http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ENNzjy8QjU

Common loon.

Loons dive under water and catch small fish–their primary prey, though they also feed upon aquatic invertebrates, insects, and some water plants.  They can take large fish as well, but need to drag them to shore and mangle them before dining.  Loons like to nest on uninhabited islands in lakes, explaining why they migrate north during spring to places like Minnesota where there are lots of lakes.  I always thought of loons as a strictly northern bird, but a few years ago a checklist and count of waterfowl on Clark Hill Lake included a few dozen common loons.  I didn’t know they spent winters in wetlands across the south and have never seen one.  They’ve been reported from many counties in Georgia but are most numerous near the coast where small fish are always plentiful.

Counties in Georgia where common loons have been sighted.  The map should include Lincoln County where they’ve been seen on Clark Hill Lake. The common loon winters in Georgia but doesn’t nest here.  Its present day nesting grounds were under glacial ice during much of the last Ice Age.  Did it nest in Georgia then?

During the Ice Age the present day nesting range of the common loon was under glacial ice.  They must have nested farther south then.  The region between the southern lobe of the Laurentide glacier and the Ohio River may have had numerous small lakes created by meltwater pulses which flooded low lying areas.  Perhaps this is where they mostly nested then.  It’s possible they nested and lived year round in the southeast during the Ice Age.  The overall population probably increased as the glacier receded and opened up more favorable habitat in the north, and they eventually abandoned their southern breeding grounds, though they still return to take advantage of ice free feeding opportunities during winter.

A loon fossil (looks like an intact wing) found in Florida by a member of the Fossil Forum.  This is a nice specimen. Did they breed and nest in Florida then or was it just spending the winter?

Three other species of loons spend winters in Georgia.  The red-throated loon (Gavia stellata) has been reported from 19 counties; the Pacific loon (Gavia pacifica) has been reported from 4 counties; and the yellow-billed loon (Gavia adamsii) is a rare accidental reported from only 1 county.

The first chapter is entitled “Drawn from Life.”  It consists of a discussion of how this work compares to others on the subject.  This is where Dr. Guthrie introduces one of the important themes of his book: Most paleolithic art was drawn realistically and the images were not representations symbolizing magic or religion, a view held by many anthropologists.  I agree with Dr. Guthrie.  To me this seems rather obvious–too many scholars look for something deep and complex when there is a much simpler explanation.  The people living in Europe then depended on hunting and that is what they depicted.  This chapter also covers the ecology of Pleistocene Europe.  Humans lived on the ecotone between southern European forests and the vast mammoth steppe that stretched from the British Isles to Alaska.  And there are detailed descriptions of cave geology, preservation, and taphonomy.

The second chapter is “Paleolithic Artists as Naturalists” which was perhaps one of the most interesting for me (well…that and the sex chapter).  He finds usable information about extinct species and extirpated subspecies from cave paintings.

Page from The Nature of Paleolithic Art.  The top drawings depict the most common large mammals living in Eurasia during the Pleistocene including Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, Megaloceros–a giant extinct deer, elk, caribou, aurochs–wild cattle, bison, musk-oxen,  horses, asses, ibex, sable antelope, cave bear, brown bear, lions, hyenas, wolves, and humans.

For example the cave paintings inform us that European lions had no manes, and horses in southwestern Europe had some striping, an adaptation for living in brushy habitat.  Dr. Guthrie shows the reader how the cave paintings represent real animal behavior–there are depictions of mating and flight response.

Chapter 3 is “Tracking down the Pleistocene Artists.”  Dr. Guthrie conducted a study that analyzed the hand prints on the cave walls.  Statistical differences between age and sex exist in the measurements of finger and palm size.  The cave painters made the hand prints by spitting a mouthful of red ocher over their hands.  Based on hand measurements, Dr. Guthrie determined most but not all the cave painters were boys aged 12 and under.

A statistical analysis of hand measurements suggests most the cave painters were boys aged 12 and under.  The kids making the hand prints were likely the same kids who were drawing the animals.

