Burrowing owl (click image to enlarge)

A few years ago, I bought a copy of Mammal Tracks and Sign, which includes a sidebar about the importance of having a basic comfort with and knowledge of the natural world before you can start to track. The book recommended a program called Kamana, an at-your-own-pace naturalist training program. I asked my husband Ted for the program for Christmas and got it, and then I did nothing with it for a couple of years.

Then we adopted our kids, Theo and Coco, and then we realized that the best bet for them was homeschooling. We homeschooled Theo last year, and this year his sister joined up. I brought out my Kamana book and all four of us started working through it as a major part of our homeschool curriculum.

And it’s amazing! The first book is divided into two “trails.” The first, which we’ve completed, is about becoming more aware of your surroundings. The exercises in it have been so helpful and fun to us. We’ve just started the second trail, which involves learning about the different life forms in our area. (We are stalled on the mammal chapter at the moment, strangely enough.)

In part of the book, you practice using your senses in a new way, and you look to various animals as inspiration. The kids and I drew the animals we were learning from, and I thought I’d share them with you as a special series on the Daily Mammal. (I don’t know where Theo’s drawings are so I haven’t scanned them, but if he gives them to me, maybe you’ll be able to see them in some of these posts. In the meantime, enjoy Coco’s beautiful work.)

The first tool we practiced using was our Owl Eyes. Because of their shape, owls’ eyes are fixed in place: owls move their heads instead of their eyes. When we practiced Owl Eyes, we literally perched, on a wall, a rock, or the couch, and kept our eyes still, relaxing until we could make full use of our peripheral vision, which let us see the sky, the ground, and all around without moving. When we did want to look somewhere else, we moved our head instead of our eyes. You can take in more than you think using just the “corners” of your eyes if you practice. This can be useful out in the field if you catch some movement and don’t want to startle an animal by suddenly turning your head. Owl Eyes was the first step toward broadening our awareness in general: we’re learning to notice not just what’s directly in front of us, but the bigger picture.

Below is Coco’s barn owl. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more beautiful drawing, honestly.

Barn owl by Coco, age 12

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.

Long-tailed goral (click image to enlarge)

Long-tailed goral by Coco, age 12

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Here is a long-tailed goral, another mammal of Primorye, the region in the far east of Russia that we’re visiting this week. If you’d like a brief introduction to the place and why we’re there, check out Monday’s musk deer. The long-tailed goral is a goat that lives in China, Russia, and north and south Korea. It’s rare for a goat to have a long tail, so this goral has something to boast about. There are about 1,300 long-tailed gorals in all the world. Isn’t that remarkable? There are 6 billion of us—just the one species, Homo sapiens—and only 1,300 of this other species. They’re currently classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and they are a natural monument in South Korea.

According to Animal Diversity Web, long-tailed gorals (which are also called Chinese gorals) “communicate with one another in times of emergency with wheezing alarm sounds…During mating season, males attract females with a “zer… zer” or “ze-ze-ze” call. When females approach and are ready to encourage a male, they make a whistling noise.” That is also what I do when I’m ready to encourage a male, coincidentally.

Siberian flying squirrel (click image to enlarge)

Siberian flying squirrel by Coco, age 12

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This week, we’re looking at a few mammals from Primorye, a region in the far east of Russia that you can learn a bit more about in my post for Monday’s musk deer. For today, Coco and I drew Siberian flying squirrels. They are quite common throughout the forests of northern Europe and Asia, where they glide through the treetops by night, snacking on seeds, leaves, buds, and catkins, which are downy, flowering spikes on some trees. An idyllic lifestyle to be sure, a lifestyle from a magical story.

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.

Northern red-backed vole and Korean field mouse (click image to enlarge)

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This week, we’re meeting the mammals of Primorye, a region in far eastern Russia. (See yesterday’s musk deer for a little more about that fascinating area of the planet.) Well, it’s late and I’ve had a rough day, so…I don’t have much to say about these two rodents, other than that the one on the left is the northern red-backed vole and the one on the right is the Korean field mouse, and of course they both live in Primorye. Do enjoy the drawing, though, and I will probably be more loquacious on tomorrow’s mammal.