Washington—Officials are searching for a female bobcat they say has escaped from the National Zoo.  Ollie, a 25 pound female bobcat was last seen in her enclosure around 7:30 a.m. Monday. USA Today 1/30/17

Bobcat
Photo by Paula Nixon

Winter this year seemed to be filled with bobcat sightings and bobcat stories.

Back in January, I wrote about seeing a bobcat outside my kitchen window. I got a good look at him, but was disappointed to find he had managed to avoid my wildlife camera strapped to a nearby piñon tree.   A few days later I got the above shot—maybe the same cat, but no way to know for sure.

I was ready to post the photo when I ran across this story about a bobcat in Sedona, Arizona.  Game and Fish officials tried to trap the animal after it bit and scratched four people, but ended up having to kill it when it evaded capture.  Tests confirmed what they suspected—the bobcat had rabies.  I decided to call my local game department to find out if there was anything unusual about seeing a bobcat walk through my backyard in broad daylight, not once, but twice.

A few weeks passed and I still hadn’t made the call when I saw the bobcat again.  This time he passed within fifteen feet of the back door, crossing the patio while Dave and I watched in amazement.  He never turned to look at us and seemed to be focused on something that only he could sense, maybe a rabbit.  He flicked his stub of a tail and was gone.

Rick Winslow with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish listened when I told him about my multiple bobcat sightings and said it wasn’t uncommon to see them out and about during the day.  He assured me that rabies is extremely rare in our area—the last case he could recall was years ago in the southern part of New Mexico.

And since then, not a sign of the bobcat.  I’m certain he’s still out there, just keeping a low profile.

After a two-plus day walkabout in the leafy wilds of northern Washington an escaped bobcat returned to the National Zoo and walked right into a trap where some “goodies” had been left for her Wednesday, zookeepers said.
Ben Nuckols—Associated Press 2/1/17

Female Mexican Gray Wolf at Wildlife West Nature Park
Photo Credit: Paula Nixon

The deadline to submit comments on the 2017 Wolf Release Proposal is tonight at 11:59 pm.  If you have read it, maybe you wondered about the wolf called F521 (her studbook number) and how it came to be that so many of the small population of Mexican wolves living in the wild are so closely related to her.

I first discovered F521 years ago in a monthly status report.

She was born on the side of a mountain in 1997 at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs.  Zookeepers called her Estrella, star in Spanish.  She and her littermates were special because of their genetics, a mix of two of the three lineages of the small captive population.

At the age of five, F521 was released with her mate and family (2 juvenile pups and five new pups) in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was the summer of 2002, early on in the Mexican wolf reintroduction effort (at the time there were approximately 26 wolves living in the wild), and no one knew how this family, named the Bluestem Pack, would adapt to life in the wild.

In the first few weeks they had to be hazed away from a ranch and killed a blue heeler before settling in and chasing down their first elk.  They established a territory and the next spring F521 gave birth to her first litter of wild-born pups.  She remained the alpha (breeding) female of the Bluestem Pack for six years, outliving one mate, finding another, and continuing to raise new litters of pups each year.  Some of those pups went on to establish new packs and have litters of their own.

In 2008 one of F521’s female offspring, F1042, replaced her as the alpha female in the pack.

The old wolf, probably no longer welcome in her pack, sometimes ran alone and sometimes ran with another pack.  In December of 2010 she was found dead in the Gila National Forest, killed in an illegal shooting.  F521 was thirteen.

Once again it is breeding season for wolves and the Bluestem Pack still lives in the White Mountains with F1042 as the alpha female.  In late April or early May  pups will be born.

The numbers cited in the 2017 proposal are surprising and alarming. Of the eighteen potential breeding pairs living in the wild in 2017, three  have one adult that is a descendant of F521 and fifteen have both adults that are descendants of F521. Inbreeding has always posed a threat for Mexican gray wolves.  They came so close to extinction that there were only seven founders when breeding in captivity began.

Fifteen years ago when F521 was released in the wild she was a star not only in name, but also in the genetic potential she offered to the wild population.  She did her part—  she lived wild and free for more than eight years and raised lots of pups.