Although many cave paintings are masterpieces, most look like something a third grader might doodle.  The highest quality paintings are famous, but they’re vastly outnumbered by little known drawings that were done by less talented or less experienced artists. 

It’s no coincidence that nearly every cave with paleolithic art was discovered by teenaged boys.  During the paleolithic just like in the present time, adventurous boys would be the most likely members of society to venture into caves.  Because life expectency was so low then, children made up a bigger percentage of the population then than they do now and teenaged boys would have been a significant segment of society.  Contrary to popular belief, paleolithic people didn’t live in caves but inhabited open air sites, temporary huts, and rock shelters.  This explains why most of the cave artists were young boys.

Chapter 4 is “Testosterone Events and Paleolithic Imagery.”  This one is about the evolution of human behavior and art.  He explains the evolutionary reason why paleolithic men and women differed in the partition of labor and why modern politically correct attitudes stifled early studies on the role evolution played in making men the hunters while women were better able to perform tedious tasks such as sewing clothes.  Younger men with higher levels of testosterone than women took more risks when hunting and were also more likely to explore caves.  Accordingly, the art on caves is more representative of a young male’s point of view.  Much information about women’s contributions is missing–the clothes they made are organic and long gone.  Boys painting on cave walls rarely drew people wearing clothes, even though they must have, considering the harsh climate.  There are rare exceptions.  The few pictures depicting clothes show paleolithic people wearing parkas, hoods, and boots.

Chapter 5 is “The art of Hunting Large Mammals.”  Dr. Guthrie begins by reviewing the evolution of hunting behavior in hominids.  He uses evidence from physiology, sociobiology, ecology, and accounts from the ethnographic record to show that hunting was a driving force in human evolution.  He believes hunting created the modern social bond between man, wife, and child.

Incidentally, Dr. Guthrie believes the red spots on some cave paintings of Pleistocene horses represent the tracking of blood from wounded animals.  This is an alternative explanation for the ones I gave in a previous blog entry– http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/pleistocene-spotted-horses/

Another page from the book.  These are line drawings of cave paintings.

The chapter on hunting is a long one covering paleolithic weapons, the use of disguises, tracking wounded game, and harpooning fish.

Chapter 6 is “Full-figured Women in Ivory and Life.”  He explains the common depiction of full-figured fat women represents the female sex when they were most fertile. In most hunter-gatherer societies, women are rarely fertile due to a combination of environmental stress and the care of an already existing baby or toddler.  Women were most likely fertile during times of plenty when they had no young children nursing.  Men evolved to identify when women were most fertile.  And, of course, young boys drew pictures on cave walls and sculpted the famous figurines because women with big boobs and big butts were what was constantly on their minds, along with hunting large mammals.

Dr. Guthrie doesn’t go so far as to suggest the possiblity that the Venus of Willendorf represents sex slavery as I did in a previous blog entry– http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/the-venus-of-willendorf-pleistocene-sex-object/

But he does dismiss the notions they represent fertility or goddess cults.

I don’t agree with Dr. Guthrie when he writes that paleolithic people chose their mates carefully.  The population was so low then that people probably had a hard time even meeting members of the opposite sex who were not related to them, and they had to accept what they could get.

Paleolithic people had many sexual items and enjoyed practices we consider modern.  Cave paintings prove paleolithic women wore lingerie.  Many cave paintings depict buxom women wearing nothing but bracelets, belts, and boots.  Paleolithic dildoes (made of stone) are very common.  One broken sculpture suggests they played bondage games.

Chapter 7 is “The Evolution of Art Behavior in the Paleolithic.”  Here, he discusses the evolution of play and how art is an extension of play.  Art contributed to the survival of paleolithic people because it helped make their brains more creative which did have practical uses.  Creativeness is heritable.

Chapter 8 is “Bands to Tribes.”  Very little paleolithic art is abstract, but the development of agriculture led to an increase in the use of abstract symbols in art.  Humans needed to invent abstract symbols to account for stored foodstuffs.  Agricultural civilization changed the human experience but not all for the better–humans suffered more malnutrition from starch-based diets, they contracted diseases spread from domesticated animals, and they experienced more warfare from being in economically unequal societies.  Not a single paleolithic drawing known depicts a shield or warfare, though individual man on man violence was rarely drawn.

