Click image, gets bigger.First Day Issue / Tierra de los Sueños / TdSPosta
39th Anniversary of scrambling up a tree to escape a family (sounder) of wild boars (javelinas) in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Gulf of Mexico, Texas USA.
(From TdSPosta stamp series: "Recovered Memories")
* Whooping crane painting by Jean-James Audubon
* Alligator from circa 1930 tinted postcard
..of St. Augustine, Florida USA
* Wild boar / peccary / javelina
..image source unknown
The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge was the winter habitat of the Whooping Crane, at this time on the brink of extinction in the wild.
The summer habitat is Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, Canada. The Whooping Crane -- about 5 feet / 1.52 meters tall -- is the tallest bird in North America.
In 1970-71 I was stationed in an Army unit in nearby Corpus Christi, Texas, and one winter day a buddy and I motorcycled to Aransas to see the Whooping Cranes. I think we saw one or two far in the distance from the wooden birdwatcher walkway.
These were the seasonal termini of the last migratory flyway of the last Whooping Cranes still in the wild in the winter of 1970/71. There were about 20 or 21 of these magnificent birds left in the wild, although there were captive zoo populations, chiefly at the Patuxent, Maryland National Wildlife Research Station.
If ever there was a rara avis, it was the Whooping Crane in those days, its wild population rapidly heading the way of the dodo.
The single flyway exposed the migrating birds to accidental (or intentional) hunting kills. A cooperative program between Canadian and U.S. bird experts took eggs from Whooping Crane nests at Patuxent and replaced them in nests of the far more populous and robust Lesser Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis canadensis) in their geographically different nesting sites. The hatchlings were reared by their adoptive Sandhill parents, and migrated with them, thus establishing new north-south winter-summer flyways.
Another problem was the aggressive physical behavior of Whooping Crane chicks toward each other, resulting in broken bones and deaths. The Patuxent naturalists raised the fragile but aggressive hatchlings among robust and non-aggressive domesticated turkey chicks, who acted like soft punching bags; the Whooping Crane chicks bounced off the turkeys undamaged, and were able safely to grow to adulthood.
2 comments:
damnit...Swung out wide on this week's star travels to peek in on Vleeptron and I get Fooled By a Headline.
I'm thinking, "This should be a great video clip! Bob running his smartphone webcam over his shoulder as he races towards the nearest mountable (yes, I said Mountable) tree in order to escape a wild boar escaped from the Northampton Zoo.
Still glad I stopped by.
ps...raked leaves for $$ today in 82degree, sunny and breezy weather....HAHAHAHAHAHA!
HeathBar! HeathKit! Hey hey hey how's it going?
Both of us Army draftees were City Boys, Dick from Boston, moi from DC, we knew Zilch about real wilderness, and the only wild animals we'd ever had any commerce with had been in Zoos.
But I'd read a long article about the nearly extinct Whooping Cranes, and realized their winter home was about 2 hours up the coast from where we were stationed, and I wanted to see if we could get lucky and see these creatures.
The public visit parts of the Wildlife Refuge had no Dangerous Wild Animal warning signs for City Idiots, so we just wandered down the path cluelessly.
First we saw a full-grown alligator diddibob ahead of us and slide into a creek. That should have been a Red Flag, but maybe we thought the wild animals were on some sort of Honor System and had pledged, in return for living in a No Hunting zone, not to eat visiting humans.
I had a 35mm camera with a telescopic lens about a yard long. I don't know if any negatives still survive from this adventure.
But I do think we managed to spot 1 or 2 Whooping Cranes.
On the way back, we hiked through an open area, and that's when the family of wild boars started slowly wandering our way. Males lead solitary lives, so this would have been a mama javelina (sow) and her half-grown kids out for a stroll. Wikiwhatchamacallit says this is precisely the circumstance that triggers attacks on humans; few attacks are fatal, but a good tusk-goring can end up amputating an arm or leg.
We saw them before they made any sign of seeing us. We didn't even discuss the situation. There was this one tree with branches we could reach, and we scrambled up it. I guess we were in the tree for ten minutes until the nasty family wandered out of sight.
We weren't scared. The tree was conveniently just where the City Boys needed it for an encounter with wild boars (actually peccaries, known as javelinas in Spanish-speaking South Texas).
I'd cut off a finger to get to the summer end of the crane flyway in Wood Buffalo Park in Alberta. Check it out on a map, we are talking REMOTE here.
Wild Boars and Gators and Cranes, Oh My!
Hi and Happy Holidays to your Sweetie-Pie! Of the epic snowstorm, it seems we've dodged the bullet, the Atlantic coast is gonna get it but good, but we're on the fringe and won't get hammered. You make sure to wear Sunscreen!
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