The most recent estimate of Mexican wolves living in the wild is 113. A combination of too few wolves being released and too many wolves being killed illegally has led to the current dire situation.

More wolves from the captive population need to be released immediately.

The 2017 proposal is a start—2 families and 10 cross-fostered pups—a move in the right direction.

Please take a moment to send an email to mexicanwolfcomments@fws.gov in support of the proposed releases.

The wild things that live on my farm are reluctant to tell me, in so many words, how much of my township is included in their daily or nightly beat. —Aldo Leopold

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table reading A Sand County Almanac when a shadow on the fresh snow outside caught my eye.  Thinking it was probably a rabbit, I went to the window for a closer look and was surprised to see a bobcat, unmistakable with his short tail and tufted ears.

I ran downstairs and out the back door thinking he would  have disappeared into the trees, but found that he had, instead, circled around the big boulder and car parked in the drive.  He stopped short when he saw me and we studied each other across the gravel driveway for a few moments before he turned and vanished.

Bobcat Tracks.
Photo by: Paula Nixon

I followed his tracks and discovered he had come from a neighbor’s yard via a small opening between two latillas in the coyote fence, just barely wide enough for a 15 to 20 pound cat to squeeze through.

Bobcats are not uncommon in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (I sometimes catch them on my camera trap), but this was only my second sighting in twenty years—the perfect excuse to get out of the house and enjoy the first snow of 2017!

Along the way, as I often do, I got distracted.

Last month I was writing a few words about my attempt to identify a bird on power pole. Raven or crow? Corvus corax or Corvus brachyrhynchos? Their scientific names—binomials, genus and species—piqued my interest.

What did they mean? Did they give any clues as to the differences between the birds?

The two-part names are usually Latin, but sometimes Greek or sometimes something else altogether.  They are standardized so that everyone knows exactly what we are talking about when we refer to that noisy black bird scavenging in the parking lot as a Corvus brachyrhynchos.

I started with Google, but didn’t find the answer easily using a Latin translation website, so I asked one of my local reference librarians who sent me back to the internet.  I kept scrolling and cobbled together what I thought was the answer.  Corvus means crow.  And, from what I could tell brachyrhyncos seemed to mean short-nosed.  But I wasn’t completely certain I was right and, worse, I wasn’t satisfied.

Still trolling, I discovered a book published in 2014 called Latin for Bird Lovers: Over 3000 bird names explored and explained written by Roger Lederer and Carol Burr.  Bingo.  But my library didn’t have a copy.

I published my raven or crow blog post without defining their scientific names and  waited for the book to arrive in the mail.

It didn’t disappoint.  A compact hard cover, it’s the perfect companion to my birding field guides. The definitions are arranged dictionary style with lots of color illustrations and supplemental information—a whole page devoted to the Corvus genus.

I’ve been going through it slowly.  Looking up birds as they appear in my backyard, first in the field guide to learn their scientific name and then in the book of definitions.

Of course, I started with the ravens and crows.  Corvus means crow in Latin and corax means raven, also in Latin.  Brachyrynchos, a two part word: brachy means short in Greek and rynchus, bill in Latin.  That makes the common raven in my back yard the “crow raven” and his smaller counterpart, the American crow, the “short-billed crow.”

The red-breasted American robin that has recently returned to my bird bath is the Turdus migratorius or “wandering thrush.” The midnight blue Steller’s jay with its saucy crest is the Cyanocitta stelleri or “dark blue jay named for the German naturalist, George Steller.”

With its three thousand definitions you would think it would be years before I ran up against the book’s limits, but it happened quickly when a red-crowned, zebra-striped bird showed up at the feeder.  It is known as the ladder-backed woodpecker or Picoides scalaris.  Picoides means woodpecker-shaped, but scalaris is not defined.

Looks like I’ll be on the hunt for the Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names if I really want to know the answer.  Referenced by the authors in their introduction, it boasts 20,000 definitions.  I checked, but my library doesn’t have it.