered.

So I wrote him a letter.

Months passed, and I had pretty much given up hope when a young colleague at the National Zoo told me Ken Stager had called about my letter.

Talk about a small world. My colleague Jesus Maldonado knew Stager very well.

The old curator apologized for failing to respond, and promised to tell me about his Burma days.

A few months later I had business in San Diego, and made an appointment to spend a day with him at the Los Angeles County Museum.

It was 1999. Stager was 83 years old and Emeritus Curator of Ornithology and Mammalogy.

Kachin regimental manao (festival) in 1950. 

Photographer unknown. (Author's collection)

We spent a great day together, and I tape recorded an oral history of his days as a soldier-mammalogist.

He had an amazing memory and clarity of diction, and listening to him was like reading a great book.

So how did his orders change from foot soldier to mammal skinner?

Here's his story.

There was a company of Kachin levies attached to the battalion in Myitkyina (pronounced Micheena) District, under the command of an Anglo-Burman named Jack Girsham.

Girsham had been raised in the jungle and grew up hunting. Before the war he had worked for the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation as a shooter of tigers and rogue elephants.

Jack Girsham, Stager's friend from Typhus Commission days. 

(Photographer unknown)

The Kachins didn’t care for k-rations, so they supplemented their table with jungle fowl and pheasants snared in the surrounding hills.

One morning Stager found them returning to camp with "a beautiful adult male silver pheasant".

He saw only one thing -- a precious zoological specimen about to be plucked.

The Kachins saw breakfast.

As any zoologist can understand, unceremoniously plucking that specimen was a disturbing thought.

Stager requested Girsham, who spoke Kachin, to negotiate a deal. The result was that Stager could skin the bird if the Kachins got the carcass.

When the Japanese started shelling he jumped into a trench with the half-skinned bird.

And when the skirmish ended he requested cotton from the medical sergeant.

"Why?" asked the sergeant.

Stager convinced him that skinning birds was a legitimate war-related cause.

Not long afterward, Colonel Thomas Mackey, head of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in N.C. arrived from the States to establish the US Typhus Commission, recently decreed by Executive Order.

Mackey summoned Stager, the word of whose strange habits had spread through the battalion.

He explained to the young soldier that he had brought a whole staff of specialists from the States, but had failed to get the mammalogist or ornithologist needed to survey bird and mammals for vectors of scrub typhus.

"I'm going to have you transferred."

Stager soon received his new orders, and made a case for having Girsham transferred too.

He and Girsham spent the rest of the war collecting mammals and birds for typhus research with a shot gun appropriated from the Chinese army. And they potted birds for mess whenever time permitted.

They made extensive collections of the fauna in the mountain rain forests north of Myitkyina using outboard motor boat and jeep transport. The unit moved to Yunnan for two months during a typhus outbreak in Kunming.

Typhus work ended several months after the Japanese surrender, and the Commission's results were published in various journals.

Most of the specimens went to the United States National Museum in Washington D.C., but some reside in the Los Angeles County Museum.

I asked Stager what became of the silver pheasant, and he said it was there in the museum.

That's when I took this picture.

Stager at the LA County Museum in 1998 holding the silver pheasant he finished skinning despite Japanese shelling.

(Photo by Chris Wemmer)

As I said, I treasure the opportunity I had to meet him.

There's a lot to learn from old guys who work in museums.

References

Audy, J.R. 1968. Red mites and typhus. University of London, The Athlone Press.
[a scholarly review of research on typhus and the accelerated investigations during WWII]

Girsham, J. with Lowell Thomas. 1971. Burma Jack. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York

[a good read, with a chapter devoted to Girsham's role in Merrill's Marauders.]

Mackie, T.T. et alia. 1946. Observations on Tsutsugamushi diesease (scrub typhus) in Assam and Burma. American Journal of Hygiene 43(3):195-218

Philip, C.B. 1948. Tsutsugamushi disease (scrub typhus) in World War II. Journal of Parasitology, 34(3):169-191.