Chapter 9 is “Throwing the Bones.”  This was the only chapter I found uninteresting.  It’s about the evolution of the belief in the supernatural.  There’s not enough concrete evidence left about early human’s supernatural beliefs, making this part of the book too vague and unnecessarily long-winded.  That’s really the only negative criticism I have of the book.  Sometimes, Dr. Guthrie overwrites and gives 5 or 6 examples when 1 0r 2 would have been enough.  Otherwide, I enjoyed the book very much.

The most recent interglacial previous to the present one was the Sangamonian Interglacial which lasted from 132,000 BP-118,000 BP.  Climate during the Sangamonian was even warmer than that of today.  At one point during this interglacial the north polar ice cap completely melted and sea levels were higher than they are now.  Cypress swamps grew as far north as Illinois, alligators swam in rivers flowing through what today is Missouri, and giant tortoises roamed the ridge and valley region of the southern Appalachians.  This wasn’t the warmest era in geological history–it wasn’t even close to as warm as much of the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, etc. ages–but it was unusually warm compared to most of the Pleistocene.  This prolonged warm climate phase allowed many frost sensitive species of vertebrates to colonize much of southeastern North America, at least temporarily.  But because cold phases of climate during the Pleistocene lasted 10 times longer than warm phases, fossils of these tropical and subtropical species are in some cases extremely rare.  There are probably more species than the following pictorial cavalcade illustrates, but these are the ones confirmed by science.

Eremotherium laurillardi, the largest ground sloth to ever live in North America, grew to 18 feet long and weighed up to 3 tons.  Fossils of this species are quite common along Georgia’s coastal fossil sites which mostly date to the Sangamonian and early Wisconsinian.  Cold climate eventually drove them from what is now Georgia, but they persisted in Florida until maybe 30,000 BP when the beginning of the LGM became too cold for them even there.  They did continue to live in South America until 10,000 BP when hunting Indians likely drove them to extinction.  If it wasn’t for man, they may have recolonized the gulf coast of today.  2 species of ground sloths (Jefferson’s and Harlan’s) were able to survive in North America during the Ice Age, but Eremotherium must have been incapable of tolerating frosts.

Evidence that the South American marsh deer (Blastoceras dichotomous) once lived in the southeast comes from 1 mandible found at Saber-tooth Cave in Florida.  It was given the scientific name, Blastoceras extraneous, but was likely the same species populating the present day South American pampas.  Dr. Richard Hulbert expressed doubt in his book, The Fossil Vertebrates of Florida, that this mandible was correctly identified, but that was before he himself indentified the presence of collared peccaries in the Florida Pleistocene–a big surprise.

Collared peccaries were only identified from the Florida Pleistocene within the last few years.  Apparently, they colonized the south during the Sangamonian and probably other interglacials.  2 other species of peccaries–the flat-headed and the long-nosed–did commonly occur in the south during cold stages as well.

1 ocelot specimen from the Florida Pleistocene proves this cat lived in the south.  It seems that this cat should be able to survive in Florida today.  I suspect Indians coveting its spotted coat led to its demise there.

Fossil evidence of a small species of cat resembling the modern day margay comes from Florida and 2 widely separated sites in Georgia–Ladds and the Isle of Hope site.  Scientists are uncertain of the identification–it’s either a margay,  jaguarundi, or a distinct extinct species.  Despite the scientific genus name, Leopardus, it’s not at all closely related to a leopard.  Was it climate or paleo-Indian desire for spotted coats that restricted this species to isolated jungles?

Giant tortoise fossils dating to the Pleistocene were found at Ladds, the northernmost locality, though during the Pliocene, which was mostly warmer than the Pleistocene, they lived as far north as Kansas.  In contradiction to what most scientists think, I suspect giant tortoises were capable of surviving light frosts.  See my reasoning in a blog entry from my April 2011 archives.

