Ilya the Manatee Recovering, Impressing Ladies with His Sweetness

Ilya, the Florida manatee rescued from New York harbor two weeks ago, should be well enough to be released in the Florida Keys in about a month, says Dr. Maya Rodriguez, the veterinarian at the Miami Seaquarium, which supplied the picture of Ilya (left) swimming with his poolmate.

"We expect him to get a clean medical mill in next couple weeks," says Dr. Rodriguez. Identified by his mangled tail and white scar on his forehead, Ilya at least didn't pick up any new distinguishing scars on his journey up to Cape Cod that perplexed marine biologists. 

Stuck in the cold water of New York harbor, Ilya initially suffered cold stress, which can shut down manatees' long digestive track and immune system. He lost about 100 of his 1,200 pounds, had low blood sugar and was having trouble digesting, Dr. Rodriguez says. A video (below) of the event shows him getting wrapped in mylar survival blankets and getting spritzed with water to keep moist.

Ilya is recuperating in a 82 degree saltwater pool at the Seaquarium with an orphaned, female,  18-month-old manatee picked up in the Everglades and named Glade. Normally Dr. Rodriguez would be reluctant to put such a big male in with her but Ilya has been very gentle. "He's just a really docile manatee," Dr. Rodriguez says. 

Ilya is unusual among manatees, which normally handle food just with their prehensible lips, because he grabs with his flippers. "He's all flippers," says Dr. Rodriguez. Ilya, who touches noses with Glade, has even taught his new companion to pick up lettuce with flippers.

Since the water in Florida is still warm, Dr. Rodriguez will wait a bit to release him so he isn't tempted to head north again. Manatees need to stay in Florida (often by the warm water of hot springs or power plant outflows) over the winter but migrate in all directions away in the summer. Ilya was caught on the third attempt near the outflow of the Conoco-Phillips in the Arthur Kill, which separates New Jersey from Staten Island. 

Ilya kept coming back for the 75 degree water even though it was in a heavily industrialized area; the rest of the harbor was in the 50s. Plant workers kept a close eye out for him and alerted rescuers when he returned. The video shows the rescue workers lining up and splashing the water to goad him towards the giant net. A huge team of oil workers, volunteers from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, local EMT divers and federal wildlife agencies pitched in to save the endangered manatee.

Wanna see a manatee at one of the places they huddle to keep warm this winter? Try these hotspots.

Destination Wildlife: Another Must-Have Book for Wildlife Watchers

Literary agent Pamela Brodowsky people who travel to see animals will want have to dream about travel adventures. Destination Wildlife: An international site-by-site guide to the best places to experience endangered, rare and fascinating animals an their habitats gives you places and animals to aspire to see around the globe.

The book is exactly what you'd want to have on hand through a cold winter weekend when you're dreaming about where you could travel next year. You'll need some other books to get into the specifics of travel to all those destinations, but this is a nice way to browse your options. Written with the National Wildlife Federation, you can be pretty sure these are ways to see animals that aren't going to hurt or exploit them.

Brodowsky is extremely diplomatic in describing the one place in the book I'd question: the wild horses of Assateague and Chincoteague. She describes the roundup of horses, some of which will be sold, adding "Depending on your personal preference, you might want to join or avoid the pony-swim crowd." Fair enough, but I'd go further and say that many people who love wild horses would be disturbed by the round-up--especially since the horses are managed so differently on each side of the Maryland-Virginia border. The Maryland folks use the Humane Society's birth control procedures (and allow dogs); the Virginian manage the herd to sell off horses every year to support their fire department (and ban dogs from the island, even inside cars). Which would you rather support? 

I would have liked to see some glossy color pictures and maps, a fuller representation of wildlife everywhere and a greater willingness to consider places outside big national parks and sanctuaries. Animaltourism.com tries to give people practical wildlife options close to home. But we need all kinds of wildlife watchers and guides to promote sustainable, responsible wildlife watching. Brodowsky does uncover a few rare gems, like Monkeyland, a primate sanctuary in South Africa, and specific inns to stay at to see the friendly gray whales off Baja, California. I bet her book inspires lots of great adventures.

A Scourge of Bunny Rabbits?

Stadspark (City Park) in Antwerp, Belgium, has bunnies like Central Park has squirrels. At first I didn't believe a local who told me of the roaming rabbits, but they aren't hard to find. In fact, they were hard to miss. Black, white, multi-color rabbits that had clearly been released from careless pet owners, nonchalantly gathered in clusters and hopped across paths.

Antwerp is not alone. It's just one of many places around the world facing a surging rabbit population. Stockholm parks managers kill thousands of rabbits a year, so many that this year they decided to start burning them as fuel. England is worried of a rabbit surge. Even Mike Ballast, the composer who wrote theme song for the embattled rabbits of Watership Down, has been wiping out rabbits on his estate. In British Columbia, the town of Kelowna has been hunting bunnies with air rifles, but will now catch them and try to give them to rabbit rescue groups or neuter them like feral cats.

