Trans and dire

 

- Are you assuming my species, human ape?

So the "de-extincted Dire Wolves" are really Grey Wolves who identify as Dire Wolves? Got it.   

Designer wolf

 

The Dire Wolf non-mystery un-thickens. Judging by this piece at the Live Science website, the "de-extincted Dire Wolves" aren´t even hybrids between Grey Wolves and Dire Wolves (Dire Wolf DNA has supposedly been extracted from ancient bones). Nor are they Grey Wolves with some Dire Wolf DNA inserted into their genomes. No, they are 100% Grey Wolves which has been designed to look like Dire Wolves by some "native" alterations to the Grey Wolf DNA?!

One thing that struck me was that the "de-extincted Dire Wolves" are all-white. But how do we know whether Dire Wolves (who disappeared 10,000 years ago) had white fur? I don´t think we do. So why are the animals white, then? Obviously because one of the fictitious "Dire Wolves" in the fantasy series "Game of Thrones" was white. One of the "de-extincted Dire Wolves" is even named after a rather notorious character in that show!

In other words, we are dealing with a kind of designer wolves (compare designer dogs). Could there be a market for these kinds of animals? Probably yes, but a resurrected "Aenocyon dirus" from prehistory it is not.      

Colossal´s "dire wolf" isn´t a dire wolf, experts say

Romulus and Remus

 

Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi are three dire wolves brought back from extinction by some crazy American start up. Or maybe not. It seems the "dire wolves" are really grey wolves genetically modified to look like the legendary extinct species (which may not have been a real wolf in the first place). 

But sure, the whole thing does have a certain Frankenstein-esque quality. If the three pups ever get fossilized, this may confuse genetically enhanced mad scientists in the far future. And yes, one of the puppies is named after a certain character in "Game of Thrones"!  

No, the dire wolf has not been brought back from extinction

Scientists say they have resurrected the dire wolf

Emerson´s dogman

 

OK, this was interesting. Last year, I linked to an article by science blogger Darren Naish, who argued that the US cryptid known as Dogman is fakelore rather than folklore (although I suppose you could see it as emerging folklore). YouTube atheist content-creator Emerson Green begs to differ. A former Skeptic, he is much more open to the unexplained than the average "angry atheist" on the web, who (cough cough) merely lacks a belief in cryptids.

It turns out that Green actually saw a Dogman when he was a teenager roaming the woods of a certain Midwest state. Yes, it actually was Michigan, the traditional folkloric haunt of these creatures. Or was it fakeloric? Green is 100% convinced that the running bipedal creature he observed was physically real and attempts to come up with a kind of minimal explanation, speculating that facultative bipedalism might perhaps exist among canids. In the second link, please read the long comment by "donnievance1942". 

As I said: interesting.

PS. My AI must have some kind of safety filter against generating pictures of dogmen or werewolves. After several tries, the system finally created a somewhat believable pic of a werewolf chasing two teenagers in the woods, although it still looks as if the monster is just running ahead of them!

That time I saw a cryptid 

YouTube comments

The Goblin Shark feat. Marvin

 

"The best cryptid evidence" doesn´t strike me as very "cryptid". Note that the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot fame isn´t included in this survey. All animals featured (except maybe Marvin) seem to belong to known and currently extant taxa. So-called cryptozoologists don´t really care - they want to find a giant ape-man, a surviving dinosaur, or something to that effect. 

So it seems the Patterson-Gimlin film is unique, being the only good footage of an *actual* cryptid (i.e. a monster). But it´s precisely it´s singular character that makes it so hard to believe...   

The Laughter of Wolves

 

Well, I´m not sure if I entirely agree, but read it anyway. That is, JMG´s weekly essay. And yes, he noticed the Chernobyl wolves...

The Laughter of Wolves

Eavesdropping on Bigfoot

 

A sneak peek (or rather eavesdropping) into the weird and wonderful world of cryptid *audio*. I´m not an expert on this niche topic, but from the top of my head, the Sierra sounds are frankly ridiculous. 