In the Sangamonian of Georgia I suspect alligators may have ranged into the Etowah River.  If giant tortoises lived in the area, alligators surely must have been able to live there too.

Many species of South American and Central American birds also extended their range north in Sangamonian times.

Listed on the University of Florida Museum of Natural History database, I counted 46 jaguar (Panthera onca) specimens, 21 giant panther (Panthera atrox) specimens, 42 saber-tooth (Smilodon fatalis) specimens, 6 scimitar-tooth (Dinobastis serum) specimens, 41 cougar (Puma concolor) specimens, 46 bobcat (Lynx rufus) specimens, 12 river cat (Leopardus amnicola or weidii) specimens and 1 ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) specimen.

The results are similar to those reported by the amateur fossil collectors who post on the fossil forum.  The most significant difference between their reports and database information is abundance of jaguar to saber-tooth abundance.  Amateur fossil collectors claim jaguar fossils are much more common in Florida than saber-tooth, though they do collect the latter and some have found scimitar-tooth specimens as well which are rare in the database.  It may be that the UF database includes a skeleton of a saber-tooth accounting for multiple specimens from 1 individual.

Dire wolves accounted for 64 specimens in my previous study, making them 33% more common, at least in the fossil record than any single species of big cat.  Overall, big cats combined outnumbered dire wolves 156 to 64, making large felines more than twice as common as dire wolves.  Perhaps there was less competition among species of canids, but more among felids.

Pleistocene habitats favorable to various species of big and small cats varied widely.  Mesic oak forests and cypress swamps, which expanded during warm interglacials and interstadials, favored jaguars, river cats, and ocelots.  Jaguars are adabtable enough to live in desertlike brush conditions which were common during cold arid stadials.  Cougars and bobcats thrive in many different types of environments.  The exact environments favored by giant panthers, saber-tooths, and scimitar-tooths is unknown, but it’s likely they were capable of adapting to many different ecotones.

Saber-tooths were evidently one of the most common large carnivores south of the ice sheets in North America.  They were actually no larger than a modern day jaguar.  Saber-tooths never colonized Eurasia, but a distant cousin, the scimitar-tooth had close relatives that did live from the southern tip of Africa to Alaska.  Scimitar-tooths also had longer front legs but these were more slender than those of the saber-tooth.  Their fangs were also smaller and more curved.  In Africa, Asia, and Europe scimitar-tooths became extinct much earlier than saber-tooths did in America.  I suspect they never learned to fear man, explaining their earlier extinction.  I suggest fanged cats didn’t often back down from anything.  Scimitar-tooths probably colonized southeastern North America during stadials when grasslands expanded due to dry climate which in turn caused an increase in the populations of ungulates. 

Giant panthers probably resembled large maneless lions.  True lions did live in Alaska and across Eurasia.  But south of the ice sheets in North America, the common ancestor split into 2 different species–Panthera atrox and Panthera onca.

This image comparing Pleistocene jaguars with modern jaguars may be a slight exaggeration, but jaguars did grow bigger during the Pleistocene because they preyed on larger mammals and had more competition among carnivores.

I’ll write more about the presence of margays and ocelots in Pleistocene Florida in my next blog entry.

Here are some related articles about big cats from my archives.

“Panthera atrox! What Kind of Cat was it?”– http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/panthera-atrox-what-kind-of-cat-was-it/

“Why did fanged cathttp://markgelbart.wordpress.com/tag/saber-tooth/s have sloping backs and large forelimbs?”–

“Two new studies of saber-tooths.”– http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/two-new-studies-of-sabertooth-smilodon-fatalis-anatomy/

“Cougars vs. jaguars”–http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/cougars-vs-jaguars/

Fossil collecting is popular in Florida, thanks to all the sinkhole lakes and caves with basal chemistry in the soil that preserves bones.  Amateur fossil collectors have many more fossils in their collections than the University of Florida’s Natural History Museum..  Many are for sale as well.  It would be a great benefit to science, if collectors made arrangements to donate their collections to the museum upon their deaths.  Many valuable specimens have been lost when their owners die and family members, not interested in the subject, lose track of where they put the old bones.

