A bear with no name.
Alberta Fish and Wildlife found the baby American black bear on Halloween night, wandering the streets outside of Westlock. He was hoping for treats and too miserable and malnourished to get up to any tricks.
Science
‘Nice and wild’: Bears to beavers, wildlife rehab centre in central Alberta takes them in
“We do have concerns about habituation — we don’t want them to become too friendly with caretakers.”
He’d obviously been without his mother since he was far too young.
“He was definitely hurting for food for quite some time,” said Miranda Collins, rehabilitation manager of animal care for the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation (AIWC) in the hamlet of Madden.
He weighed a skeletal 13 kilograms but, fortunately for him, emaciation was his only serious condition — aside from a few scrapes on his paws and a laceration on his nose.
An animal in poor condition is also likely to be covered with ectoparasites, or ticks. The cub was struggling with the little suckers. Now he’s on a re-feeding protocol, pest free, and packing on the pounds.
“He’s been doing really well in care,” Collins said.
He didn’t have enough fat to hibernate through the winter on his own, but his medical team’s hoping for full recovery and release next summer, when he can forage for himself and get on with a bear’s life.
And since a friendly bear is a dead bear, everything about this adolescent’s care has been done to keep him unaware that he’s in care. His caregivers aren’t mean — just invisible and anonymous as they can be.
He’s plain old 1624.
The only time 1624 has had human hands on him was for his full exam on intake. He will again at release. Both times call for full sedation, a carefully medicated deep sleep for x-rays and treatment, with his ears filled with gauze to avoid sounds, and his eyes covered with a blindfold.
A tall wooden fence keeps 1624 from seeing his anonymous caregivers.
For regular feeding and maintenance, they attract him to one side of the enclosure, then go in to the other side when required. His caregivers wear coveralls and a mask. Just in case.
“We do have concerns about habituation — we don’t want them to become too friendly with caretakers. We do what we can to avoid any sort of comfortability between us and the bear. We do everything we can to minimize contact, in the hopes of keeping him nice and wild,” Collins said.
“He’s very fearful in care, we’re really happy to see.”
Now a rich black and getting glossier all the time, the cub plays king of the hill at the top of a pile of boughs. He’s learning to scale a pole.
Keeping it wild
If the various and even odd outlying buildings at AIWC were for humans, they’d be considered ramshackle. But for animal denizens, they’re what the veterinarian ordered. New and bigger enclosures are springing up, purpose-built, supported by donors.
Faded live edge wood slices on some walls might remind a hawk of a stump on its native prairie.
On the wall, a code of ethics for wildlife rescue reminds tender-hearted caregivers that patients who can’t be healthily, successfully returned to their wild home deserve to be euthanized rather than left in pain.
“Unfortunately, we do see creatures come through here that don’t make it. We do believe in humane euthanasia,” Collins said.
Staff at the AIWC take it one animal at a time.
Groceries and medicine are a big expense, even if it’s just mice to lay in a neat line on a log. A charitable organization, the AIWC relies on grants and donations, big and small, to operate. People can adopt animals “symbolically.”
But there are no TV appearances, no putting a squirrel on the talk show host’s head. No snuggling a marmot and baby-talk gibberish. No promotional tours — just gawking at the creatures can exhaust them.
“Unfortunately, that’s not appropriate for wildlife,” Collins said.
Appropriate is a relative word.
Oddly — or perhaps not surprisingly — a bright orange fox stuffie actually was a snuggly comfort to a young fox in need of rehabilitation.
The centre also has a rehabilitated juvenile moose, which can be dicey patients with their reactive temperaments.
Gray guardian, the kestrel
Grey and solemn, the wounded kestrel sits on a branch. He’s excited. And stressed. A side eye on the door.
Does this mean mice?
Humans fleeing wildfires in B.C.’s Shuswap found the raptor on a farm, singed, a number of feathers stripped to the quill. Unable to fly or flee. Facing certain death.
But his luck changed, said Collins.
“He was lucky to be found where he was, and we’re very lucky to be able to care for him,” she said.
The kestrel meant paperwork. They had to apply for a special permit.
“We do have provincial borders we have to respect — it’s not something we’d intake or encourage,” Collins said.
Unbeknownst to him, the kestrel will have to wait out the hoped-for moult of new feathers. He does seem to be biding his time.
For the sensitive raptor, waiting instead of winging it is stressful. Highly strung, they don’t always thrive in what feels like captivity to them.
“We do everything we can to minimize stress,” Collins said.
By early January, the would-be snowbird should be winging his way around palm trees in Mexico. Instead, while healing, he takes a trip without leaving the Alberta foothills. There’s a heat lamp to mimic changing latitudes, a humidifier for that cozy Texas feeling, and UV light to extend his “days,” Central American style.
He thinks mice are nice, but he’s not fussy about service. To minimize stressful interaction, he is fed once a day. That he often chows down right away is a very good sign — many are too stressed to do so in care.
In his free time — and it’s pretty much all free time — the kestrel enjoys taking the occasional whack at wood disks suspended on a string, or empty toilet paper rolls. Just to change it up a bit.
“We try to make things exciting for him,” Collins said.
But no unicorns
Some of the patients have injuries that appear minor to the human eye, but which would doom them in the wild.
Two Great Horned owls scowl first at each other, then at intruders to their personal practice runway.
Get a bit closer and the aggressive one will do a wafting fly-by, Top Gun style, skimming within arms reach, then flapping up to the perch at the other end.
On the way, he’ll pass the hors d’oeuvres — a log with mice neatly laid out, distinctly dead.
He’s saving those for later.
On a tree limb in a songbird room, to a natural soundtrack complete with trickling water, a waxwing is a patient patient, waiting for broken bones around its neck and shoulders to heal. Full patient history is lacking — and he’s not talking.
A bat room is pretty much just good for bats — dim environment, natural perches for the big brown bats and little brown bats — for whom upside down is right side up when it comes to catnapping.
A dozen washtubs await next spring’s bevy of orphaned ducklings. That’s where they will learn to paddle happily, 10 ducklings per tub under heat lamps until they’re ready to quack away on their own.
“This is a busy room in the summer,” Collins said.
Volunteers are warned the ducklings are prone to imprint and habituate on their caregivers. Cute as a duckling is as it waddles after a person, imprinting on a human is not going to help them make it on their own.
“We have to be careful. It’s an adorable room. We wear masks, so we’re not very recognizable,” she said.
No discrimination by odour
A delicate dance of baby skunks, luxuriant tails raised, was found wandering alone, looking for food in broad and reckless daylight after their mother died.
Skunks are cared for by the ounce. When they weigh enough to make it on their own, they’re released.
“They’re great patients, we enjoy having them,” Collins said.
A regular supply of boughs will keep those orange teeth filed until it can get back to its real-life construction job.
One recent young beaver patient stayed two years, replicating the relatively lengthy time she would have spent with her mother and siblings.
She was gifted a teddy bear — and she quite doted on it, Collins said.
“If we have any lone individual that would like some company, we will give them a stuffie,” she said.
And while the very young rescued beaver kits do require bottle feeding — and they do bond with their caregivers — they seem to reach a certain snarly teenage point where they “wild up” and go do their own dam thing.
“I’ve never met a friendly adult beaver,” Collins said.
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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
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