The intoxicated world of the spotted flycatcher

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Spotted flycatchers have commandeered the fence this year. Darting from shadows behind the hedge; landing on a post or wire; pausing to watch for a target; looping out into the field to land back on a further post; launching to snatch an insect on the wing with a blur and then back into the shadows. The spotted flycatchers have learned they have a speed and agility beyond the comprehension of walkers along the fence. They have the confidence now to hunt even while people and dogs are about. Sheep in the field bring more flies and the jackdaws are too slow and otherwise engaged to bother.

The flycatcher sprites appear flitting from post to post along the field's length as you walk beside the fence. They stay a couple of posts ahead, luring you closer and closer, until they flick to the next post or wire. When you get to the kissing gate at the end of the field they vanish. But if you look the way you've come, you'll see them on fence posts behind you going back to the far end. It's a game. However, with a 70% drop in population since the 1960s, climate change, farming changes, a lack of insects and problems crossing the drought-ridden Sahel on migration, the flycatchers' game is deadly serious.

With their grey-browns and faint dotted lines, they are often described as dull-looking birds, as if that makes them less interesting. But like many of the insects they catch and the landscape they inhabit, subtlety has a greater beauty and their aerial hunting dance is astonishing to watch. We, the lumbering pedestrians along the fence path, are enchanted and find ourselves drawn into it. Spotted flycatcher world is intoxicated by the scent of honeysuckle and the flush of dog roses. We hope the insects they snip from the air with those pencil-sharp beaks are feeding a brood that will also return to the fence.

Mr. Badger Should Be Worried: Britain Ponders a Cull

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Britain's Parliament held a four-hour debate in the House of Commons this past Wednesday, and it wasn't about public spending cuts, the war in Afghanistan, or abortion rights.

It was about badgers.
A badger, for those not acquainted with the species, is a mammal about three feet long with gray fur, a mouthful of sharp teeth, and a black-and-white face striped like a zebra crossing. Meles meles, the European badger, is indigenous to the United Kingdom, lives in an underground labyrinth of tunnels called a sett, and feeds on worms and grubs. There are about 300,000 badgers in England.


The badger has been around long enough to have survived two Ice Ages, but if the Conservative-dominated coalition government executes its plan, some 5,000 will not survive two government-led trials that are the prelude to a culling policy that aims to reduce the spread of tuberculosis (known to be carried by badgers) in cattle.


In 1971, a dead badger was found in a barn in Gloucester, autopsied, and found to be infected with TB. The concern—that badgers transmit the bacterium to cows, thereby putting a farm at risk of being shut down until the infection has cleared—has enmeshed scientists, politicians, government bureaucrats, and farmers ever since.


Opposition Gathers Steam

Last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced its intention to test the "safety, humaneness, and efficacy" of culling by targeting 5,000 badgers in Gloucestershire and Somerset—two infection hotspots.


As the proposed cull drew closer, the controversy widened to include celebrities like Queen guitarist Brian May, who led a protest march in London last Saturday and recorded a song called "Badger Swagger"; the rock star Meatloaf; and actress Dame Judi Dench, who posted a video on YouTube calling for a stop to culling.


An anti-culling petition has 235,000 signers, and there's an online threat of a voodoo curse on Environmental Secretary Owen Patterson, a hard-line advocate of the cull. Others have weighed in with tweets, blogs, and letters to the editors of British newspapers. "Cull the politicians instead," one reader wrote the Daily Mail. On the other side, a farmer's wife pointed out that "we wouldn't be having any of this nonsense if this was about culling rats."

200-Year-Old Fish Caught Off Alaska

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In 1813, President James Madison occupied the White House, Americans occupied Fort George in Canada (a result of the War of 1812) and a rockfish was born somewhere in the North Pacific.

3 Crazy Animal Anomalies
Sometimes nature produces some crazy anomalies: animals with two heads, one eye, or extra legs!
DCI
Two hundred years later, that same rockfish was caught off the coast of Alaska by Seattle resident Henry Liebman — possibly setting a record for the oldest rockfish ever landed.

Troy Tydingco of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told the Daily Sitka Sentinel that the longevity record for the shortraker rockfish (Sebastes borealis) is 175 years, but that fish "was quite a bit smaller than the one Henry caught."

"That fish was 32-and-a-half inches [83 centimeters] long, where Henry's was almost 41 inches [104 cm] — so his could be substantially older," Tydingco said.

PHOTOS: World's Oldest Known Bird
Samples of the rockfish have been sent to a lab in Juneau, where the actual age of Liebman's fish will be determined, according to the Sentinel.

Scientists can estimate the age of a fish by examining an ear bone known as the otolith, which contains growth rings similar to the annual age rings found in a tree trunk.

Animal longevity remains a puzzle to biologists. Some researchers have found that smaller individuals within a species tend to live longer than their bigger brethren. This may be due to the abnormal cell growth that accompanies both larger body size and the risk of cancer.

The longest-lived animal ever found was a quahog clam scooped from the waters off Iceland. The tiny mollusk was estimated to be 400 years old.

At 39.08 pounds (17.73 kilograms), Liebman's fish may also set a record for the largest rockfish ever caught.

"I knew it was abnormally big, [but I] didn't know it was a record until on the way back — we looked in the Alaska guidebook that was on the boat," Liebman told the Sentinel.

He plans to have the fish mounted, so he can continue to tell the fish story that he's already been "getting a lot of mileage" out of, according to the Sentinel.

Dog Disease Infecting Tigers, Making Them Fearless

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Cats and dogs don't usually mix. But a domestic dog virus is posing a new threat to endangered tigers in the wild, experts say—partly by making them less fearful of people. (See tiger pictures.)

Forced into increasingly smaller habitats, tigers are sharing more space with villagers and their dogs, many of which carry canine distemper virus (CDV), an aggressive, sometimes fatal disease that is usually found in dogs but is also carried by other small mammals.

The virus has infected 15 percent of the 400-some Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East, and has killed at least three, according to Wildlife Vets International (WVI), a U.K.-based conservation organization. (Related blog: "Protecting Russia's Last Siberian Tigers.")


Based on odd tiger behavior on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, scientists suspect the virus is a problem there and in other countries. Many of these potentially CDV-infected tigers seem to be unfazed by people, wandering onto roads and into villages.


John Goodrich, now senior tiger program director of the conservation group Panthera, found the first known tiger with distemper in 2003 in Pokrovka, Russia: "This tiger just walked into a town and sat down. She was absolutely beautiful—a healthy-looking young tigress."


Even so, she had a fixed stare and did not respond to stimuli. "The lights were on, but no one was home," said Goodrich, who was then with the Wildlife Conservation Society.


Goodrich and colleagues anesthetized the tigress and found her positive for distemper. They cared for her in captivity for six weeks before she died.


Such fearless behavior is likely a symptom of brain damage caused by distemper, which also causes respiratory disease, diarrhea, seizures, loss of motor control, and sometimes death.


Veterinarians still don't know much about tiger distemper. It seems that the tigers "can get a mild infection that doesn't cause any problem—conversely it can be more serious than it is in the natural host," said Andrew Greenwood, a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at WVI.


Concerned by the development, WVI plans to work with the Indonesian government and veterinarians to launch the world's first tiger-disease surveillance program, which aims to find out how tigers catch distemper, identify the likely source of the virus, and determine how to best tackle it.

"If we get it right, it could help us forestall a major problem, which is the last thing tigers need in their precarious state," WVI director John Lewis said in a statement.

Conservationists estimate that only 3,200 tigers exist in the wild in 13 Asian countries—a 93 percent reduction of their historic range. (See a National Geographic magazine interactive of big cats in danger.)