DEC debunks cougar rumor

Did you hear they found a dead mountain lion in Black Brook? It was hit by a car. The state Department of Environmental Conservation picked up the carcass and hauled it away the other day. There’s even a photograph to prove it.

The photo has been making the rounds of the Internet.

You can read all about this mountain lion on the Internet. Some guy took a picture of it on his cell phone.

But there is a problem with the story. The same photo turned up on the Internet weeks ago, supposedly taken in Pennsylvania. And a guy in Adirondack Forum says he received the photo twice: the first time, a few weeks ago, he was told it was taken in Springville, N.Y. ; the second time, just yesterday, he was told it was taken in Black Brook.

You can read about the hoax here and here. And click  here to read about an earlier hoax.

DEC spokesman David Winchell said the agency decided to issue a news release debunking the rumor after receiving a number of phone calls and e-mails about it.

Winchell acknowledges that mountain lions have been seen in the Adirondacks, but he insists there is not a wild population. Rather, DEC maintains that any cougars in the region are pets that were released or escaped. He says it’s easy in some states, such as Ohio, to acquire exotic animals.

“They’re cute when they’re little,” Winchell said of cougars, “but when they grow up they’re wild animals, and the people can’t take care of them, so they bring them to the Adirondacks and release them.”

Click on the link below to read DEC’s news release (Word document).

DEC on hoax

How to scare a bear

State wildlife biologists experimented for years with different methods to keep bears from stealing campers’ food in the High Peaks Wilderness. Finally, the state decided to require all campers in the eastern High Peaks to store food in bear-resistant canisters.

A black bear. Photo from Wikipedia.

This not a problem unique to the Adirondacks. The latest issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management includes a study conducted in California’s Sequoia National Park of the various ways people try to scare away “problem” bears: yelling at them, spraying them with pepper, throwing things at them, shooting them with rubber bullets, etc.

“Aversive conditioning was most effective when applied quickly after a bear’s first contact with human food. Shooting bears with rubber slugs from a 12-gauge shotgun was found to be slightly more effective than any other method,” according to a news release from the journal.

“Overall, aversive conditioning reduced but did not eliminate incidents of bears entering developed areas to forage for food,” the news release said. “The study noted that in areas where bears require access to critical habitats, it may be best to seasonally exclude people rather than bears.”

Incidentally, Mary Thill wrote a story about Adirondack bears in our September/October issue. And if you’re interested in bears, you’ll be interested in our earlier post about Yellow-Yellow, the bear that learned how to open food canisters.

Click here to  read the California study.

Click the link below to read the news release.

news release pdf

Our wolflike coyote

The skull on the left is from a pure coyote. The one on the right is from a coyote with wolf genes. Photo courtesy of the New York State Museum.

Scientists have recognized for a while that Adirondack coyotes are bigger than western coyotes, but there has been debate over whether the cause is genetic or environmental.

A recent study led by Roland Kays, mammal curator at the New York State Museum, comes down squarely on the side of genetics: the Adirondack coyote is part wolf.

Although scientists have suspected a wolf connection, Kays said the study proved it. “One of the big results was to show this in a systematic way,” he said.

Kays and two colleagues, Abigail Curtis and Jeremy Kirchman, tested the DNA from 686 coyotes and measured the skulls of 196 specimens. They found not only that Adirondack coyotes are part wolf, but also that their skulls are wider and larger–that is, more wolflike–than the skulls of typical coyotes. The Adirondack coyote’s larger skull and body give it an advantage in hunting deer.

“It’s got enough coyote in it to live around humans, but enough wolf to take down ungulates,” Kays said.

Coyotes evolved as hunters of rodents and other small prey in the Great Plains, but they migrated east in the last century, partially filling the niche once occupied by wolves (which were driven out in the 1800s). Some traveled south of the Great Lakes, reaching New York State via Ohio. But others went north of the lakes into Canada, where they bred with wolves, and then moved south to the Adirondacks and New England, according to the study, published in Biology Letters.

The two populations later met in western New York and Pennsylvania. Unlike the Adirondack coyotes, those that arrived in New York via Ohio remained the same size as their western counterparts. Kays said that since both populations dwell in similar habitats–woods filled with deer–genetics, not the environment, must account for their physiological differences.

Kays also noted that Adirondack coyotes exhibit far less genetic diversity than coyotes that migrated through Ohio. This suggests that the population is descended from a few females that crossed the St. Lawrence River from Canada.

Despite its lupine genes, the hybrid remains more coyote than wolf, according to Kays. In a sense, though, the wolf has returned to the Adirondacks, only in a different form.

“It’s interesting to show that evolution is still happening,” Kays said. “It’s not something you observe just in fossils.”

NOTE: This article appears in the November/December issue of the Adirondack Explorer. 

Pelican postmortem

Katherine Nussbaumer and the brown pelican on Lows Lake. Photo by Scott Nussbaumer.

The brown pelican that excited Adirondack birders for a few weeks has died of starvation, according to Amy Freiman, a wildlife rehabilitator in Newcomb.

The pelican was first spotted on Fourth Lake in the Fulton Chain and later on Lows Lake. Observers said it exhibited strange behavior, approaching people in boats and at campsites, apparently looking for food. The photo above is a case in point.

Freiman said the bird, though it may have appeared healthy, probably was famished the whole time. She speculates that it may not have been able to fish in our murky waters. Brown pelicans usually fish coastal waters. They reside along the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic as far north as Maryland. This pelican, a male, was banded in Maryland in 2001. It was the first of its kind seen in this neck of the woods.

“How it got here, that’s a big mystery,” Freiman said.

When Freiman received the bird last Wednesday, it was already weak and emaciated and vomiting bits of styrofoam and earthworms. The bird died overnight. She sent the carcass to Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research in Delaware for a necropsy.

“It had other issues, but the main cause of death was starvation,” Freiman said.

She thinks the bird might have been saved if authorities were alerted sooner. “The biggest mistake was that all the birdwatchers who were enjoying this bird didn’t call anybody,” she said.

By amazing coincidence, the bird was captured after begging for food at a Lows Lake campsite whose occupants included a woman who used to raise and rescue brown pelicans in Florida. Her son wrote in an e-mail posted on a birders’ e-mail group: “My mom caught the pelican and we kayaked down the Bog River to the Lower Lowe’s [sic] Dam. At the dam, my mom hitchhiked with the bird to the nearby Wild Center. However, they would not take the bird, or give it fish, so she took it to the High Peaks Animal Hospital [in Ray Brook].”

Steph Hample, a Wild Center naturalist, said the museum is not set up to take in wildlife. She also said that protocol calls for examining a distressed bird before feeding it. Hample was en route to the Wild Center to look at the bird when the woman decided to take it to the animal hospital instead. The hospital later turned the bird over to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Next time an unusual bird shows up, Freiman hopes people will contact DEC right away.  “Anytime you see a bird that is outside its natural habitat, there is something wrong,” she said.

“Everybody tried,” Freiman added, “but it was just too late.”

A rare sighting

Sometimes it seems like half the people in the Adirondacks have seen a panther. Heck, I thought I saw one myself last year. But a spruce-grouse sighting–now that’s a real rarity.

Male spruce grouse. Wikipedia photo.

As reported in the Explorer this year, the spruce grouse is one of the most endangered birds in the Adirondack Park (and the state). The birds live in patches of boreal habitat more characteristic of northern Canada than northern New York. Over the past two decades, the number of “birding blocks” in the Park where the bird has been sighted has dropped 26 percent, from twenty-seven to a mere twenty. One researcher fears there may be fewer than a hundred of the birds left.

So it’s good news that Steve Langdon thinks he saw a spruce grouse in a region where there has not been a confirmed sighting since the 1980s. At the time, Langdon was driving on a dirt road in the Shingle Shanty Preserve, private land located south of Lake Lila, with Ron Tavernier, a biology professor at the State University College at Canton. Langdon is helping to manage research at the preserve.

“I was just giving him a tour of the property, and this grouse tears across the road,” Langdon says. “Both of us saw the red on the head.”

Red patches above the eyes distinguish a male spruce grouse from the much more common ruffed grouse.

Langdon and Tavernier realized the significance of the sighting. They stopped to look for the bird, but it had disappeared.

Glenn Johnson, a spruce-grouse researcher, said there have been no confirmed sightings in the Shingle Shanty region since the 1970s, although the land’s caretaker had reported seeing spruce grouse on a number of occasions. Johnson and Angelena Ross surveyed the region from 2001 to 2005 but found no specimens. Johnson is tantalized by Langdon and Tavernier’s sighting. “These guys are on the ground a lot, so maybe they’ll find the bird,” he said.

Ross, a state wildlife biologist, notes that Shingle Shanty Preserve is seventeen miles from the nearest known spruce-grouse habitat–at Massawepie Mire. And yet spruce grouse, being poor fliers, generally don’t travel more than six or seven miles. If spruce grouse exist at Shingle Shanty Preserve, she said, they could be an isolated population or they might have come from an unknown population between the preserve and Massawepie Mire.

Johnson and Ross are working on a plan to protect the Park’s spruce grouse. One option is to introduce birds from out of state. But the preliminary results of DNA tests suggest that the Adirondack spruce grouse has a unique genetic makeup. That could complicate matters. On the one hand, bringing in birds from outside could change the population’s genetic identity. On the other, the population’s unique DNA could be a sign of a lack of genetic diversity.

Click here for an online Explorer story about the Park’s boreal birds, including the spruce grouse.

Click here for maps showing the locations where spruce grouse are known or thought to dwell in New York State.

Gunning for moose

The state Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that five hundred moose live in the North Country. Since moose tend to avoid census takers, the figure involves some guesswork, but it seems clear that the population is growing.

 Do we have enough moose to start shooting them? Apparently, some hunters think so.

Dennis Aprill, the outdoors writer for the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, reports that the Onondaga County Federation of Sportsman’s Clubs is proposing that the state initiate a lottery in which the winners would be given a permit to kill a moose.

Aprill is not against hunting, but he writes in his outdoors column that this is an idea whose time has not come.

Moose are hunted in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and the time may come when DEC will seek to establish a moose season in the Adirondacks. I’m guessing this will be controversial no matter how many of the animals we have.