Primorye Week: Leopard (Panthera pardus)

by JR Kinyak on October 3, 2011

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

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.

Tagged as: cat, ivan, primorye

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Primorye Week: Long-tailed Goral (Naemorhedus caudatus)

by JR Kinyak on October 1, 2011

in Theme Weeks,Ungulates

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.

Tagged as: coco, goat, people, primorye

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Primorye Week: Siberian Flying Squirrel (Pteromys volans)

by JR Kinyak on September 29, 2011

in Rodents,Theme Weeks

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.

Tagged as: coco, primorye, squirrel

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Primorye Week: Sable (Martes zibellina)

by JR Kinyak on September 28, 2011

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

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.

Tagged as: humans, primorye, threats

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Primorye Week: Two Rodents (Myodes rutilus and Apodemus peninsulae)

by JR Kinyak on September 27, 2011

in Rodents,Theme Weeks

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.

Tagged as: mouse, multiple, vole

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Primorye Week: Siberian Musk Deer (Moschus moschiferus)

by JR Kinyak on September 26, 2011

in Theme Weeks,Ungulates

Siberian musk deer (click image to enlarge)


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I’m reading a book called The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant. It’s about Siberian tigers and tiger trackers in the far east of Russia, a region called Primorsky Krai, the Maritime Province, or Primorye. It’s a fascinating place, closer geographically to Beijing and even to Australia than to Moscow, and amazingly biologically diverse. Vaillant says that “Primorye is also the meeting place of four distinct bioregions,” the taiga, the steppes, the subtropics, and the far-northern forest:

“Here, timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures will compete for carrion with saber-beaked jungle crows. Birch, spruce, oak, and fir can grow in the same valley as wild kiwis, giant lotus, and sixty-foot lilacs, while pine trees bearing edible nuts may be hung with wild grapes and magnolia vines. These, in turn, feed and shelter herds of wild boar and families of musk deer whose four-inch fangs give them the appearance of evolutionary outtakes. Nowhere else can a wolverine, brown bear, or moose drink from the same river as a leopard, in a watershed that also hosts cork trees, bamboo, and solitary yews that predate the Orthodox Church. In the midst of this, Himalayan black bears build haphazard platforms in wild cherry trees that seem to fragile for the task, opium poppies nod in the sun, and ginseng keeps its secret in dappled shade.”

Beautiful, isn’t it? And inspiring to an amateur mammalogist like me. This week, we’ll look at some of the mammals of Primorye, like those mentioned above, beginning with today’s fellow, who isn’t Bunnicula, but rather the Siberian musk deer.

Musk deer, as their name suggests, are the traditional source of the musk that we use in perfume. Musk comes from a gland, or musk-pod, in the male musk deer, and generally, someone who wants that musk-pod will kill the deer for it. The musk deer has been so heavily hunted that it is now internationally protected, but still, poachers poach, and our friend’s numbers are declining.

Here is a link to a video from Arkive of the musk deer in action. It has powerful hind legs and weaker front ones, like a rabbit, and it moves through a series of bounds. I also like the sound of the cold wind in this video.
ARKive video - Siberian musk deer - overview

Tagged as: books, deer, humans, threats

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Colorado Chipmunk (Tamias quadrivittatus)

by JR Kinyak on September 23, 2011

in Rodents

Colorado chipmunk (click image to enlarge)


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The day after the kids and I drew this chipmunk (I haven’t scanned their drawings—sorry!), we rode the tram to the top of Sandia Peak here in Albuquerque. At the top, we stood on a deck overlooking the mountainside and the city below, and who should we spy skittering on the rocks in front of us but a handful of Colorado chipmunks! At first we thought we might just have Colorado chipmunks on the brain and that these were likely some other kind, but a look at my dad’s Field Guide to the Sandia Mountains helped confirm our identification of the chipmunks.

My Princeton field guide to the mammals of North America says, “CHIPMUNKS—This group of small, striped squirrels is easy to recognize, but it is very difficult to distinguish between the 22 different species. Easterners have it easy, with only one to choose from,” leaving the other 21 to form a chaotic overlapping mass of chipmunkitude for the westerner to tell apart.

Our family has been working on a fantastic naturalist training course (more on that someday soon), and one of our references for the course, Reader’s Digest North American Wildlife, says, “You should have little problem identifying mammals that you’ve had the luxury of observing out in the open for a long period of time. But if one crosses your path only briefly, try to extract from the encounter a general impression of its shape and color, and also a rough estimate of the size of its ears and the length of its tail. With such information at hand, you’ll have a much easier time giving the creature a name.”

Here’s a video of the Colorado chipmunk to help you identify it next time you meet it in the mountains.

Tagged as: books, chipmunk, naturalist

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