The Thing in the Woods

This is an off topic post, as it is not about art, but from time to time I do post about my trips to the mountains so it is not entirely off the mark.  I want to post about the "thing in the woods" because it is becoming more of an issue than you might expect.

Before I get too much further into this post, I want to reference some documented instances so you will not think I have gone completely off the deep end.  In the last couple of years, there have been some things in the woods that ought not to be there.  If you do web searches, you can find documentation of these items in news articles.

On two occasions here, there have been chimpanzees in the woods here in Mechanicsville.  They had escaped from a private zoo.  The owners did the ethical thing and notified the authorities that the animals had escaped.  The first time only one escaped.  The second time two escaped.  They were caught just two miles from my home if you go by the road.  After the second escape it was discovered that the private zoo had more chimps than they were licensed to have on the premises.  Because of that and the two escapes, they were ordered to find new homes for the chimps or else the chimps would be euthanized.  This made the national news.  It really came down to the wire because it is not easy to find a home for a whole group of chimpanzees.  Eventually, a new home was found that would keep them together as a family.  But at least for a time, there were animals that don't normally exist in this area in the woods around where I live.

Chimpanzees are not the only thing that have been found in the woods around here, although this was water surrounded by woods.  Alligators!  Yes, alligators have been found in the Falling Creek Reservoir in Midlothian, Virginia about two years ago.  This is about 25 minutes travel time from my house.  The first time someone found an alligator, they thought that they were doing a public service by eliminating a predator from a recreation area.  Wrong idea!  The man was fined for killing a gator.  The news spin was that this was an isolated event of someone dumping a gator.  Last year, they found a baby  gator, so that indicates that there are more gators in the area and that they are breeding.  Let that be a lesson to you.  1. Don't kill a gator unless you have to for self defense.  (Always remember to say "It was coming at me")  2.  There are gators in unexpected areas now.  When you are around fresh water, check for slide areas and keep on the alert.  According to Wikipedia an American alligator can grow to be 790 pounds and 13 feet long.

It used to be that alligators came no further north than North Carolina.  Their natural boundary seemed to be the Alligator River.  Yes, it was named that because there were alligators in it.  However, in recent years they have moved north into Virginia.  There are numerous news reports of alligators having been found in the Dismal Swamp in the last couple of years.  The general consensus is that they have migrated up through the swamp and river systems on their own, that they have not been dumped into the swamp.  There is some suspicion that the ones found in the reservoir in Midlothian were dumped.  However, that river system runs all through the state so it could be connected to the place where they are supposed to have arrived naturally. It is not totally unreasonable to suspect that they might have meandered a little further north, and other news stories have already suggested that bears use this route. While I was following links on the alligators in the swamp stories, I found a map that showed where alligators had been found and it listed whether they were alligators that had arrived naturally or whether they were suspected of being dumped gators. I found that there had been an alligator found in West Virginia.  It was suspected that  this was a dumped gator.  There seems to be a whole lot of "dumping" going on.  More on "dumping" exotic animals in a moment, but first, another natural thing in the woods.

Bears!  I live in a neighborhood that borders on farm land.  However, being outside the state capital, there is a lot of suburbia around here.  Most people aren't expecting to have to deal with bears, but they should.  A news report of a bear in your suburban neighborhood, a  bear at your bird feeder, or a bear in the road is more than an annual event.  While I was researching what bear tracks looked like while I was making my latest walking stick, I came upon an interesting article.  It was entitled "Virginia Does Not Have A Bear Problem".  The gist of the article was that bears will eat your dog's food if you leave it out, tear up your bird feeder if you leave it in reach, or get into your garbage if you don't secure it properly.  So my take on that is Virginia does not have a problem with bears but you might.  So if you live near woodlands or swamp you might want to keep an eye out.  Yes Virginia, there have been bear attacks.

More importantly, if you are camping, make sure that your food is properly secured, and don't keep food in your tent.  Every time I go to the mountains, I see people camping in the forest that have coolers out within easy reach of bears.  Because this post is already getting long, I'm going to suggest that you research how to secure your food rather than explaining it here.  Don't think your car is a safe place to store food either.  There have been reports coming out of Yellowstone that bears are not only breaking into cars for food, that they also have an understanding that certain types of vehicles were easier to break into than others.  When I visited a forest in California, they required people to take their child's car seats out of the car and leave them on top of the cars because children's car seats so frequently have spilled food and drink on them that they attract bears which break into the cars.  I guess the reasoning is that it was better to lose the car seat than to have the whole car damaged.

