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Details of fish / eel biology are outta my ken. Anybody here know if there's such a thing as land-locked eels? Last I heard, all the eels in the eastern US and western europe spend some part of their life cycle in the Saragasso Sea, and then at some stage migrate back to their ancestral...

When did the dam go in? I'm thinking that a canoe trip with my wife down the Batsto in '82 was post-dam. I do, very clearly, recall that during a brief skinny-dip well upstream from Batsto I experienced a very startling - and thankfully non-traumatic - close encounter of the most personal and...

I suppose that's why Largo started this thread under "general Discussion" Forum where any topic is admissible, so long as we keep it civil. Dave

I gotta go with Tom and Sreve on this one. Having lived in Texas and South Dakota, both places where appreciable numbers of illegal aliens - mostly Mexicans and Central Americans - are significant and contributory to the economies , I think it truly immoral to cast aspersions on their desire to...

I've eaten a few, and must admit I'm not partial to the taste, but... as for their tasting "...like worms...", I'll have to leave that to those who have made the definitive gustatory comparison. Dave

Terrific website, Scott ! The shots of the grouse scat reminded me that years ago when I was doing field research in West River and sage grouse were still fairly plentiful, my friends back home in Iowa always appreciated a gift of some dried sage grouse turds to use as incense. The birds feed...

I never saw one, but Joe Palmer (on whose cranbogs along the Wading I worked in the early 60's) told me he had seen a few in the pines, and had heard a few drumming, but never in the numbers he was used to seeing and hearing in Pennsylvania. He was a savvy outdoorsman and not given to fancy or...

The ones with speckled breasts were undoubtedly yellow-shafted flickers. The flickers, red-headed woodpeckers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers are, of the woodpeckers in New Jersey, the most definitively migratory. Some migration can be expected with some subpopulations from the northern-most...

It's the size / width of the forepaw and the width of spacing of the claws that produces scratch marks identifiable as those of a black bear. The fingers of the human hand will easily follow the typically four parallel scratches through their typically four- to 12-inch course down the tree. No...

Hey, Jeff- I couldn't agree more. I did, many moons ago ... Spring semester, 1961, actually..., take a course at Penn State in animal behavior - it was double-listed in the Psychology and Zoology departments. It was fascinating and dealt predominantly with a variety of serious attempts to...

I've only seen Google Earth images a few times - my iMac can't handle it, gotta use my wife's (shudder) PC* - and observed the same thing about water. My best guess was that it was related to the angle of the sun when each image was recorded and, since they weren't all recorded on the same day...

Hi, Jeff- I'm aware of the consensus that tree scratching by bears is a territorial behavior, I'm just unaware of any substantive proof of that commonly held belief. I'm always leery about conflating "commonly held opinion / consensus" with "fact / truth". I've no problem with recognizing that...

Hi, Jeff, I don't know, and I don't know if it is known. I do know that the act of scratching by those clawed beasts that do it does contribute to limiting claw length and promotes fragmentation of the distal keratin with consequent exposure or a newer, sharper terminus of the claw, but if I...

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this before. When I've spent time in areas with healthy black bear populations (north-central PA, the Adirondacks, Algonquin Provincial Park, and southern and south-east Alaska) the single most common sign of their presence wasn't on the ground (where one...

Yeah; and the pelt looses color and gets dry and crispy once its stripped from the carcass... Dave

Probably ought to get out of town more, Ben ... Juuuuuust kiddin'! The birds most call "pigeons" and see in lofts on city roof-tops are the domesticated form of the wild bird called a "rock dove" (Columba livia) which are found in many distant, remore, wilderness areas. They commonly nest in...

I agree with Chris- re: Coopers or sharpie - both, in adult plumage, can have a distinct "gun-metal blue-grey" cast to their dark feathers of the head, body and wings ... as can a mature pergrine falcon. The adult harrier/marsh hawk is usually a lighter blue-grey and invariably has a white...

Just a point about the 1973 numbers of bald eagle breeding pairs. This article, as well as several others e've seen have stated that there were "410" or "470" or even "717" breeding pairs in the "continental United States". What they be saying is that that was the pre-1973 estimate for the...