My little study is limited to canid fossils listed on the University of Florida database and leaves out the great many more in the hands of amateur fossil collectors.  I also limited this survey to the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age (300,000 BP-11,000 BP), leaving out Armbruster’s wolf which dominated the middle Pleistocene before being replaced by dire wolves.  Nevertheless, I think there’s enough information to suggest relative canid species abundance during the late Pleistocene.  Keep in mind, I was counting on a computer screen while scrolling down, so my numbers may be off slightly.

Listed on the Florida Museum of Natural History’s database, I counted 64 dire wolf (Canis dirus) specimens, 34 coyote (Canis latrans) specimens, 1 red wolf (Canis niger) specimen, 9 domestic dog (Canis familiaris) specimens, 0 dhole (Cuon alpinus) specimens, and 55 gray fox (Urocyon cineorgenteus) specimens.

The fossil record strongly suggests that from 300,000 BP to about 11,000 BP dire wolves were by far the most common large canid being about twice as abundant as coyotes.  Red wolves were rare but present.  Gray foxes were just as common during the Pleistocene as they are today.  These neat little foxes have the ability to climb trees, a skill that saves them from their larger relatives.  There is no evidence of dholes but as I wrote in a previous blog entry http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/did-the-dhole-cuon-alpinus-range-into-southeastern-north-america-during-the-pleistocene/ , I suspect they may have periodically colonized parts of the southeast but in numbers too low to leave fossil evidence.

Dire wolves were the dominant large canid in the southeast (and all across North America south of the Ice Sheets) during the late Pleistocene.

Coyotes probably occupied a niche similar to African jackals.

Gray foxes thrived in areas where they had access to trees and could escape larger predators.

The presence of domesticated dogs in the Pleistocene fossil record puzzled and surprised me.  I almost didn’t even do a database search for Canis familiaris and only did so as an afterthought.  Most anthropologists don’t think humans domesticated dogs until after the Pleistocene about 10,000 years ago, but the fossil evidence contradicts this.  In fact scientists recently discovered the skull of a domesticated dog in a Siberian cave that dates to 33,000 BP.  They determined  this particular domesticated dog was not the ancestor of the lineage that led to today’s dogs but instead its descendents died out.  It’s probable that there were many early lineages of domesticated dogs that ceased to exist for various reasons.  Perhaps that group of people died out or stopped keeping dogs.  The popular idea that people domesticated dogs by kidnapping and raising wolf pups is a misconception.  Scientists think it’s the other way around–dogs adopted us.  Dogs are descended from the wolves which had the least flight response.  Wolves that hung closely around human campsites for access to leftovers gave birth to pups with floppy ears, multi-colored coats, and other dog traits that differentiate them from other wolves.  The gene for tameness shares a pathway with the gene for these physical characteristics.  So it’s likely that dogs adopted people in many different geographic locations wherever wolves (Canis lupus) began occupying areas adjacent to human campsites.  Obviously, dogs either followed or were brought to Florida by the Paleo-Indians.

The authors of a chapter in the book The First Floridians and the Last Mastodons suggest that all the coyote fossils found in Florida are actually domesticated dog fossils, but they only knew of a handful of coyote fossils.  Apparently, they didn’t know 34 specimens had been found.  I doubt scientists made that many misidentifications.

Dire wolves succeeded in becoming one of the dominant predators in the environments of southeastern North America where they found a wealth of prey roaming the open woodlands and savannahs.  Everything from bison and horses to deer and rabbits sustained them, and a mammoth or mastodon that died of natural causes provided a feast.  Coyotes successfully co-existed with dire wolves by scavenging large predator kills and by hunting rodents.  Red wolves must have been restricted to islands and perhaps deeply wooded swamps where they could survive on deer and small game.  Their niche must have been areas with lower densities of prey as opposed to grasslands that hosted large herds of ungulates.  Following the extinction of the megafauna and dire wolves, forests replaced grasslands and red wolves increased in number and drove coyotes completely out of the south.  But after European settlers wiped out the red wolves, coyotes returned.

References:

Ovodov, Nikolai, et. al.