The most fascinating recording could be a Blue Jay (a known and extant species) mimicking an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (an extinct species)! Either the jumbo-sized woodpecker is still around, or Blue Jays have been mimicking it for generations after it went extinct...

I also wonder what´s up with the Japanese Wolf, claimed to be extinct for over 100 years. Yet, freakin´ close-range photos of the beast exist?! With apologies to C S Lewis: Really, we are hard to please! If the Honshu Wolf is tojour vivant, that would be fascinating since they are believed to be the last surviving lineage of the Pleistocene Wolf, the direct ancestor of domestic dogs (the Grey Wolf apparently being a side lineage).

Of course, we have to kill the wolves anyway, LOL. Just make sure to send a frozen specimen to your local bio-lab for closer inspection...

   

Please don´t tell the cornucopians

 

"Yes, cornucopian, you can get it all,
the only thing I demand is a
bloody sacrifice of a mutant wolf from Chernobyl!"

Noooooooooo!!!! 

Chernobyl´s mutant wolves

Lapplands Anubis

Credit: JulianAlper

Kalis och Anubis´ heliga djur har åter siktats i vårt östra grannland! Bilden ovan är dock tagen i Israel.  

Guldschakal observerad på flera platser i Finland

A historic day in Colorado

 

Is there some kind of bizarre symbolism in this? 

En genuin skitfråga?

 

Credit: Mariomassone 

En genuin skitfråga, tyckte Annika Strandhäll om förslaget att förbjuda kusinäktenskap. Titta vad sossarna vill satsa på istället...

Men okej, varghybrider bör givetvis förbjudas. Och avlivas. Men om maktpartiet vill snacka varg, så har jag några förslag om vad vi ska göra med den svenska vargstammen också! 

Time to call in the terminator, guys. 

Förbjud varghybrider

Dog days

 

Credit: Sage Ross

“Dogs in the Wild: Meet the Family” is a 2022 BBC nature documentary. Everyone knows about the domestic dog, but here we are indeed invited to meet its “family”. I admit that the diversity of the Canidae is pretty staggering. Some live in unexpected places: the Tibetan fox in the Himalayas, the Arctic wolf at the Queen Elizabeth Islands and the diminutive fennec fox in the Sahara desert. And yes, many red foxes live in London!

Some canids are embroiled in intricate near-symbiotic relationships with other organisms. The dingoes at Fraser Island survive in part by eating eggs of sea turtles, but they inadvertently also protect hatched turtles from further predation, since no other predators dares to approach the beaches if the dingoes roam there. The Fraser Island dingo population is also considered important since these specimens are supposedly very “pure”, genetically speaking, while dingoes in other parts of Australia have interbred with domestic dogs. To stop further racial mixing, domestics have been banned from the island (sure wonder why humanity meddles into the love lives of feral canids, but there you go).

Meanwhile in South America, the wolf apple is the preferred diet of the maned wolf, a bizarre canid that looks like a fox on stilts. The maned wolf´s bad eating habits help spread the wolf apple, with some assistance from leaf-cutter ants! The canid literally shits out the seeds of the wolf apples it consumes, and the seeds are then saved from the scorching sun by ants, which takes them to shaded and moist places around their nests (the ants are interested in remaining fruit fragments attached to the seeds). There, the seeds sprout and a new wolf apple plant can wet the appetite of the maned wolf…

I don´t think “Dogs in the Wild” has any deeper purpose or meaning. The point is to show the viewer some interesting animals, and perhaps to show off the technological prowess of the BBC. But sure, I admit that “the family” was pretty wild!

What the fuck am I even watching

 

Most crazy Eurovision song, nay, pop song like ever? Come and meet Subwoolfer and "Give that wolf a banana". Any relation to a certain henge? 

