Manatees, Ospreys and Bald Eagles. Is there a wildlife expert in the house?
- Thread starter Princess
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I see ospreys and "dugongs"(which are our version of manatees in australia) all the time.
I've never seen an osprey being a crazy bastard exactly. Would love to hear your story.
There's an enormous colony of fruitbats near my house that are constantly watched over by a pair of sea eagles, if you watch them for long enough you'll see one of the eagles pluck a fruitbat out of the sky, that looks pretty crazy. They fly up underneath them and flip upside down right at the last second to grab them, its really cool.
I've never seen an osprey being a crazy bastard exactly. Would love to hear your story.
There's an enormous colony of fruitbats near my house that are constantly watched over by a pair of sea eagles, if you watch them for long enough you'll see one of the eagles pluck a fruitbat out of the sky, that looks pretty crazy. They fly up underneath them and flip upside down right at the last second to grab them, its really cool.
wow, Dr. Lou, that would be exciting......
Well, it appears that I posted my initial post from a friends computer, so I apologize for the confusion.
Regarding Ospreys: We were fishing with live bait on light tackle all week. As the week progressed we found all of the fowl to be quite bold in approaching the boat to snatch any minnows that were thrown overboard. On several occasions, gulls snatched the minnows right off the hook as soon as they hit the water. That didn't surprise me having observed gulls before. But the boldness of the Ospreys was pretty shocking. At one point, an Osprey swooped on our bait and became entangled in the line. We had to haul him up to the boat and untangle him. That was dicey, as you can imagine. Lucky we didn't get to scratched up. That's a big bird with some nasty talons.
Here's the weird part. My buddy foul-hooked something at one point. At first we thought it was a turtle, but as we got it up to the boat, it became apparent it was no turtle. The water is pretty dark there, so I couldn't get a great look at it, but whatever it was, it had little flipper/feet looking things. We cut the line. We assumed it to be a baby mannatee, but after getting home and looking at pics of baby mannatees, I'm still not sure.
How big is a newborn mannatee, and how well could one swim? This thing probably weighed about 20-30lbs, and fought like hell as soon as it saw the boat. If it wasn't a mannatee, any ideas on what it might have been?
Regarding Ospreys: We were fishing with live bait on light tackle all week. As the week progressed we found all of the fowl to be quite bold in approaching the boat to snatch any minnows that were thrown overboard. On several occasions, gulls snatched the minnows right off the hook as soon as they hit the water. That didn't surprise me having observed gulls before. But the boldness of the Ospreys was pretty shocking. At one point, an Osprey swooped on our bait and became entangled in the line. We had to haul him up to the boat and untangle him. That was dicey, as you can imagine. Lucky we didn't get to scratched up. That's a big bird with some nasty talons.
Here's the weird part. My buddy foul-hooked something at one point. At first we thought it was a turtle, but as we got it up to the boat, it became apparent it was no turtle. The water is pretty dark there, so I couldn't get a great look at it, but whatever it was, it had little flipper/feet looking things. We cut the line. We assumed it to be a baby mannatee, but after getting home and looking at pics of baby mannatees, I'm still not sure.
How big is a newborn mannatee, and how well could one swim? This thing probably weighed about 20-30lbs, and fought like hell as soon as it saw the boat. If it wasn't a mannatee, any ideas on what it might have been?
I've seen that on a documentary (David Attenborough, Life of Birds). It looks awesome!
The eagles wouldn't do much damage to the bat population however. Bat colonies are huge.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
This is a phenomenon that has been repeated since humans began to become the dominant species on this planet, and it is still happening as your experience shows.15ofthe19 said:
Any animal who eats the same food we do can't help noticing that wherever humans congregate, there is either a pretty impressive food supply, a flock of domesticated prey animals, or else the humans are about to bring down some remarkably large game.
The preprogrammed instinctive behavior of most animals makes them reluctant to do more than regard us as competitors. But every species, especially the social ones, has a few individuals whose intelligence and curiosity allow them to overcome these instincts and learn to be camp followers. Rats, raccoons, hyenas, crows -- the smaller scavengers are naturally first in line because we don't guard our garbage very carefully. But fresh-food lovers like parrots and large carnivores like wolves also learn that living on the fringe of human settlements or following our hunting and gathering parties out into the wilderness can make life pretty easy.
Wolves/dogs (DNA shows that they're really one species) were the most successful, voluntarily forming a multi-species community with Mesolithic humans. They could smell the woolly mammoth five miles away, run fast enough to catch up with it, and harrass it into confusion, waiting for us to bring the spears that could kill it and the fire that made the meat so tasty. Other species also eventually moved in voluntarily and were welcomed into Earth's first and only multi-species community, including cats who kept the rodents ouy of our granaries and pigs who cleaned up the trash. (Well maybe it turned out not to be such a good deal for the pigs.)
Other species were not interested in becoming second-class citizens of our cities like dogs, but they lost their fear of humans and became bold enough to dispute our ownership of our catch. If you think fishing with ospreys is tough, talk to someone who's dined at an outdoor cafe in Latin America and had to deal with marauding macaws.
I don't live where there are manatees so I can't tell you for sure. But that sounds like the right weight for a baby, proportional to their adult size. Remember that most mammals are born much larger in proportion to their adult weight because they don't have huge heads like we do, that threaten to block the birth canal. Because of that, their brains are also much more developed than ours. Baby giraffes literally hit the ground walking. Fully aquatic mammals are all born with excellent swimming skills or they couldn't survive.15ofthe19 said:
There aren't very many vertebrates besides fish who have "flippers." Aquatic turtles, but you're sure it wasn't one of those. You'd recognize a crocodile I'm sure. You don't have fresh-water dolphins in Australia and I don't think you have seals in your rivers either. There are a handful of species of aquatic lizards, but baby lizards look like adult lizards, you wouldn't be wondering what it was. I don't see what else it could be but a dugong/manatee. People have been misidentifying them for centuries. They are almost certainly responsible for many "mermaid" sightings; those sailors must have been at sea for a really long time to mistake a manatee for a human female.