“A 33,000 Year Old Incipient Dog from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: Evidence of the Earliest Domestication Disrupted by the Last Glacial Maximum”

Plos One 6 (7) 2011

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/databases/vp/intro.htm

The Dunwoody Nature Center

I attended my nephew’s bar mitzvah in Dunwoody, Georgia last weekend.  Dunwoody consists of dozens of subdivisions and plenty of shopping centers and absolutely no rural farmland.  I didn’t hold out much hope for a nice nature walk here–the traffic is terrible.  But at least the developers left a lot of trees standing.  I decided to walk from my sister’s house to a little park known as the Dunwoody Nature Center and I discovered a surprising gem.

This white oak was about 4 feet in diameter.  White oak is a common tree in Dunwoody.

From the composition of the trees left standing most of Dunwoody must have once hosted a pretty nice dry upland forest.  Too bad developers converted it into a crowded suburb.  Today, white oaks, black oaks, southern red oaks, shortleaf pines, and loblolly pines are the dominant trees.  The Dunwoody Nature Center slopes sharply down toward Wildcat Creek, the name of which is a relic to its former status as a wilderness.  The woods here are dominated by beech, white oak, sweetgum, river birch, and loblolly pine.  I was stunned to see a woodlot of mostly beech trees in central Georgia.

A mature beech tree growing on the edge of a rocky creek.  It’s surrounded by many immature beech saplings.

Fossil pollen studies show beech was a common tree in the south during the end of the Ice Age when the Laurentide glacier began melting and releasing more moisture in the atmosphere creating a climate that was still cool but more rainy than it was during the height of the Ice Age.  The presence of abundant beech in the fossil record is indirect evidence of massive flocks of passenger pigeons.  Passenger pigeons fed on acorns–in some places completely eliminating the oak seed crop…and the beech’s competition.  Although beech trees produce an edible nut, they can also spread from roots and could survive their seed being consumed by passenger pigeon flocks.  Since the passenger pigeon’s demise, oak forests have been replacing beech forests in many areas.  So I was delighted to see this remnant beech forest in central Georgia.

Wildcat Creek flows through a granite outcropping.  Here is a miniature waterfall.

Two little league baseball fields take up about half the space of the park.  The park is heavily used by dog and toddler walkers.  It’s popularity shows that the planning commission in charge of developing Dunwoody should have arranged for the purchase of more land for more parks.

I found this photo of a fisher carrying a dead squirrel on google images but I think it’s from the cover of an issue of the Journal of Heredity.   They had an article about genetic bottlenecks of this species created from habitat fragmentation.  Fishers require complete forest cover and avoid open fields.

Fossil evidence of fishers in Georgia comes from Ladds stone quarry in Bartow County.  Ladds is a collapsed and eroded cave system that yields fossils of warm climate species such as giant tortoise, Florida muskrats, and rice rats; and c0ol climate species such as bog lemmings and meadow jumping mice, besides the fisher.  The warm and cool climate species may or may not have occurred during the same climate phase–the quarry operation may have mixed fossils of different ages together.  But asymmetric compositions of species are common in most other Pleistocene fossil sites, so no one is really sure.  The fossils found here are at least 10,000 years old.  I suspect they date to the Sangamonian Interglacial–more than 100,000 years ago for reasons I discuss in my blog entry, “The Giant Chipmunk (Tamias aristus).  Kicked up Version of the Eastern Chipmunk?” http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2011/01/20/tamias-aristus-the-extinct-kicked-up-version-of-the-eastern-chipmunk/

The fossil material of the fisher found at Ladds consisted of a couple of fragments of cheekbone with teeth attached and a partial jawbone.  This proves that fishers occurred in Georgia thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene.  What is not known for sure is how recently they lived in state.  There is fossil evidence of both porcupine and fisher from the Law’s archaeological site ins northern Alabama which dates to about 1700 AD, and from the Etowah Indian Mound Site in Bartow County which dates to between 1100 and 1500 AD.  This doesn’t prove fishers lived in Georgia that recently.  Indians traded fisher pelts and porcupine quills, and they could have originated from their known historical range.  However, it’s quite possible fishers had a more southerly range within the last few hundred years and were trapped out by Indians selling pelts to newly available European fur markets. 