Surviving with wolves

"Misha and the Wolves" is a 2021 Netflix documentary about Misha Defonseca (or Monique de Wael), a Belgian-American writer of a memoir titled "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years". A French derivative work by the same author is titled "Survivre avec les loups" (Surviving with the Wolves). Both were published in 1997. There is also a French film of the same title based on the latter book. 

According to the memoir, Misha is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who ran away from the Catholic family that was hiding her after her parents had been deported by the Nazis (who occupied Belgium during World War II). At the time, Misha was only seven years old. The most sensational part of the story claims that she was adopted by a wolf pack in the Belgian forests! She also claimed to have killed a Nazi soldier who tried to rape her, by repeatedly stabbing him. 

The story was almost too good to be true. As indeed it was. "Misha and the Wolves" tells the story of how Defonseca´s lies were exposed. It´s an intriguing detective story, almost as hard to believe as Defonseca´s memoir. 

Somewhat ironically, it was Defonseca´s American publisher, Jane Daniels, who worked overtime to expose the hoax. Daniels claims that she initially believed in Misha´s story. The two women had a fall out after the memoir had been published, Misha Defonseca accusing Daniels of keeping most of the royalties. A US court sentenced Daniels to pay 22 million dollars to Defonseca, money Daniels claimed she didn´t have. So Daniels certainly had a vested interest in suddenly realizing that Misha´s memoir was a literary hoax, and hire people to prove the fact. (According to Wiki, the US court system has indeed revised its verdict and now demands that Defonseca pays Daniels a substantial sum instead!) 

After painstaking research in various archives (including preserved secret lists of Jewish children hiding from the Nazis during the war), Daniels´ team discovered that Misha Defonseca´s real name is Monique de Wael, she is a Belgian Catholic rather than a Jew, and was safely in parish school during World War II. Two reporters from the Belgian newspaper Le Soir did further research and came up with a possible motive for the hoax (apart from the money to be gained). It turned out that Misha´s parents *were* deported and killed by the Nazis. Both were members of the Belgian resistance. Misha´s father, Robert de Wael, is believed to have cracked under torture and turned in other resistance members. For this, he was widely regarded as a traitor after the war, and Misha became known as "the traitor´s daughter". This triggered Misha to invent a new identity for herself as a lone Jewish child and Holocaust survivor as a coping mechanism. After Misha Defonseca moved to the United States, this psycho-drama took on further life, as she joined a Jewish synagogue and began to tell her story to a gullible audience. As for Daniels, she was warned by a Holocaust historian that Defonseca´s story was impossible, but decided to publish her memoir anyway. The historian believes that Daniels was simply greedy. The most bizarre episode in the entire saga took place when The Oprah Show became interested in Defonseca´s story. They sent a team to the small town in Massachusetts where Defonseca was living in order to film her interacting with live wolves from a local wildlife sanctuary. The alpha wolf more or less attacked Defonseca under the very nose of Oprah´s producer, but then decided to let the "wolf-whisperer" go?!

While "Misha and the Wolves" is interesting, it´s frankly too kind to the people involved in this affair. I never read "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years", but if Wikipedia´s description of it is correct, it´s remarkable that *anyone* believed in this story. Here is Wiki: "At a time when she faces starvation in a forest, she is adopted by wolves, becoming a feral child. Protected by the pack, she survives by eating offal and worms. All in all, she treks over 1,900 miles (3,100 kilometers) through Europe, from Belgium to Ukraine, through the Balkans and Germany and Poland (where she sneaks in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto), to Italy by boat and back to Belgium through France. Before the war is over, the character has taken human life to survive, stabbing to death with a pocket knife a rapist Nazi soldier who attacks her." Either Americans are extremely badly informed about World War II history (and wolf biology) or Misha was automatically believed due to her status as a Holocaust survivor. But note that *Holocaust historians* (hardly Nazis) didn´t believe her, while many European readers *did*. So perhaps something else is going on here. And why wasn´t the above information included in the documentary?

