This Week in Wild Animals for May 10, 2013
In Oregon, a sporting goods chain turned the state's rainbow trout into lottery tickets. Each rainbow trout is tagged with a number and the lucky fisherman who catches a particular trout this season will win $1 million. The contest is called "Fish for Millions." Other prizes include a Chevy truck and some gift cards.
This Week in Wild Animals is a public service for human beings compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book Wild Ones.
A student at Tulsa Community College brought a live, 4.5-foot alligator to campus as a visual aid for his class presentation about alligators. However, the student never made it to class; instead, campus security found him passed out in his car in the parking lot, in possession of marijuana and prescription pills, with the alligator in the backseat.
A New Jersey town was building a "turtle tunnel" to funnel turtles safely across a road, and the state of Idaho was trying to help elk traverse a busy highway. A state committee suggested an elk underpass, but a biologist recommended an elaborate system of fencing, animal-detectors and flashing signs instead. "Elk do not like underpasses," the biologist explained.
A surveillance camera caught a Canadian teenager attacking a goose outside a shopping mall; someone dumped a dead bear in the trash in a Colorado subdivision; video emerged of a Chinese circus in which a bear mauled a monkey after the bicycles that the bear and monkey were forced to ride collided; and a Muscovy duck was found impaled with an arrow in Florida.
A Utah businessman named Dell Schanze insisted that, despite much evidence to the contrary, he was not the person caught on video kicking an owl repeatedly in mid-air while flying a motorized paraglider. ("I kicked an owl's butt!" the pilot — who may or may not be Dell Schanze – says in the video.)
Dozens of carp were dying mysteriously in a Kentucky river and dozens of dolphins were dying mysteriously in a Florida logoon. Three hundred and fifty people walked two miles around the decks of Disney cruise ships to "connect with nature" and marine animals.
A Minnesota town finally evicted a two-year-old moose that had taken up residence there, after five unsuccessful attempts to herd the animal back into the countryside. The moose — which locals nicknamed Mr. Moose, and also Mike, despite the fact that it is actually female — had appeared "totally at ease among buildings, traffic and people.” A concerned state wildlife official had warned that "Moose kill more humans than any other wild animal" and that "If a moose doesn't like a scenario, it can put its hooves through your stomach."
In Truckee, California, a bear got stuck in a truck. ("At one point," the owner of the truck said, "he had both hands up on the steering wheel, was honking the horn with his snout.") And in Brookline, Massachusetts, police had to escort a wild turkey out of a couple's living room after the bird flew straight through the double-paned window. "I was just sort of casually watching it and I realized it was aiming for my house," the husband told a reporter named Todd Feathers. His wife added, "This is crazy."
The United Kingdom observed "Hedgehog Awareness Week."
In Kansas, a college baseball player scooped a squirrel off the base path in his helmet during a game and hustled it off the field. A robotic raven built by University of Maryland scientists was attacked by an actual hawk. A 30-foot "sea monster" with "rudimentary flippers" washed ashore in New Zealand.
Canadian wildlife officials air-dropped roadkill from helicopters to feed and distract grizzly bears, hoping this buffet of carcasses would keep the bears away from nearby cattle ranches. Explaining the evolution of the project — how the government came to drop dead elk, moose and deer from the sky – one biologist said, "We didn't start out being super-scientific."
A New York man was attacked by a fox, twice, and so were the police officers who arrived on the scene to help him fend off the fox, and an extraordinarily large groundhog glared menacingly at a woman in New Jersey. "Seriously?" the woman later recalled thinking. "Dude, you may not know this but you are a groundhog." A man recalled being swallowed by a hippopotamus.
A wild parakeet that built its nest on a utility pole caused a power outage in New Jersey, and a squirrel chewing on a power line caused a surge at a Georgia woman's home, shooting sparks into her kitchen, destroying her heating and air conditioning system and several appliances, and causing her to run around the house shrieking. The woman lives on a fixed income and does not have homeowners insurance, but the utility company would not compensate her for her losses. A spokesman explained that, last year, there were 158 outages due to squirrels — “Squirrels have their own category in our outage reporting,” he said — and, as a matter of policy, the company categorizes all squirrel malfeasance as “acts of God.”
A teenager in Houston was hospitalized after ashes from a cigar he was smoking set off an explosive concoction in his pocket while he was on his way to "blow up turtles."
A man donated a 100-pound, stuffed moose head to the crew of the U.S.S. Anchorage, in memory of his father.