Historical range of the fisher.  They may have ranged further south but were uncommon and trapped out early after European contact.  During the Ice Age just about their entire modern range was under miles of glacial ice, so of course they once ranged further south in pre-historic times.

Ecological studies show fishers require continous tracts of mature forest, and they completely avoid open areas.  In New England now that fur trapping has gone out of style and forests are growing back, fishers are recolonizing states where they’ve been long absent.  They’ve got a long way to go before they reach Georgia though.

Fishers prey on squirrels, rabbits, mice, and birds.  Studies of their dietary habits have yet to find fish in their scat, so their name is misleading.  They’re one of the few carnivores that commonly prey upon porcupines, but they occasionally die from injuries suffered when they mishandle the spiny rodents.  They kill the porcupines by biting their faces off, not by flipping them over as is falsely believed.  Fishers will kill small house dogs and cats, but I don’t believe reports that they attack German Shepherds.  Fishers only weigh 10-15 pounds and would have a size advantage over smaller cats and dogs but a big dog could shake a fisher and break its back.  Scientists studying Canadian lynx report two cases of fishers feeding upon radio-collared cats.  I don’t believe a fisher can kill a full grown lynx.  In one instance there was no sign of a struggle in the snow which tells me the cat was already dead.  A fisher doesn’t have a powerful enough bite to kill a large animal instantly, precluding the possibility that it ambushed a sleeping cat.  I think the cat died of either sickness or starvation.  Likewise, a find of bobcat in fisher scat was probably from a kitten or an already deceased cat.  The following youtube video shows a fisher struggling to kill a gray fox.  Bobcats and lynx are much more powerful than gray foxes.  The former regularly preys on gray foxes.  (Note: The fox in the video is a gray fox, not a silver color phase of a red fox.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txdoUgli2FQ

When I visited the Silver Bluff Audubon Center a month ago, I heard a cry that sounded like the distress call of the gray fox from this video.  At the time I didn’t know what it was and thought I was hearing a bird I couldn’t identify.  Maybe I was hearing a gray fox being attacked by coyote or bobcat.

What a majestic beast.

I have some questions about caribou in Pleistocene Georgia that I suppose may never be answered.  Were they year round residents or did they migrate here seasonally?   Today, barren ground caribou are known for their long distance migrations, but eastern woodland caribou are reported to stay in the same area their entire lives.  Did caribou live in the south during cold phases of climate or were they here during interstadials as well.  The caribou fossil from Charleston, South Carolina comes from strata thought to date to a warm interglacial.  There is a scientific method that can be used to answer the first question.  So far no scientist has chosen to chemically analyze the tooth enamel of fossil bones of southern caribou.  By determining the strontium isotope ratios in the tooth enamel they can compare it to that of extant mammals and mathmatically estimate where the extirpated southern caribou spent their time.  Scientists have used this technique with mastodons and mammoths.  Scientists determined from mastodon fossils found in Florida that they had spent time in central Georgia, but mammoths in Florida did not migrate long distances.

Robert Martin, a professor at Murray State and author of Missing Links: Evolutionary Concepts and Transitions in Time, first identified two caribou molars from Yarbrough Cave.  In an email he informed me there was also unsorted material from the cave but was unclear whether this consisted of more caribou specimens.  Murray State donated all of the fossils to the Florida Museum of Natural History where they probably rest in the bottom of a basement drawer.  The original fossil discoveries were made in 1991 but they have yet to be described in detail in the scientific literature with the exception of a few teeth of southern bog lemmings.  I had to ask Dr. Martin which parts of the caribou they found in the cave. 

Caribou are the only member of the deer family that have antlered females.  Male caribou shed their antlers after the rut is over, but females retain theirs through the winter.  The females dig craters in the snow, exposing lichen and grasses–their food supply.  They defend these territories against other females and antlerless males.  The females with the biggest antlers have the best chance of maintaining their top condition for next year’s pregnancy, and it improves the survival rate for the present year’s calf.  In regions with light snows where it’s unnecessary to dig craters, female caribou have smaller or no antlers.  Therefore, southern female caribou probably had smaller antlers.

