Category: mammals

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

One generous contributor has come forward with some wildlife photos: mathematician Abby Thompson from UC Davis. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

This is a grab-bag of photos from Northern California from the summer (with one exception).

Cervus canadensis nannodes. A particularly contented Tule elk from the Point Reyes preserve:

Cornu aspersum (garden snail)- As a gardener I abhor them but looked at closely they are beautiful. They were introduced to California in the 1850s to be made into escargot, and now plague gardeners up and down the state:

Brodiaea terrestris from Point Reyes:

Once the extreme tides of the summer pass and there are no “good” low tides, I start looking through a microscope at bits of riffraff collected from the beach. It’s astonishing how many different creatures can live in a cubic inch of washed-up kelp holdfast.

Thetis vagina (twin-sailed salp). One of the seemingly endless types of blobby transparent things drifting around the ocean. Lying on the sand it looks like a scrap of Saran Wrap. Once revived in some sea water and under magnification the ghostly internal structure appears.    From google AI:  “Despite their jelly-like look, salps belong to the subphylum Tunicata (sea squirts), making them chordates that are evolutionarily more closely related to humans and vertebrates than to actual jellyfish.”  Cousins!

Phragmatopoma californica (California sandcastle worm). The worm is the curly orange thing on the left, which connects to the pink tentacles on the right underneath the structure with purple flecks, which is all that’s left of the tube the worm calls home (it’s ok, they can rebuild):

Close up showing the worm’s operculum – the “lid” of the tube, which the worm pulls down to close off the top of the tube when it retreats inside. I’ve posted a picture of this species before; my excuse is that this one’s tube, usually just made of sand,  has an interesting feature:

A close-up of the tube remnants, showing some Foraminifera, amazing 1-celled organisms.   The white ones in the center that look kind-of like a snail shell are Haynesina depressula (thanks inaturalist expert!) and there are several other types in there, harder to pick out.    I think the purple bits are pieces of sea urchin spines.     An artistic sandcastle worm!:

Genus Elphidium– another foram. This one was tangled in a shred of bryozoan.  It’s hard for me to believe this is a single cell, but I guess life is complicated:

Class Ostracoda – the things with little white dots. These are tiny crustaceans, mere specks.  There’s a foram in this photo, too:

Another ostracod- from 2025, not a great photo, included because it’s the first ostracod I ever saw. At first I thought I was looking at an infant mussel.    Then it sprouted legs and started running around like a crazy cartoon mussel. Quite a shock:

Genus Corambe (nudibranch, a baby), surrounded by its bryozoan prey. I think this ID is correct- its coloration is not typical of the genus. The nudibranch is so small that it looks slightly like it’s going to be attacked by the bryozoa, rather than vice-versa:

Sunset over the water:

Most photos taken with an iPhone precariously clamped to the eyepiece of an antique microscope.

Colossal Biosciences continues to tout its faux “dire wolves”

October 5, 2026 • 9:45 am

Remember the “Dire Wolves” that Colossal Biosciences pretended to have brought back from extinction? (See all my posts on this ruse here.) Although Colossal said it had “de-extincted” the dire wolf, which vanished about 10,000 years ago, what they really did was put 20 edited bits of DNA into 14 gene regions of a gray wolf genome, and then put the edited wolf nucleus into a dog egg. A surrogate dog then produced three puppies deemed “dire wolves.”

Since gray wolves and dire wolves differ by 12 million DNA bases, the edits comprise only 0.0002% of the dire wolf genome. In other words, what Colossal produced, as anyone with neurons knows, is a grey wolf with a few morphological changes. (One of these is white color, which comes from loss-of-function mutations occurring in either domestic dogs or wolves.) This is by no means a dire wolf, or anything close to it. But Colossal needs to convince its investors that it’s on the road to de-extincting many things, including the dodo and the woolly mammoth, with the latter originally scheduled to appear in 2028.  (The firm has since pushed back the mammoth date to 2030 or so, but I wouldn’t put money on that, either.)

What angers me about this stuff is the pretense of Colossal’s saying they had brought back an extinct species.  At first they admitted that they hadn’t in this New Scientist article (click to read).


