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This Week’s Weirdest Wild Animal Incidents

This orphaned bobcat kitten is one of two being cared for after they were found on a train car in Tuscola, Ill. It is suspected the young cats and their mother lived in the car. But the mother apparently wasn’t aboard when the train left Louisiana Tuesday. (AP Photo/The News-Gazette, Darrell Hoemann)

This Week in Wild Animals for May 24, 2013

A 51-year-old man shot a red-bellied woodpecker that was eating plums from trees that his mother had given him. The man was sorry, he said, but he was very attached to those plums.

After setting out to collect 67 million walleye eggs this spring, the state of South Dakota announced it was only able to collect 60 million walleye eggs, leaving South Dakota 7 million walleye eggs short of its “walleye egg-collection goal.”

Scientists diagnosed swine flu in elephant seals, deer were mysteriously going bald in California, surgeons removed a 4-pound hairball the size of a basketball from a tiger’s throat, and a columnist casually wondered if dolphins might have the ability to detect cancer in human beings: “Probably not,” the columnist conceded. “But what if the rather far-fetched idea were true?”

The people of Idaho were asked “not to pick up newborn fawns.”

Investigators in Florida threatened to bring federal charges against two men, one of whom jumped on a manatee and tried to ride it. (The other man filmed him, then posted the video online. He also said, “Jump it! Jump it! Jump it!” as his buddy got ready to leap.) Elsewhere in Florida, a law enforcement officer filmed a woman in a bikini mounting a manatee, then holding its tail and using the animal like a kickboard. These incidents come amid much Tea Party-inflected vitriol over the manatee situation in Florida, particularly over federal regulations restricting the individual right to manatee-riding. As one activist has put it, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to get into state right issues like riding the manatee.”

Two bobcat kittens accidentally got on a train in Louisiana without their mother and rode all the way to Illinois.

After a visitor to a Hewlett-Packard office in Boise was attacked by a goose, a company memo advised any employee approached by a goose on office grounds to “maintain a neutral demeanor toward the goose….[D]o not cower, hide your face, turn your back or run from the goose.” And in Hungary, authorities were investigating whether donkeys had pulled a 65-year-old former firefighter off his motorcycle, dragged him 55 feet, then bit and trampled him to death. “Donkeys are known for their kick, but it is rare that they kill people,” one news report noted. “The donkeys are being held for observation.”

A woman in Corpus Christi found a snake in her toilet, and a couple in San Antonio found a baby opossum in their toilet. (“It was just sitting there,” said the woman, “scared and kind of shaky.”)

day-to-day operations, both in the field and in the office.”

In New Jersey, a “rogue” wild turkey flew into a moving car, shattering its window, and a wandering goat, described as having conspicuously calloused knees, caused a four-car accident on the Pulaski Skyway. A squirrel cut power to 1,000 customers in Pennsylvania.

Australia was killing 10,000 feral horses. New Zealand was fishing dozens of “feral goldfish” out of a lake.

A dog named Tucker was riding around in a boat sniffing out killer whales’ poop from up to a mile away, and bees in Croatia were being taught to smell land mines. A dolphin being trained by the U.S. Navy to detect undersea mines off the coast of San Diego instead discovered a kind of 11-foot-long brass torpedo that hasn’t been used since 1898. “We find things all the time,” said the Navy dolphin trainer. “It was kind of in our way.”

The city of Barcelona declared war on pigeons, embarking on a multi-faceted, 60-million-Euro eradication effort while simultaneously conceding that total eradication would be impossible, and that a city without pigeons is merely “a utopia.”

A black bear padded around backyards in Los Angeles, and another black bear and her cub were loitering outside the Krystal restaurant in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Somewhere in rural Massachussetts, near Podunk Road, a bear leaned against the door of a home, trying to come inside. Other black bears made news in North Carolina, Michigan, Connecticut, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. These bears were reportedly “swimming,” “lumbering,” “heading into the woods,” “moving around,” “roaming around a wooded area,” and “crouching next to a tree,” respectively.

A bear fell out of a tree in Tampa, after wildlife officials had shot it with a tranquilizer and set up pads and cushions beneath it. And in Wisconsin, a woman used her husband’s shotgun to beat the 200-pound black bear that was attacking him over the head. (She could not figure out how to load the weapon.)

A U.S. Customs station in Los Angeles discovered a dead primate in the mail, which appeared to be partially mummified. This was a day after agents intercepted a half pound of elephant meat being shipped to Fresno.

An old sailor in Mississippi described outsmarting a raccoon.

Planet Earth observed “World Turtle Day.” America proved it was willing to perform acupuncture on hypothermic sea turtles, if it has to.