With that little reflection, I end this blog post. (Swedish readers might want to know, that "Misha och vargarna" is available on SVT Play.) 

Realm of Mother Volga

"Realm of the Volga" is a two-part German nature documentary, produced by Altay Films. It takes the viewer on a journey from the taiga of northern European Russia all the way down to the steppes surrounding the Caspian Sea. Most of the time, the documentary follows the Volga, the largest river in Europe. With the exception of Astrakhan close to the delta, the cities in the Volga basin are mostly not shown, the most notorious of these being Volgograd (Stalingrad). Instead, we get to see the Russian wilds (and a few Orthodox churches) in mostly pristine condition. 

Many of the animals shown are instantly familiar to a Swedish viewer like myself: moose, beaver, red fox, boar, capercaillie, mallard, tawny owl, black woodpecker, great tit... I even recognized the wisents, since we have them at the Skansen zoo in Stockholm! 

Further south, the fauna becomes more exotic. Large flocks of saiga antelopes roam the desolate landscape and drink the brackish water, while trying to stay clear of the steppe wolfe. Meanwhile, steppe eagles build their nests on the ground, and demoiselle cranes carry out their mating rituals. Corsac foxes, rosy starlings and hoopoes are other characteristic species found around Volga´s southern portions. In the Caspian Sea, cormorants and white-tailed eagles live onboard eerie abandoned ships, while enormous colonies of seals gather at the islands of this peculiar inland sea. And yet, even this feels familiar somehow, obviously because all these animals are included in field guides to European mammals or birds, the geographical border of "Europe" being situated even further east than the Volga river.

It´s a fascinating trip, to be sure, almost aesthetical. And yet, by not showing the great cities, the oil industry and the environmental degradation, I still get the impression that perhaps somehow we are being served the wrong picture here! I can´t help thinking that perhaps Mother Volga has fallen on hard times...   

Skjut de galna hundarna, jag menar, vargarna

Kommer snart till en förstad nära dig!

Det är förstås inte Skansens fel, men det ser onekligen märkligt ut att man skjuter vargar i fångenskap, samtidigt som man låter vargstammen i det vilda föröka sig över alla breddar, så att det snart kommer att bli livsfarligt att ta en skogspromenad...

Skjut de vilda varghelvetena istället. "Döden är en del av livet". Please! 

Skansen avlivar sina vargar

Anubis is a WOLF!

 

Some taxonomical notes...

The golden jackal (Canis aureus) is mostly associated with India and the Middle East, but it has also considerably expanded its European range, with small populations in northern Norway and Finland, perhaps entering Swedish Lapland as we speak. Yes, golden jackals north of the Arctic Circle!

A similar-looking canid in North and West Africa was previously considered to be a subspecies of the golden jackal. This is the animal associated with the Egyptian god and psychopomp Anubis. However, recent DNA research shows that it´s really a separate species, closer related to the wolves than to the golden jackal. Its vernacular name is African wolf, golden wolf or African golden wolf, with the Egyptian population being called - you divined it - Egyptian wolf. The scientific name is Canis lupaster. Or Canis lupaster lupaster, if you´re a Egyptian wolf specifically (well, sub-specifically). 

So strictly speaking, Anubis doesn´t have the head of a "jackal" at all, but the head of a wolf! Imagine that. It does make him less romantic, but (perhaps) more scary... 

Somewhat ironically, it should be noted that the golden jackal itself isn´t really a jackal either, LOL, but is *also* closer to the wolf, a kind of wolf cousin perhaps? The "real" jackals in sub-Saharan Africa are usually classified in the genus Lupulella, not Canis. 

So Anubis is a wolf, and the golden jackal - associated with Tantric goddesses in India - is also wolfish. Somehow, I´m not surprised. 