Then, realizing that this looked bad for the public and investors, Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal, did a 180°, saying that they had brought back an extinct species, because they redefined “species”. Anything that looked like a dire wolf, she asserted, really was a dire wolf, no matter how superficial the resemblance.

No biologist with brains would agree with that, because you could produce such a “dire wolf” simply by artificially selecting a dog to be big and white.  This duplicitous redefinition of species will, I suspect, be used in all their “deextincted” species, including the “woolly mammoth” which isn’t much more than an Asian elephant in a fur coat. (See my op-ed in the Boston Globe about this colossal bait-and-switch.)

I haven’t heard much about the three dire wolves lately, but Colossal just sent out a video to keep the excitement going. Here’s their announcement (note the “with it” jargon of bringing the wolves back from extinction “for a minute”):

The dire wolves have been back from extinction for a minute. We thought it was high time to rank the highlights.
​
Welcome to the Colossal Top 10. For our first-ever countdown, we’re ranking the 10 greatest moments from Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, the world’s only three de-extinct dire wolves.
The “greatest moments” are lame, and Colossal continues to pretend that the dire-wolf is “de-extincted”, building on the dire wolves shown in Game of Thrones.  Note that it’s called a “prehistoric hypercarnivore” and a “predator from the Pleistocene.” Normal dog and wolf activities are fobbed off as activities of extinct dire wolves, and the whole thing is childish and embarrassing—especially when you realize what they’re trying to sell.  There’s nothing here that a gray wolf wouldn’t do.

The video says, “It’s hard to put into words what it feels like to watch an extinct species return after thoursands of years. .  .”  I’d be embarrassed to work for a company that distorts the truth so strongly, but of course there is mucho dinero involved.

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 29, 2026 • 8:15 am

Hallelujah, we have a contributor!  (Please send in your wildlife photos if you want this feature to continue.) The contributor is Jan Malik, who has birds and mammals from Poland. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In this batch, I have included pictures of birds and mammals from the Tatra Mountains that I had a chance to photograph during my hikes over the last couple of years. They consist of both lowland generalists that have penetrated into the boreal forest zone and alpine specialists.

The Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) is the only representative of the wren family in Europe. It was given the name “Troglodytes” (“cave-dwelling”) because it often searches for arthropods in rocky nooks and crannies; this behavior allows it to feed even in snowy conditions. Like the American marsh wren, males construct several nests, possibly both as a display of fitness for the female and as a decoy against predation:

The White wagtail (Motacilla alba) avoids dense forests but can penetrate from the lowlands into mountain valleys with meadows left from the earlier pastoral economy of the region or near ski slopes. This bird (just like the wren above, females and males are identical) was well aware of my presence and refrained from rushing to its nest so as not to betray its location:

Possibly a Water pipit (Anthus spinoletta), which is an altitudinal migrant—in summer it nests in the alpine zone, but in winter it relocates to wetlands or riverbanks. Its nest is well hidden in a rock crevice or in a tussock of grass:

The Alpine accentor (Prunella collaris) is a mountain specialist, staying in the alpine zone all year round except during very bad weather, when it can descend into lower valleys. A thick layer of down protects it against the cold.

It easily becomes habituated to people and is often seen on the highest summits, where it fearlessly scavenges for scraps of food among hikers:

This is a European robin (Erithacus rubecula), which, like the other birds mentioned above, is a species where females and males look alike. It is a generalist with a range that just penetrates the boreal montane forest. I saw them follow cattle or humans to catch insects fleeing from the disturbed ground. They look cute but are extremely territorial, and fights between two competitors can be deadly:

Not too many pixels on this Dunnock (Prunella modularis), which, unlike its cousin the Alpine accentor, is not limited to the mountains and does not go above the krummholz zone. It has a complex mating system consisting of a mix of polyandry and a “mating cooperative,” where a couple of males maintain a territory containing a couple of females:

The European goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis). I found this male (with a slightly larger red mask than the otherwise similar female) by first noticing a stream of thistle seeds drifting in the wind. This species stays in warmer lowlands with an abundant presence of thistles, which are used for both food and nesting material. In a fashion similar to the famous Galapagos finches, this species evolved a high-precision bill to extract nutritious seeds defended by thorns:

This Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) is an edge-habitat dweller, hiding and nesting in lowland forests and entering only the lower boreal forest in the mountains. As a corvid, it is quite smart for a bird; however, with the many acorn and beech nut caches it makes for the winter, it always forgets a portion of them and thus contributes to forest growth. This one was patrolling a popular trail, looking for crumbs:

For the next two four-legged species, this is what their habitat looks like—an alpine tundra just below the barren high alpine zone:

Passing through it, finding a herd of Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica) is quite likely. The shaggy appearance of this individual is due to post-winter molting. Despite being commonly seen in the Tatras, it is an endangered subspecies; their numbers plummeted at the turn of the millennium to fewer than 200 individuals and have since increased to over 1,000 thanks to strict limits on tourist traffic in sensitive areas:

This mountain goat-antelope has close cousins in the Alps and parts of the Carpathian Mountains, but the Tatra population is completely cut off from them, since they are obligate mountain dwellers and do not tolerate dense forests or plains. The Tatra population has been isolated since the end of the Pleistocene, for at least 15,000 years. Over that period, the Tatra chamois evolved a special trait: unlike the Alpine chamois, it stays above the forest zone throughout the year. In the Ice Age, they populated the vast, ice-free montane tundra in that part of Europe (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Maps-showing-the-geographic-distribution-of-the-extant-subspecies-of-the-genus-Rupicapra_fig1_336957033):

The Tatra marmot (Marmota marmota latirostris) is another Ice Age holdover that became marooned on a high-altitude “island” as the climate warmed after the Pleistocene. It has had no contact with other groups of alpine marmots for at least 10,000 years. This site (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/46082-Marmota-marmota#map-tab) shows how fragmented the marmot habitat is:

The marmot also stays above the forest zone all year round. Since summers in the Tatras last only about 5 months, all of the marmot’s active life must occur within that short period. In the winter, it hibernates in a deep burrow and emerges emaciated in the spring, when it must nearly double its body weight to prepare for the next winter and breeding season:

And as a reminder of how crowded the Tatras can get, here is a Red deer hind (Cervus elaphus) that was trotting along a trail and forced me to step aside to let her pass. As in many other national parks, animals in the Tatra Mountains become habituated to people. Red deer are vertical migrants—feeding on montane meadows and in boreal forests in the summer, but retreating to lowland pastures and forest edges in the winter:

Fat Bear Week is here! First vote is today.

September 22, 2026 • 8:15 am

Yes, it’s Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park in Alaska. you can read all about it, see the bears and matchups, and vote for the winner by clicking on the site below:

About the contest, with the links. Note that you can vote TODAY between noon and 9 p.m. Eastern time (11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Chicago time).

Vote for the fattest bear of the year! Some of the largest brown bears on Earth make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Brown bears get fat to survive. Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament celebrating their success in preparation for winter hibernation. Matchups are open for voting September 22 – 29 between 12 – 9  p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Pacific / 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Alaska.

This is a single elimination tournament. For each match-up, vote for the bear you believe best exemplifies fatness and success in brown bears. The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. Only one will be crowned Fat Bear Week champion.

Meet the bears, download and fill out your bracket, predict your fat bear winner, and campaign for your candidate.

You can vote in four contests today; click HERE to cast your vote. Two of the contests involve bear families, the other two individual bears. Remember, you’re voting for the bear with the most avoirdupois.  Today’s pairups:

The details:

How to Participate:
Vote by clicking or tapping on the photos of the bear. The bear you do not vote for will turn gray. Then enter your email where prompted. You have successfully voted when you see the total votes for each bear.

Voting Widget:
The poll registers one vote per email. To view updated results, please refresh the webpage. If the results do not display, then reenter your email and hit submit. The poll will not register it as a second vote. If the polls do not load, please refresh, and check that you do not have any ad-blockers or pop-up blockers enabled.

As you see from the bracket link above, the next vote is tomorrow.

For example, in poll 4 you will be voting for one of these:

You can read about Marshmallow, an 8-year-old female, by clicking on the link below. Look how fat she got from scarfing salmon!

And her competitor, Bear 910, a ten-year-0ld female. Remember, though it’s fun to do this, the bears are in a life-and-death struggle to lay on the pounds before they go into winter hibernation. If they don’t have sufficient resources to make it through hibernation, they may die. The problem is compounded for female bears, who give birth in midwinter and must also suckle their cubs until Spring.