What's going on here? There are two kinds of rabbits: wild and dumped pets.Both groups are benefiting from some changes: in Europe 95% of rabbits were wiped out by the myxomatosis virus in the 1950s. But resistant rabbits thrived and over the decades the population came back to levels not seen in many people's lifetimes. Some also think global warming lets them overwinter in places that were once inhospitable. And there's the lack of natural predators. Or even unnatural predators, like unleashed dogs, which have vanished since the 1950s.

The dumped pets generally can't survive in a real forest; they starve to death or are eaten by predators, according to the House Rabbit Society. A predator-free city park with human feeders can be another story. Some of the rabbits I saw in Antwerp were babies--too cute to have been dumped. So I think they're successful enough to breed. People who dump pets are hard to catch--unless the cities start requiring microchips in rabbits, which could quickly put an end to the problem.

What's odd is that there's been little effort to introduce natural predators. That's admittedly difficult in a city park. But fox and rabbits are the classic population cycle relationship biologists have been using for decades. English pest control agents are using ferrets to chase them out of holes. If there are any natural predators out there, they're likely to start surging on their own with this healthy diet.

PEER to Sue for More Manatee Sanctuaries after Disturbing Videos of Manatee Harassment

About two years ago some local Florida manatee lovers took some disturbing video of tourists and tour guides pestering manatees. Tracy Colson and Steve Kingry posted shots on YouTube of tour guides holding manatees so that tourists could touch them. Some tourists also kicked them and tried to sit on the sea cows. Finally, about two years later, something might actually be done to protect this endangered species whose population has dwindled to about 3,000 from Florida hooligans.

Spurred on by the videos, this summer the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) officially asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban "Swim with Manatee" programs. Tourists aren't supposed to get within 50 yards of dolphins or 100 yards of whales in NOAA's (voluntary) guidelines for those tour operators. But at least there is some enforcement for whale boats. NOAA also won't let tour operators show ads that have people interacting with, chasing, petting or riding whale or dolphins in the Dolphin Sense and Whale Smart programs. So how can tours advertise swimming with the far more endangered manatee?



Before I had heard about any of this going on in Florida, I saw ads online for sleazy outfits around Cancun that advertised Swim With Manatees programs. Yuck, I thought. Don't people know that manatees (or any animals) don't want to be forced to swim with them. But I had no idea there were plenty of places in Florida getting away with it, too. Then I read an incredible story travel writer Andrew Mersmann did for Passport Magazine last year about Florida manatee tours that end up harassing manatees.

Mersmann says people in the industry know exactly which are the bad ones. He went on both to see what was really going on. The captain of one tour told the groups: “It’s a good day if you see a manatee, but it’s not a great day unless you touch one.”  You are, of course, not supposed to pet the manatees any more than you're supposed to cuddle a polar bear. The difference is manatees can't fight back. And even when they try to get away, videos posted on YouTube show, the tour guides restrain them so the tourists can play.

What's wrong with swimming with manatees? Morally, if you bother manatees, they stop what they're doing. Manatees don't have frivolous hobbies; whatever they're doing, they need to do it to survive. They're an endangered species. They need to eat grass, nurse from their mothers, sleep, come up to the surface to breathe.



Legally pestering, holding, riding, kicking manatees--again, all documented--is a violation of Florida state law, the Endangered Species and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which bans "taking" a manatee. Taking is defined doing anything on purpose or by negligence "to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." It goes on to clarify that it includes "the restraint or detention of a marine mammal, no matter how temporary...causing disruption of behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering."

The Marine Mammal Commission has recommended not allowing people to approach within 10 feet of manatees. (If they come to you, that's fine. And that's exactly what skilled manatee watchers say will happend if people would just be patient.) The manatees, Mersmann writes often leave lagoons as soon as the tour boats show up.

In August the Fish and Wildlife Service basically said no to the request to ban the programs, reasoning, more or less, that harassing manatees was already illegal. And that they could only provide some protections to threatened animals and since manatees are already endangered--a notch worse--they're out of luck.

"They saw that harasment of mantees is illegal," says PEER staff attorney Christine Erickson. "What they're allowing people to do is causing harassment." So PEER is going to take the FWS to court. They want to get more sanctuaries set up and ban the swim with programs in the winter, which the manatees need to be in the warm shallow water to survive. The sanctuaries are small areas with the warmest water where manatees can go and people can't. The manatees know that and retreat there when they get tired of people. Let's hope this

Let's hope this finally means the manatees will get a break.

