Internet Naturalist – September 9, 2013

Cats have come a long way from being animals charged with catching mice to treasured, adorable creatures that snuggle with us in our beds. But this relatively new arrangement is creating issues for cats and the people who live with them. John Bradshaw has studied the history of domesticated cats and how the relationship between people and cats has changed. He’s the author of the new book Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, which is a follow-up to his book Dog Sense. Bradshaw is the foundation director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol in England. As an anthrozoologist, he studies the interactions between people and animals. He’s also the former science chairman of the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations. He joins Fresh Air’s Terry Gross to talk about how our relationship with cats has evolved over time and how toning down cats’ hunting instincts will ensure them a future on an increasingly crowded planet.

“It’s a jungle if you’re an eagle right now on the Chesapeake Bay,” says , a conservation biologist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. “You have to watch your back.” Americans have long imagined their national symbol as a solitary, noble bird soaring on majestic wings. The birds are indeed gorgeous and still soar, but the notion that they are loners is outdated, Watts and other conservationists are finding. After nearly being wiped out, inadvertently, by strong insecticides that were in widespread use until the 1970s, bald eagles have come roaring back in places like the James River, south of Richmond, Va. Today the raptors fly around together above the James in big groups, hang out in communal roosts and are fiercely competitive.

The Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Band of Ojibwe began an occupation in the Penokee Hills this weekend, at a proposed open pit iron ore mine site. The LCO harvest camp is small — five acres as compared to the four and a half miles proposed for the mine here. But LCO tribal elder Melvin Gasper says that this is not just a way to protest the mine plans, but also to get in the way by occupying part of it. Gasper says this is an exercise of their 1842 treaty rights in the Ceded Territory of northern Wisconsin to hunt, fish and gather.

Across the Western U.S., yearly areas of snowpack are decreasing, and researchers are trying to figure out what that means for everything that relies on the snowmelt — from farms to power plants to a little creature known as the Cascades frog. The frog lives way up in the mountains of the Northwest and thrives in alpine wetlands fed by melting snow. Scientists are now trying to figure out how these frogs will adapt to their shrinking habitat. In Washington’s Olympic Mountains things are looking dryer than normal. On a recent day, Maureen Ryan is out looking for the wet spots. She’s a researcher with the University of Washington and an expert on amphibians that live at high elevation. These mountain trails are Ryan’s lab, so to speak. She studies tiny snow-fed potholes of water, cupped in the folds of high mountain ranges in the Northwest, a perfect habitat for Cascades frogs. But as the global climate warms, that habitat is receding.

Bick Boyte plops a 1-pound bullfrog in his aluminum canoe, still half alive. He resumes his kneeling position, perched upfront, on the hunt for a big bellower. Boyte hears the “wom, wom, wom” and knows frogs are within reach. Boyte and Tommy Peebles have been “gigging” Tennessee ponds together since their daddies first taught them. Boyte now owns a truck dealership. Peebles is a real estate lawyer. But in the warm moonlight, they revert to their boyhoods. Peebles does the paddling. The more deadly half of this duo is Boyte. Instead of a paddle, he wields a 12-foot bamboo cane with four barbed tines on the end — his homemade frog gig. On his head, Boyte wears a miner’s headlamp. The light freezes the frogs.

Latitude 46.5°N and Longitude 84.33°W (Elev. 597 ft)

Whooping crane project at Patuxent National Wildlife health center, with interview of Dr. John French, discussing health, exercises, diet and training of these birds once on the brink of extinction.