The Champion Bear of 2025 was Chunk, and he won despite overcoming a broken jaw. Tomorrow Chunk will be running against Bucky.

Here’s a short video of the Champ:

Below is the live BearCam at Brooks Falls, the famous small waterfall where bears foregather to catch the salmon migrating upstream. When it’s dark, they show highlights.

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 11, 2026 • 8:15 am

Ephraim Heller sent us a passel of lovely brown bear photos (and, oddly, one of an elephant), all  save the pachyderm taken in Alaska. (They are of course also known as “grizzly bears”.)  Ephraim’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I traveled to Lake Clark National Park in Alaska to photograph its famous coastal brown bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) as they clammed and fished along the coast of Cook Inlet. I stayed at a remote lodge on the coast. It was a mixed experience. During the week I was there I saw only a few individual sows and cubs, far fewer than expected (the boars tend to stay inland at this time of year). However, the sows loitered in the area, so there was plenty of time with them. When it was just the bears, the guide, and a few other guests, the photography was spectacular. Unfortunately, that was seldom the case. The few bears were more often mobbed by folks on bear-watching tours arriving from other lodges, small planes, and boats. At times, I counted up to 35 people watching a single bear. In crowds that large, you put your camera down and just enjoy watching the animal.

Now that I’m done with the kvetching, let’s get to the photos. For those who care about such things, all the photos were taken with a Nikon Z8 or Z9 camera and either a Nikon Z 70-200 lens + 1.4X teleconverter or a Nikon Z 24-120 lens.

When there were no crowds and I saw a bear approaching from afar, I made my first attempts at using a remote trigger. This involved: putting my camera and wide-angle lens on a low tripod at a location where I thought the bear was likely to pass; stepping away to a distance of about 30 feet; and triggering the camera with a remote shutter release. Most of these attempts ended in failure, as the bruin chose a different path. But occasionally, it worked:

Brown Bear at Lake Clark:

At other times, I just lay down in the mud and hoped that an approaching bear would walk nearby. It was quite safe, as there are so many clams and salmon to eat that they aren’t interested in eating me. I would certainly not do so with bears from the interior, who are typically hungrier and more aggressive:

A sow out for a stroll on the beach:

Ninety percent of the shoreline is made up of salt marsh, sand, and mud. Multiple rivers flow into Cook Inlet, creating a habitat containing three distinct food sources: protein-rich salt-marsh sedges, intertidal clams, and late-summer salmon. Park biologists have counted as many as 219 brown bears in a 54-square-mile coastal block. Those densities are possible because the food is concentrated and the bears have learned to tolerate one another.

Here’s a sow patrolling along a salmon stream. These two shots were taken with a remote trigger:

Taking a load off her feet:

Coastal and inland bears in the park are the same subspecies, but they live different lives. Inland animals travel farther for scarcer resources and remain more solitary. Coastal bears grow larger because marine-derived protein is available for months.

Another shot taken with a remote trigger:

This bear is looking for salmon at a river mouth at low tide. The following photos were taken as I in the mud flats. My waders kept me mostly dry, albeit mud-covered:

After den emergence in April–May, lean bears head first to salt marshes. These wetlands occupy less than 1 percent of the park yet supply Ramensk’s sedge (Carex ramenskii), an early-season protein source. Bears graze for hours like cattle.

When the sow spots a fish at the river mouth, she rushes over to seize her prey:

A few yards seaward, the intertidal flats hold clams, particularly Pacific razor clams (Siliqua patula). These are a year-round protein source that bridges the gap between spring vegetation and summer salmon. The tides were over 20 feet when I visited, and at low tide the exposed mud flat stretched out for hundreds of yards:

Clamming is a learned skill. Cubs watch their mothers. Novices dig randomly, excavating large, unproductive craters and then crunching whole shells. Experienced bears read siphon holes and slight depressions, work specific slope and sand textures at the lowest tides, and extract dozens of clams in a single low-tide window. The most efficient animals pry shells open with claws rather than crushing them and slurp the meat. Different individuals invent slightly different techniques.