It used to be that we did not have coyotes and wolves in Virginia.  I guess about a decade ago they found the first coyote in my county when someone accidentally hit one when it crossed the road.  The driver took it to a vet, thinking he had hit a dog.  Now coyotes are a nuisance all over the state.  Although I have not been able to find anything on wolves being re-introduced into Virginia, they have been deliberately re-introduced into North Carolina.   The wolves seem to be coming up through the mountainous areas on their own.  I read in a magazine of one wolf being shot in Virginia.  Again, there was a fine.  It is hard to use the "it was coming at me" defense when it is shot in the rear end.

Now, as I mentioned above, more on the dumping of exotic animals. Maybe some are dumped.  More than likely, some escaped rather than being dumped, there is no way to tell.  A few years ago, there was a report of a lion in a neighborhood in Chesterfield, again, just 25 minutes away from my home.  Some people were convinced it was a hoax because it was right before Halloween and because no lion was caught.  There was a big fire in the Dismal Swamp in that time frame.  It could have driven a mountain lion out of the confines of the swamp.  In any case, that is not the only report of big cat sightings.

Virginia Game and Inland Fisheries flatly denies that there are big cats in Virginia.  Up until the the 1960s there was a predator eradication program here and supposedly all of mountain lions and black panthers (Virginia was the northernmost part of their range.)  were killed then.  When people have made reports of sightings, the wardens just flat out deny that there are any big cats here.  Although it is possible that they were all eliminated here at one time, it does not mean that big cats cannot come back.  Especially since the predator eradication program ended somewhere between forty or fifty years ago.  One author of a book about Cougars speculates that the denial is because Game and Inland Fisheries will have to do something about it if big cats are proven to be here.  A study will have to be done to determine how many there are, hunters will sue because they want to hunt, and animal rights groups will sue because they will want them protected.  The cost will be considerable.  But the natural repopulation is not the biggest problem.  The bigger problem is the dumped or escaped cats.

From time to time I visit a website where you can report  big cat sightings in Virginia.  Most of them are of the "I saw one while I was out hiking" variety.  However, once in a while someone gets a picture.  Strangely, this website tries to debunk the sightings, claiming that they are hoaxes.  However, they will admit if they are wrong.  On one occasion, the photo absolutely showed a cougar (mountain lion) that had been shot, but then they said that they could not prove the picture was taken in Virginia.  (The claim and photo made by a third party due to extenuating circumstances.  The person who allegedly shot the cougar supposedly did so because it charged them while they were dressing a deer.  [The "it was coming at me" defense] However, even though cougars are supposedly non-existent here, there is a fine for shooting one.)  On another occasion, so many people signed affidavits saying that they had seen a big cat, and there was a picture of it that the website could not sweep it under the rug.  They finally said yes it was a predator cat.  It was a jaguar.  They said it probably was someone's pet or zoo animal and that it had escaped.  This was in Amelia, the county on the far side of Midlothian where the alligators were found.

On another website relating to big cats in Virginia, I read that there are more than a thousand people in Virginia keeping large cats either as pets or in private zoos.  Many of these animals are cross bred animals because it is illegal to keep a pure bred.  Many of these animals would not cross breed in the wild normally, but are bred by animal traffickers. There are ligers, a cross between a male lion and a female tiger and  tigons, a male tiger and a lioness.  There is a lot of profit in this, and the possession of these cross bred animals is largely unregulated as the laws generally only refer to specific animals.  Just this week there was an item in the national news about a woman whose animal was seized because it was a bob cat as confirmed by DNA.  The woman claimed it was a cross between a female bob cat and a Maine coon cat.  The animal was returned to her when the DNA of the male parent was not able to be determined.  (This was in New Jersey)

I guess that this is really the gist of my post here.  When I mentioned the chimpanzees escaping at the beginning of the article, I also stated that the owners had done the ethical thing and had alerted the authorities that large, potentially dangerous animals were on the loose.  Look what happened there.  They lost their chimpanzees.  People who are keeping animals illegally, or who are suddenly worried about the liability if their escaped animal harms someone may not report a lost animal.  (One website referenced other websites with information on how to track your escaped cougar.)  There may be things in your woods that aren't supposed to be there.  And if it is an escaped animal that has been exposed to humans, it will not have the same fear of humans that wild animals have.  So my point here is that natural predators that were not in the woods for many years are coming back.  And there might even be animals in the woods that are not supposed to be there at all.  The majority of the time, these animals are going to avoid you, but if they are hungry and out of their element, especially if they have been around humans and associate them with being fed, all bets are off.  Keep an eye out, because things are not like they used to be.