Nature's Call

New "Whatzit" posted

Have a look at the new "Wednesday Whatzit" that, admittedly, I posted this morning rather than Wednesday.
Hey, we do the best we can.
Check back later today for more from America's heartland as we explore what is left of the nation's tallgrass prairie.

That's no antelope

Quick! Name the animal in the photo at left.

"Antelope" is incorrect. The animal in the photo is a pronghorn. I snapped the picture as we drove across Wyoming this past week, on our way back from an environmental educator's conference in Kansas (home of some of the nation's last remaining tall-grass prairies, which is fodder for a future post).

The pronghorn is a familiar sight as one drives across the vast high sagebrush deserts of Wyoming and Montana and the Great Plains of Colorado and parts of Kansas. Its numbers are so great that it, along with the American bison, have long been symbols of the wild open West. And like the bison, the pronghorn has been the object of erroneous identification by the human masses.

A bison is not a buffalo, and the pronghorn is not an antelope. Both species are native only to the North American plains, and neither has a living ancestor. The modern American bison is a leftover from the last Ice age (also fodder for a future post).

The pronghorn, antilocapra americana, is the last surviving species of the family Antilocapridae. Normally, we don't delve into the scientific nomenclature here. But we must in order to understand how very special these sleek ungulates are. (Ungulate means hoofed animal. Who knew one could learn so much on a Sunday morning?)

The fossil record of the Antilocapridae family dates back some 20 million years to the Miocene epoch, a period of time during which the Pacific plat continued pulling apart, forming the West's Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. For a complete listing of the Antilocapridae species known to date, go to the International Wildlife Museum of Tucson's Web site, www.thewildlifemuseum.org.

The pronghorn is unique to the American West. While some subspecies of bison were adapted to living in eastern areas of North America and parts of Canada, the experts at the Great Plains nature Center in Wichita, Kan., say the pronghorn has never been found to have lived outside of the central United States' Great Plains or its high sagebrush desert.

While the cheetah is often considered the fastest animal on the planet -- credited with reaching speeds of 55 to 70 mph -- this fast cat can only maintain such speed for a few hundred yards. The pronghorn, which can reach speeds of 60 to 70 mph, can maintain speed in excess of 30 mph for miles at a time. This trait proved frustrating to the West's pioneering settlers, who found the pronghorn exceedingly difficult to hunt because their horses simply could not keep up with the herd.

In addition to being fast runners, pronghorn have amazing eyesight. Take a look at the skulls shown in this photograph (obtained from the Web site of Edwards Taxidermy, Montana). Note the size and placement of the eye sockets. The size of the pronghorn's eyes coupled with them being positioned toward the back of the skull mean that the animal not only can see clearly for great distances -- a pronghorn can spot movement up to three miles away -- but it also can see almost completely behind itself.

Suffice to say that sneaking up on one of these animals is not easy. The pronghorn's speed and keen sight are adaptations that allow it to survive, and even thrive, in vast swaths of open space that provide little or no cover.

The pronghorn's main predators, besides humans, are coyotes and golden eagles, the latter of which which typically preys on the fawns. As a result, a pronghorn's fawn has virtually no scent. This allows a female to "hide" her young in the open when she must leave it to eat.

Fascinating stuff, eh? if you are bent on photographing one of these animals, my advice would be to get off of the interstate and travel on foot or by bicycle, if possible. Trying to pull over from highway speeds of 70 mph and snap a photos of these svelte desert-dwellers before they know they have been spotted and take off is virtually impossible!

Following nature's course

In the photo on the left are three newborn squirrels. Obviously, they are being raised by a human surrogate -- that, or mama squirrel has taken to purchasing nesting materials in the baby aisle at Target.

I have included this photo because the age of these squirrels closely resembles that of a pair I saw outdoors last week. But I didn't go back and take a photo of them for fear of startling the babies with my flash or their mother with my presence. Alas, I fear that mama squirrel has abandoned her litter.

One of my groups of students discovered the pair last week while crawling through our nature center's  "mouse hole." The hole is a deep indentation dug into the ground that is supported inside by large timbers. Its roof is more timbers with earth and branches piled on top. There are three entrances (or exits, depending on your perspective). The result is a "hole" through which children, and a few adults I know, love crawling.

Our fall field ecology classes include a trip to the mouse hole. We study predator-prey relationships and use  a camouflage tag game in which children pretend to be mice. As my afternoon class emerged from the hole last Thursday, they were breathless and excited over discovering what they thought were baby mice.

My coworkers and I checked it out, and there were, indeed, two tiny creatures curled together in the loose dirt along one wall of the hole. They were situated on a small ledge a few inches above the ground. They were definitely squirrels, about as long as my thumb and as big around as my pinkie. Their eyes were still closed, and the sides of their tiny, hairless bodies moved in and out with their breathing. We closed the mouse hole in hopes that mama squirrel would return for them.

We had seen a large tree squirrel running out of the mouse hole over the summer but had no idea a mother had built her nest in there. Oddly, these squirrels were lying in the dirt without benefit of nesting materials. Our assumption, at that point, is that they somehow had been knocked out of the nest -- probably by the scores of children who play in the mouse hole on a daily basis.

Whether mother will retrieve them or not is anyone's guess. A squirrel will abandon its young if they fall from the nest and become too cold. Cold babies are likely unhealthy ones, and mama squirrel allows nature to take its course in those cases. A squirrel has at least two litters a year with two to four young each time. Obviously, nature has made allowances for mishaps.

But humans have a hard time accepting that. An Internet search of "baby squirrels" turns up dozens of sites that give instructions for the care and feeding of abandoned squirrels, including how to treat for injuries and dehydration.

As a teacher-naturalist, I know that the right thing to do is to let nature take her course. The act of rehabilitating such young animals without imprinting them on humans is very delicate business, as our center's wild bird rehabilitation specialist knows. Each summer, hundreds of well-meaning people bring in baby birds that have fallen from their nests, hoping that she will perform her miracles as she usually does and will raise them to a point where they can be released.

The problem is, many of these birds have not fallen and been abandoned by their mothers. They have been fledged from the nest and will sit on the ground for long periods of time as mama bird watches from a nearby tree and the baby bird learns to save itself by using its newly feathered wings.

Other baby birds brought to our center are featherless newborns that have fallen from a nest. They can be replaced in the nest when that happens. But people bring them to us because of an old superstition that mother birds won't touch babies that "smell" like human rescuers. In truth, birds have little or no sense of smell, so replacing them in the nest does far more good than harm.

Animals are far better off when raised by their own mothers -- a thought I tried to keep in the forefront as I read instructions on how these baby squirrels, if I "rescued" them, could need feedings every three to four hours until their eyes opened. That could take up to 36 days. It was work to keep at bay the mental images of their fragile paws and their helpless little pink bodies as I made the "right" decision.

Today, I will cruise past the mouse hole to see whether mama squirrel has removed her babies or left them where they surely will have died from exposure, by now. In either case, the mouse hole can be reopened for today's group of children who will come to learn some of nature's lessons -- at least, the ones that are easier to teach.