The Strangest Ways Wild Animals Crossed Paths With Humans This Week

A roundup of odd ways humans and wild animals crossed paths this week compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America.
Image may contain Human Person Clothing Apparel Animal Mammal Cattle Cow Vest and Lifejacket
Crookston Times.

This Week in Wild Animals for May 17, 2013

An ad in a Yiddish-language newspaper in Brooklyn recommended fresh, warm pigeon blood as a cure for warts. The woman who placed the ad claimed she does not sell pigeons, or have any financial interest in the cure, but only wished to spread the word and "help people.” “You go to the market, you buy a pigeon, and the blood goes on the wart," she explained. "That's it." She added that the remedy is not effective on gentiles, only Jews.

This Week in Wild Animals *is a public service for human beings compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book *Wild Ones.The town of Rexburg, Idaho lit a fire in a vacant lot in a suburban subdivision, hoping to clear a brush pile where a mountain lion had made its den. "We're relieved that the mountain lion won't be sleeping in our backyards," said one resident. "It just puts our mind at ease knowing that the pile is gone." Two days later, the fire magically restarted and burned for half an hour.

Seagulls were pecking baby whales to death. Researchers determined that mosquitoes have killed at least two killer whales.

A king cobra protected two frightened puppies that fell down a well.

Firefighters rescued a great horned owl that was stuck on a wooden cow protruding from a steak house sign in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a policeman called to a home outside Atlanta to free a raccoon stuck in a jar discovered it was actually a cat stuck in a jar. A hawk was photographed transporting a live blackbird on its back, the way a 747 transports the space shuttle. A State Veterans Home in South Dakota was hanging dead turkey vultures upside down in trees.

The federal government was prosecuting a man named Matthew Mayo who snuck a snake named Isabelle onto a charter flight to Alaska, hidden in a cardboard lunch box. The facts of USA vs. Mayo seemed complicated—namely because, during the flight, at least two snakes got loose on the plane, but neither snake was Isabelle, and Mayo insisted that Isabelle was the only snake he had smuggled aboard. One of the snakes on the plane was never caught. Isabelle was taken into custody.

Video surfaced of a drunk man charging a wild elephant in South Africa. A wild turkey attacked a Land Rover near a Connecticut country club.

Authorities were still on the lookout for an extraordinarily large groundhog that terrorized a New Jersey little league game, baring its teeth and chasing the umpire around the field and the 69-year-old league president into his car. ("That thing was gaining on me," recalled the league president.") Animal control had captured the groundhog, and taken it to a veterinary office, but the groundhog somehow escaped from its cage in the dead of night.

The city of Vienna built a park for 170 squirrels.

Two bald eagles crashed on a runway at Duluth International Airport after locking talons during a mid-air dogfight and spinning out of control. And roughly two dozen bald eagles were filmed hanging out in the back of a Nissan Frontier and circling overhead, while the truck was parked outside an Alaskan grocery store with bags of fish scraps in its bed. Even the blaring alarm of a neighboring car failed to disperse the eagles. Finally, Officer Bill Simms ran toward the vehicle screaming to shoo the birds away. "It's hard to imagine the bald eagle was once almost extinct," wrote Motortrend magazine, which noted that it likes the Frontier--for its dependability and durability--as much as the eagles seemed to like it.

A raccoon infiltrated a power substation in Kansas, creating mechanical problems that threatened to bring down the grid but ultimately caused outages of a local television station's signal instead.

A Florida man who leapt out of his car during a traffic stop and sprinted into a swamp to evade police was mauled by an alligator. An 8-foot alligator appeared on a family's porch on Mother's Day morning, trapping them inside, until a star of an Animal Planet reality series could come and drag the animal away by its tail. "I thought my husband had bought one of those blow-up alligators because he's a big prankster," said the woman of the house. And outside the town of Palestine, Arkansas, a 9-foot alligator was run over by a train.

“Microbats,” which can weigh as little as a single sheet of paper, were infesting the walls of Australian homes. "Microbats are much more common than you may think," explained a microbat enthusiast.

Two turtles were photographed having sex on a golf course, and the oldest tortoise in Britain died after being bitten by a rat. (Thomas the Tortoise was 130 years old and actually a female.)

A female moose which had been imperiously walking through the town of Crookston, Minnesota — and which wildlife officials had finally pushed back into the wilderness last week after five unsuccessful attempts — crossed a river and came straight back into town. The moose seemed more aggressive now, flaring her ears and advancing toward Crookston's chief of police.

An orphaned polar bear cub was shipped from Alaska to Buffalo via UPS. A squirrel in San Diego tested positive for plague.

Two middle-aged Canadian sisters in a van happened across a 400-pound black bear tearing apart a trash bag. "I grabbed my sister's leg and said, 'Look, a bear," one sister said. Soon, they realized the trash bag was actually a man. "A big piece of his scalp was hanging off," the second sister explained. "I turned to my sister and said, 'Hit the horn.’" After scaring the bear away, the sisters collected the man and drove him to the hospital. The man received three hundred stitches and is recovering nicely. "We had a tough couple of days," one of the sisters said.

Inmates at an English prison were working hard to attract great tits.