Another telling tail

Only 23% of the 77 pictures at this night set had animal images. The rest were blanks.

That's a rather crappy success rate.

Something was triggering the cam.

Was Bigfoot toying with me again? I think not.

More likely small cryptic critters were triggering the sensor and vanishing like Tinkerbell.

They can be hard to see. You have to click back and forth between images on a computer screen.

Then your eyes can see changes in the scene. Often the change is in vegetation caused by a gentle breeze, but sometimes you can see a disturbed path in fallen leaves, the footfalls of a phantom passerby.

I zoomed in on the edge of this picture and there was a long rodent's tail.

There's only one rodent in the upper Yuba River area with a long tail like this, the Western jumping mouse (Zapus princeps). All the other species have tails shorter than the head and body length.

Plus, the coloration seems right -- "pelage on sides usually washed with lemon yellow" (Verts and Carraway, Land Mammals of Oregon).

I can't really prove it to the satisfaction of all, so you call me a bluffer, BS artist, or worse.

(Thanks to Don E. Wilson (aka Batfinger) for confirming my hunch.)

A fleeting glimpse of tail

A fleeting glimpse of tail is sometimes enough to identify a faceless subject.

In this case it was Herman the Ermine, also known as the short-tailed weasel (Mustela erminea).

It's a new species for my camera trapping life-list.

The location was the bank of a steep falling creek that feeds the Yuba River's north branch.

Weasels work creek bottoms on their foraging rounds, but I attribute this picture to serendipity.

Here's a full-frame camera trap view of the site on June 21 when I set the camera.



And here's what it looked like 24 days later.



Yes, growing vegetation can be a problem when you leave your cameras out for even three weeks.

It took me an hour and a half to find one of my other 5 cameras in the area.

My GPS told me I was on top of it, but it wasn't there until I pushed through a patch of Delphinium that had grown up around it.

The other cameras operated for a total of 96 camera trap days.

I got lots of pictures of deer mice and chipmunks, but no mountain beavers climbed the alders to reach the apple and birch scent lures I had painstakingly attached.

Herman the ermine was the only picture that stirred me, but only a little.

I'm too old to attempt a back-flip for a fleeting glimpse of weasel tail.

A beaver dam bipass

The Sierra Nevada beavers are now using PVC. It's a labor-saving innovation.

Okay, I'm pulling your leg.

I took this photo yesterday in Plumas County, where a homesteading beaver tempted fate by damming the creek next to the local landowner's house.

The "environmental logger" who lives across the road learned of his neighbor's resentment, and advised him to use PVC to trick the beaver.

The PVC device is a called the Clemson beaver pond leveler, but its really just a bipass of sorts.

According to the beaver specialists, "Beavers repair dams in response to the sight, sound, and feel of running water. The Clemson leveler transports water through a dam in such a way that beavers cannot sense it and as a result, beavers don't attempt to plug the leveler."

It doesn't work all the time, but so far it has given this beaver a stay of execution.

Skinny cat nails plump bunny

The young bobcat caught the brush rabbit on the evening of June 11.

I couldn't see the rabbit when I scoped the pictures on the camera's LCD the other day, but there was no mistaking it as a rare event when I saw it on the computer screen this evening.

I think the dead rabbit is the same one the cameras photographed between May 31 and the morning of June 9. (I have three cameras on this trail.)

No bunny however was photographed after June 11 and until I checked the cameras on June 30.

The rabbit had the habit of loafing on the trail. I got multiple images of it.



This trail seems to be on the cat's regular beat.



Between June 10 and June 23 the cameras photographed the same cat on 5 occasions.

Look at the it's right foreleg and you will recognize a distinctive broken band of dark fur.



It's the same in all photos, except the one with the dangling rabbit.



My guess is that the hunter is the same skinny bobcat seen in the other pictures -- a young adult probably from last year's litter.