Here’s a sow digging for clams in the mud flats. I don’t include many photos of bears clamming because photos of bears with their noses stuck in the mud just aren’t that interesting or pretty:

The Jesus bear subspecies walks on water. Or, perhaps, the mud flats extend for hundreds of yards at low tide:

By July and August the rivers fill with sockeye and other salmon. Park-wide sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) runs have ranged from 150,000 to more than 3 million fish. Bears shift from meadows and flats to stream mouths and shallow riffles. Techniques range from patient standing to explosive pounces. Experienced animals may catch dozens of fish a day and often eat only the most energy-dense parts (brain, roe, skin) before discarding the rest. This sow has caught silver or coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch):

I’ve written Ephraim for a replacement photo, but in the meantime enjoy this elephant picture:

If you visit, remember to carry bear spray. Bears like the pepper flavor:

Note: That was not my bear spray!

I kissed a squirrel and I liked it

September 5, 2026 • 8:15 am

Yesterday, after second lunch for the ducks, I was chatting with a grad student in medical research when I was—as I often am—besieged by squirrels begging for nuts.  After several months of getting them habituated to me and to the way I look and smell, I have made them fairly friendly (I want to avoid bites at all cost!)

At this point several of them will climb up my leg and onto my shoulder for a nut.  When they do that, only a quick turn of the head is necessary to allow me to kiss them on their furry flanks.

See below for the short video showing this. The smack of the kiss is audible.

I can now credibly claim that I am the only person at the University of.Chicago who has kissed a squirrel. I may be the only person in the history of the University of Chicago who’s done this.

If any readers have osculated a squirrel, let me know below.  (h/t to the woman who took the video).

And here’s another squirrel begging for a nut, unaware that his face is decorated with a leaf. With his eyes on the sides, perhaps he can’t see it.

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 4, 2026 • 8:30 am

Very few people are sending in wildlife photos, so if you have some good ones, shoot them my way, please.  Fortunately, ecologist Susan Harrison has come through with another batch from Oregon. Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Mt. McLoughlin, Oregon  

In southern Oregon at the tail end of summer, climbing a volcano to look for Gray-crowned Rosy-finches (Leucosticte tephrocotis) seemed like a fun thing to do.

Gray-crowned Rosy-finch (photo from AllAboutBirds):

Per AllAboutBirds, “This delicate pink-and-brown songbird is among the hardiest of all birds. Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches nest in the highest parts of the highest mountains in North America… they forage, seemingly at complete ease, on snowfields, forbidding talus slopes, and in high winds or snowstorms… (It) probably holds the record for highest-altitude breeding bird in North America.”

Who could resist looking for such superlative birds??  It required only a day hike to a 9,500-foot peak not far from my home base in Ashland, Oregon. The peak, Mt. McLoughlin, is just north of Mt. Shasta in the Cascade volcanic chain. The trail goes up its east (= right, in the photo below) side.

Mt. McLoughlin from the south:

Hikers often get lost as they descend the peak.  Near the summit there is no clear trail in the loose ash and talus, and if you start a few degrees off-course you’ll end up far from your destination.  Accordingly, there are many warning signs and route markers.

Trail warning sign:

The last half-mile to the summit is steep and slow going.  This is the likeliest place to see Rosy-finches – which, alas, I did not see.

Approach to the summit, with trail on the left:

However, I did make it to the summit and back safely!

Summit:

The main birds I saw at the top were several Rock Wrens (Salpinctes obsoletus) and a pair of Sharp-shinned Hawks (Accipiter striatus) chasing around a Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius).

Rock Wren:

Hawk chasing Harrier:

On the descent it became easier to pay attention to other small wildlife.

Scruffy juvenile Canada Jay (Perisoreus canadensis);  or is it an “American Jay” now??:

Townsend’s Solitaire (Myadestes townsendi):

Yellow-pine Chipmunk (Neotamias amoenus):

Rounding out this photo set, a few other recent scenes from the southern Oregon Cascades…

Upper Rogue River just below Crater Lake, where it flows through the collapsed lava tubes of ancient Mount Mazama:

Lower Rogue River at Blossom Bar rapid, where it flows through a scary and occasionally lethal (to rafters and kayakers) feature called the Picket Fence: