Sardonicus's stories

And a glider shall lead them
Thu 3 Oct 2002 - 08:00

While this may sound like a sequel to the movie Fly Away Home, a hang-glider by the name of Angelo d'Arrigo is attempting to establish migratory routines for a population of captivity bred Siberian Cranes. These young birds have never been exposed to adult cranes and as such have no knowledge of the appropriate migration patterns. As part of a coordinated effort, this year Angelo is going to lead the birds over a 3,400 mile long migratory route that is hoped will imprint the appropriate information on the young cranes. As unusual as the project might seem, a Canadian-American team, working under the title of Operation Migration, has been carrying out similar projects involving Whooping Cranes since 1994.

That isn't a house cat scratching at the door.
Thu 26 Sep 2002 - 06:25

While the folks in Quitman, Arkansas may be somewhat accustomed to dogs and cats wandering around their property, stray lions are something else. Over the past week, residents there have found themselves in the position of having to shoot and kill four lions that have been roaming the neighboring woods. Steve Henning, the proprietor of a nearby exotic animal farm, has stated that the lions don't belong to him, and has declared that they may have been dumped by an owner who had tried to give them to him previously. As he cannot provide the local law enforcement officals with a name or address for this person, his neighbors aren't inclined to take him at his word.

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White Bear Hunting Banned
Mon 26 Aug 2002 - 11:30

While I had recently run across mention of a rarely seen variety of ursine known as the glacier bear in Lynn Schooler's book The Blue Bear, I wasn't expecting actual photos of one to be making the news this week. Thanks to photographer Pat Costello and the photos he took of the Spirit Bear, unusually fast action was taken by the Alaskan Game Board to ban any hunting of said bear in the Juneau region. Additional information can be found at the Juneau Bears site, which has a number of outbound links currently connected to the story.

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Only a Temporary Extinction?
Tue 28 May 2002 - 14:19

Since late 1999, the Australian Museum has involved in a project unique in this world- the cloning of an extinct species, namely the Tasmanian Tiger. While no living representative of this species has been witnessed since the death of the last one in captivity in 1936, the museum possesses several preserved pups. While the ones that were preserved in formalin are unusable due to the effect of the preservative on the cell structure, there is a female pup that was preserved in ethanol. She is the linchpin of the cloning project, as this allowed intact DNA strands to persist. While the successful replication of individual Tasmanian Tiger genes, as detailed at http://www.austmus.gov.au/thylacine/newsrelease.htm,
does not mean there will be a living representive of the species any time soon, it does mark something singular. For the first time in human history, there is the indication that we may be able to bring back from the darkness of death and total extinction a unique species that was destroyed solely by our hands.

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