Where The Wild Animals Are.
Hey,
Monday again….don’t they come around with monotonous regularity!
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I hope that you had a memorable weekend.
Mine was quite good.
Well, let’s face it, at my sort of age any weekend is way better than the alternative, hence the obsession with green tea.
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On Saturday we had a quiet and damp sort of day, with a small walk around the local area.
Yesterday it was sunny, so we went out for a drive along the roman wall.
It is beautiful wild countryside, with segments of the wall crossing the land.
One part of the journey was more dark and cloudy and it was excellent to see the shadows running across the far hills, along with the misty areas where it was obviously raining.
A very northern landscape.
A place where fables happened and wild creatures surely roamed.
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I remember a blog that I did a while age about wolves in Sweden, and now there is news of them again on another continent.
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In Alaska, there is believed to have been a wolf attack near Chignik Lake, which is about 500 miles southwest of Anchorage.
It is thought that a pack of four wolves attacked and killed a lone jogger called Candice Berner.
This lady, originally from Pennsylvania, was a remedial teacher who had moved to the area about 6 months ago.
She was 32 and a very tiny person under five feet in height.
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Her body had been found when a trail of blood was followed from a rural road and led searchers to her partially consumed body.
There were wolf tracks there, although wolves are normally nervous of humans.
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When the autopsy was carried out it was decided that it was probably an attack by wolves because of the damage to the throat.
This is how wolves usually behave with prey, and local people had previously spotted wolves in the area where the attack took place.
As the victim had been jogging, it is thought that the sight may have triggered the wolves to attack, in the same way that a running animal would have.
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Nothing like this has happened in North America since 2005, when wolves killed a human in Saskatchewan, Canada.
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Now hunters are out searching for the wolf pack they think are responsible, and children are being watched over carefully.
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My Auntie Muriel went to live in Canada when I was a little girl and she ended up living near Vancouver.
I remember one letter she wrote to my parents which described something awful that happened to her dogs.
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My young cousin went out on a winter’s morning to feed their two dogs, one of which was a big German Shepherd.
He found that the dogs had been torn to pieces and he saw blood all over the snow in the area.
When the warden came out he told them that the signs showed that a cougar had been on the ridge for about two days watching their isolated home.
He said it was lucky that my cousin had not been out there at the wrong time, as dogs were a favourite food.
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There were also many times that they would find huge bears trying to find food in their bins around the back of the house.
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There are actually fears for the 35,000 Brown Bears in Alaska at the moment.
A lot of poaching goes on at the moment, and because the place is so vast and empty it is hard to police it properly.
The worry for the bears is made worse by the fact that the Federal Subsistence Board has helped to pass new regulations which mean that subsistence hunters can sell bear parts commercially now.
This will probably lead to much more poaching and killing.
There are already Polar Bear and Wolf furs on sale there but not yet those of the Brown Bears.
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At the moment there are many stores who are meeting a huge demand by selling fake bear claws- how much more desirable will the real ones be!
The new regulations have meant that in some parts of Alaska it will be legal to hunt bear in the next autumn hunting season.
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I will admit that I was totally horrified by the whole idea of my own relations living close to nature in that way.
It seemed far too scary for me to consider, but Muriel really loved it.
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A Mr. Paul Van Vlissingen, a Scottish landowner, is calling for the re-introduction of wild lynx and wolves into Scotland because they will help keep down the large numbers of red deer by a process of natural culling.
This gentleman, who owns an estate of 32,000 hectares in Ross-Shire, had previously paid £300,000 for a three year study to be carried out on the effects of such prolific deer breeding numbers.
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The study results showed that there are over a quarter of a million red deer in Scotland and they are damaging the landscape.
He now thinks that it would allow natural regeneration of vegetation to have the deer culled by their natural predators.
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The last wolf in Scotland was killed in the 18th century.
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I guess that I am just a townie….and a British townie at that!
The scariest thing here are spiders, and they are harmless ones!
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Have a good day.
Jaksie,x.
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