Roll of tigers in progress

I’ve been wanting to write a post about the animals killed near Zanesville, Ohio, last week, but I’m not sure how to say everything I want to say. I did have the idea, though, to draw a tribute to the 49 unfortunate mammals who died, and I’ve been working on it the past several days, which is one reason why there hasn’t been a Daily Mammal for a while.

Tigers in progress

So far, I’ve drawn 14 of the 18 Bengal tigers, though I have yet to color them. I’m not going to color them as elaborately as I do the Daily Mammals, and you can see that I was a lot more general with my line work, too. After the tigers, I’ll draw the 17 lions. Lions are sexually dimorphic and eight of them were lionesses, so they won’t be as monotonous as the tigers. But drawing the tigers has become a bit of a sacred act, in a way, an act of witness and regret.

Tiger (click image to enlarge)

Before we leave Primorye at the end of our weekish-long visit, we must pay tribute to the tiger, the animal that inspired the book that inspired this week’s theme. Early in The Tiger, John Vaillant says,

“If Russia is what we think it is, then tigers should not be possible there. After all, how could a creature so closely associated with stealth and grace and heat survive in a country so heavy-handed, damaged, and cold? The nearest jungle is two thousand miles away. For these and other reasons, neither Russia the Idea nor Russia the Place are useful ways of describing the home of the Siberian tiger, which is, itself, a misnomer. This subspecies is known locally—and formally—as the Amur tiger, and it lives, in fact, beyond Siberia.”

A few pages later, he gives us a very vivid description of this most powerful of beasts:

“Of the six surviving subspecies of tiger, the Amur is the only one habituated to arctic conditions. In addition to having a larger skull than other subspecies, it carries more fat and a heavier coat, and these give it a rugged, primitive burliness that is missing from its sleeker tropical cousins…To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature.”

I love that “primordial calligraphy” and of course that last idea, that we are fortunate to coexist with tigers. As I’ve said before, one thing that this Daily Mammal project has given me is a huge sense of awe and wonder at the beauty and variety of life here on this planet, and for the miracle of evolution. I am indeed grateful to live in the same world as the tiger, even if, as Vaillant says in his book, “it alone can mete out death at will.”

Leopard (click image to enlarge)

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Today, we visit the smallest of the big cats at home in Primorye, a fascinatingly diverse region of far eastern Russia that you can read a bit more about in last Monday’s post on the musk deer. In that post, I quoted John Valliant’s The Tiger in saying that only in Primorye, and nowhere else in the world, “can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the same river as a leopard.” I have no reason to doubt that, but leopards are pretty adaptable. The IUCN says that “the leopard has the widest habitat tolerance of any Old World felid, ranging from rainforest to desert,” and in that range is the “boreal jungle” of Primorye, as well regions ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Leopards are also quite adaptable in terms of what food they’ll eat, not disdaining to eat a beetle, a baboon, or a wildebeest. Walker’s Mammals of the World informs us that when leopards hunt, “larger animals are seized by the throat and killed by strangulation. Smaller prey may be dispatched by a bite to the back of the neck.” Leopards are so strong and so good at climbing trees that they will store carcasses bigger than themselves in trees to eat later.

If you’re wondering about leopards and panthers and whether they’re the same animal, let Ivan T. Sanderson, my favorite mustachioed, swashbuckling naturalist, set you straight with this passage from Living Mammals of the World:

“Before anything else is said about leopards, it is essential to dispose of the age-old argument about the names ‘panther’ and ‘leopard.’ Fairly important men have been challenged to duels for either affirming or denying that there is a difference—i.e., that there are two different animals. There are not: the two names denote the same animal or animals—for they vary greatly—though they may be used to differentiate between large and small, or between light and dark individuals in any one area. All the Great Cats that can roar are now officially panthers, as their technical name implies.”

I wonder if there’s any point in trying to find out just who was involved in those duels.

Sable (click image to enlarge)

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Welcome back to Primorye, an ecologically diverse region in the far east of Russia that we’re visiting this week. (Read Monday’s musk deer post for more about the area.) Today’s mammal is the sable, he of the beautiful coat, prized by rich ladies the world over. Sables are carnivores, related to weasels, skunks, ferrets, and so on, and they live in Finland, China, Japan, North Korea, Mongolia, and Poland, in addition to Russia.

According to a New York Times article called “Behind the $100,000 Sable Coat, a Siberian Hunter,” from 2000, during the Soviet era, most sable fur came from farms, but post USSR, the fur-farming system has given way to hunters, and now (or rather, in 2000), most fur for fur coats comes from wild sables. That article begins, “Wearing a hat made from pelts of hunting dogs that had disappointed him…” Another article, this one from the Japan Times, is headlined “Cuteness belies killers’ true nature,” but the sable is not enough of a killer to make a match for a man with a gun.

Banded linsang (click image to enlarge)

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The banded linsang is a viverrid, a carnivore in the style of civets and genets: slender, long, cat-like hunters, graceful of movement and beautiful of coat. Banded linsangs live in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. They make nests out of sticks and leaves between tree roots or in burrows, and they eat small mammals, such as squirrels and spiny rats; birds and bird eggs; lizards; and insects. Walker’s Mammals of the World assures us that “unlike many viverrids, Prionodon seems to be free from odor.”

Coco drew a linsang as well.

Banded linsang by Coco, age 12

Coyote (click image to enlarge)

Here’s an idea! Why don’t I point you to two embarrassingly bad old drawings in a row? I drew the coyote as mammal number 65, way back in 2007 (oh God, it’s been four years and I have barely a year’s worth of mammals…). Look how my drawing style has changed: very much for the better, yes? Looking over that post is bittersweet because the drawing was by request of Maleta Scrivner, a lifelong family friend who has since died. I wish I could have drawn her a better coyote back then, but heck, I think she liked just about anything I drew, or at least that’s what she let me think!

In homeschool this year, we read a book that my dad bought for me when I was 8, Coyote & by Joe Hayes. It’s a collection of Native American coyote trickster stories, and I think we’d all highly recommend it. One thing we learned was that if you want to make Coyote laugh, call him by the secret name that always gets him tickled: Yellow-Behind-the-Ears.

Here’s Coco’s drawing of the old trickster.

Coyote by Coco, age 12

Tibetan sand fox (click image to enlarge)

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By request! A Tibetan sand fox, which is also known as a Tibetan fox or as a sand fox. These foxes live on the Tibetan Plateau in India, China, Nepal, and Tibet. The Tibetan Plateau is both the largest and the highest plateau in the world, and I know from Coco’s school report on Tibet this year that it’s called the roof of the world.

The foxes seem to mostly eat black-lipped pikas, chirpy little furry guys in the rabbit family. In fact, pikas may be pretty much the only thing Tibetan foxes eat, which would make them obligate predators: the biological term for a predator that eats mostly just one type of prey. That reliance on pikas means the Tibetan sand fox could be in trouble if people continue their current campaigns of poisoning pikas to control the pika population. Right now, though, the foxes are doing all right, endangerment-wise.