For Sure It's a Cougar in Kansas--Let the Cougar Hysteria Begin

Cougar caught in NM Camera Trap Photo courtesy of J.N. Stuart

A century after the cougar officially disappeared from Kansas, an alert hunter on a tree stand got several photos that for the first time since 1904 prove there's a live mountain lion in the state since 1904. This may set off another round of what Jeff Beringer, a biologist with the state of Missouri, told the Wall Street Journal was "cougar hysteria." As the population of mountain lions grows in the west and expands east, biologists at the Cougar Network are mapping the stunning number of confirmed sightings that now hit every state west of the Mississippi and eight states east of it, including Illinois, New York and Maine.

The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks made the confirmation just through the photo--they didn't find any scat, hair, tracks or other traces. The hunter snapped seven pictures in the brief moments the cat examined bait corn--moments in which most big cat witnesses don't think clearly enough to grab their camera. A Department spokesman Mark Shoup says the cougar never stopped walking and left the area after he looked up at the hunter. According to McClatchy newspapers, the hunter took the pictures on Oct. 12 in northwest WaKeeney in Trego County.

Many cougars have been seen by people in Kansas in the last couple decades, even though the closest established population is in Colorado, hundreds of miles away. Audubon of Kansas has been keeping track of all the potential mountain lion sightings and rumored shootings. One big cat was confirmed (legally) killed a couple years ago. But one dead cougar doesn't mean that there are any left in the population. Especially since bachelor cats are known to roam hundreds of miles looking for a female.

Other states are sure to get more of these successful sightings as years go by. Kansans have been so firmly convinced that they had mountain lions already, they're probably not going to go cougar hysterical about it.

Ilya the Manatee May Be Going Wrong Way--Back to NYC

Ilya, the missing manatee, may be headed the wrong way--back up to New York City, instead of down south to Florida and the warm water he needs to survive. Someone saw what they thought was a manatee near Bayonne, NJ, but by the time rescuers came out, there was no animal, says Bob Schoelkopf, founding director of Brigantine's Marine Mammal Stranding Center, which would rescue Ilya if they could just find and catch him.

FWC photo by Tom Reinert

Ilya, who is 16 and known for his missing tail chunk and a white scar on his head, befuddled scientists by swimming from his native Miami all the way up to Cape Cod this summer. Now he needs to get to waters at least 68 degrees--the Carolinas at this time of year--or he could die.

The last time anyone definitely saw Ilya was when he ate a crate of lettuce from biologists outside the Conoco Phillips refinery in Linden, NJ, last Friday. Then he disappeared into the dark, cold waters of the Arthur Kill, the 10-mile tidal estuary between New Jersey and Staten Island. If that was him near Bayonne, that puts him in the Kill Van Kull, a shorter passage that's a few miles closer to the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan and the heavy traffic of the Port of Newark.

But rescuers are dubious it really was Ilya. It's not so much that they think there's a second manatee up here--though one did spend the summer in Raritan Bay. Schoelkopf says he didn't get the spotter's name (and manatee identification credentials) and the call came in eight hours after the supposed encounter. Marine creatures can just be hard to ID. "I've had Coast Guard people tell me there's a whale and calf trying to get up a waterfall and we get there and it's two logs," he says. Manatees are such a rare sight, people--especially northerners--could easily get it wrong. When seals turn up in winter, Schoelkopf says, he gets calls about "sea lions, walruses, anything."

Ilya was drawn to Linden by the plant's warm water discharge, so Schoelkopf called four power plants on the Jersey Shore to ask them to look out for Ilya. In Florida, power plants have become such a popular hang-out in the winter, biologists from Florida's Fish and Wildlife Commission use the gathering to take a census. The New Jersey plants area already on the look-out for stranded sea turtles, who are also drawn to their warm water, Schoelkopf explains. (A rare and endangered Green Sea Turtle recently turned up in Rumson with cold shock, he says.) In northern New Jersey, the Linden plant is the only one.

If anyone does see the manatee, the stranding network is ready to go with a net at a moment's notice. They have a salt water they put on the ideal manatee temperature of 74 this week just for Ilya. If they can catch him, they'll bring him to Brigantine and warm him up for a few days before getting him to Florida, probably by an awaiting Coast Guard cargo plane.

If you see the manatee, call the Marine Mammal Stranding Center's 24-hour number: (609) 266-0538. Try to take a picture and email it to mmsc@verizon.net

Wanna see a manatee not in danger? Try these places.

Which Animal is Having More Fun? The Horny Parrot or Spiteful Dolphin?

Is it the horny, endangered parrot, pointed out by Zoologix? (This flightless Kakapo name Sirocco was hand-raised and imprinted on people. So it's only natural he wants to hook-up with people. Watch out, he's looking for more friends on facebook)

Or the spiteful dolphins, who flick jellyfish out of the sea at every opportunity?