And Arctic night came to be

"A Perfect Planet" is a BBC One series, narrated in the original by David Attenborough. Here in Sweden, our very own Henrik Ekman is the mysterious voice in the background. I recently watched the second episode, titled "The Sun". Ostensibly about the impact of sunlight on Earth´s wildlife, it´s really a nature photographer´s extravaganza, showing spectacular images from all over the world. This time, the production team takes us to Southeast Asia, Ellesmere Island during the Arctic night, mainland Canada, the Sahara desert, New Zealand, Alaska, and a few other places besides. We get to see the bizarre life cycle of the fig wasp (which has co-evolved perfectly with the fig trees), the weird mating rituals of the garter snake, hibernating frogs, snow geese fighting it out with Arctic foxes, silver ants in the Sahara, gibbons, and the sooty sharewater (a bird that migrates between New Zealand and Alaska, thereby experiencing "an eternal summer"). 

But the most astounding and frankly scary footage comes from Ellesmere Island north of Greenland. You would think an island in the middle of the Arctic Ocean would be devoid of "higher" wildlife. You would be wrong. Even during the coldest and darkest time of the year (the Arctic night lasts four months here), the island is the scene of an eternal struggle between hords of muskoxen and packs of Arctic wolves. It frankly looks like another planet. In the documentary, the wolves actually fail to kill a muskox, and are forced to chase enormous swarm-like flock of Arctic hares instead! It looks almost comic. Last time I watched a documentary about Ellesmere Island, I waxed philosophical. Somehow, the fate of the animals at this God-forsaken place, being forced to act out their pre-programmed behavioral patterns over and over, made me more appreciative of being born a human...

Finally, two complaints. At least in the Swedish version, the narrator quotes the Bible but garbles its meaning. No, citizen, the Bible doesn´t simply say "And light came to be". It says very explicitly that *God* created the light. But nice try, atheista. Also, the observation that one hour of sunlight contains all the energy humanity needs is irrelevant, since there is no way to harness that large amount of solar power. Funny how the little sound bites tells us more about the Zeitgeist than the big picture...

If Our Lord also created Ellesmere Island after hounding the wolves out of Eden is, alas, less clear!

Still, recommended. Especially in conjunction with the first episode, reviewed by me elsewhere on this blog. 

I knew it! Donald Trump is EVIL!!!

This must be Donald Trump's most evil deed so far.

From People's World, magazine of the...wait for it...Communist Party USA.

Trump removes endangered species protections for gray wolves

Ghosts of a fallen world

”White Wolves: Ghosts of the Arctic” is a somewhat scary documentary about the wildlife of Ellesmere Island, a Canadian territory in the Arctic Sea only 1,000 km from the North Pole. The human population of the island is only about 200 people, but wildlife seems to be thriving despite the hard climatic conditions. The main part of this production, signed Ivo Nörenberg and Oliver Goetzl, deals with the Arctic wolf or White wolf, a subspecies of the Grey wolf found in the North American High Arctic. We also get to meet muskoxen, Arctic foxes and Arctic hares. Birds shown include jaegers (skuas).  

The lives of Arctic wolves are brutal, and I´m almost tempted to say that “wolf is wolf to other wolves”. The flocks are fiercely territorial, but also competitive, and make frequent incursions into each other´s respective areas. Wolves attack and destroy the dens of other wolves, killing and eating the pups in the process. They also attack strays which accidentally or otherwise find themselves on the wrong side of the territorial divides. Yes, we get to see all this intra-wolf killing in the documentary. So you assumed animals never attack other animals of the same species? Think again, sonny! No Kropotkinesque mutual aid here.

Personally, I admit that ”Ghosts of the Arctic” made me wax philosophical on more than one occasion. If you are an atheist-materialist, this is the only world that exists. You may whine about it all you like, but the universe (and the High Arctic) don´t give a damn. And if you´re a Neo-Pagan, I suppose you have to "relate" to these "magical creatures". Or something.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you – hungry cannibalistic wolves. Happy hunting…