For most of the year cow caribou fear or are antagonistic toward bulls.  During the rut the bull caribou approach the cows by lowering their head and bleating like a calf approaching to nurse.  (This reminds me of human foreplay–tit sucking.)  The female will stop and urinate, and the male will smell the urine to test whether she’s in estrus.  The vomerosonal organ in the nostril is used to detect the pheremone levels.  Primates lost this organ along their evolutionary pathway, but humans still wrinkle their noses at funky odors.

Reindeer warble fly.  They lay eggs under the hides of caribou.  Eskimos enjoy eating the larva–a fatty, salty snack, according to R. Dale Guthrie.  Reindeer meat is lean, and the average human would starve on such a high protein diet with no fat.  The warble fly larva provided valuable fat for people living in the Pleistocene.  Reindeer warble flies must have expanded their range into Georgia during the Ice Age.

Reindeer warble flies (Oedenagena tarandi) torment caribou all summer.  Their larva live under the hide during the winter and emerge during the spring.  Caribou meat is a healthy source of protein but is so low in fat that most humans would starve to death if they only ate this kind of meat.  Eskimos and Pleistocene Europeans eat or ate the warble fly larva which is high in fat.  It’s a valuable dietary supplement.  Warble fly larva is even depicted in paleolithic art alongside the more famous cave paintings of mammoth, bison, and horses.  Reindeer warble flies almost certainly enjoyed an expanded range during the Pleistocene and flew in Georgia then.

Yarbrough Cave

The area around this cave is clear cut, and the owner would “just as soon fill the cave in or level it.”  Many real estate developers are ignorant Nazis whose God is money.

View from inside the cave.

Yarbrough Cave is a small one about 120 feet long with a couple of small side passages.  Some woodland Indian artifacts have been excavated here.  All of the Pleistocene fossils in this cave come from a surprisingly small area–a 5 foot square, 6 foot deep hole in a side passage known as the Peccary Room.  The fossils date from between ~15,000 BP-~ 19,000 BP (from 2 different specimens), the end stage of the Last Glacial Maximum.  Like most other Pleistocene fossil sites in Georgia, the species represent a variety of habitats that must have existed nearby–woodlands, grasslands, and wetlands.  13-lined ground squirrels require extensive treeless prairies, but the other 6 species of squirrels show that forests must have been predominant.  Beaver, muskrat, river otter, and raccoon prove wetlands occurred here as well. Many more microfossils were lost here when some nameless blundering scientist botched the removal of a large section of matrix.  He probably lost all the bird bones.  There’s probably more fossils to be found here with a little digging and as I mentioned earlier the fossils already found here have yet to be described in detail.  Anyway, here’s the list of Pleistocene fossils that were excavated from Yarbrough Cave between 1988-1991. * denotes extinct species

short tailed shrew–Blarina brevicauda

least shrew– Cryptotis parva

eastern mole–Scalopus aquaticus

eastern pipistrille-Pipistrelus subflavus

big brown bat–Eptesicus fuscus

*giant ground sloth (probably Harlan’s)–Megalonychid sp.

*beautiful armadillo–Dasypus bellus

rabbit sp.?–Sylvilagus sp.

eastern chipmunk–Tamias striatus

13-lined ground squirrel–Spermophilus tridecemlineatus

red squirrel–Tamiasciurus hudsonicus

gray squirrel–Sciurus carolinensis

fox squirrel–Sciurus niger

southern flying squirrel–Glaucomys volans

northern flying squirrel–Glaucomys sabrinus

woodchuck–Marmota monax

beaver–Castor canadensis

mouse sp.?–Peromyscus

wood rat–Neotoma floridana

pine vole–Microtus pinetoreum

*?steppe vole–Microtus sp.

meadow vole–Microtus pennsylvanicus

muskrat–Ondatra zibethicus

southern bog lemming–Synaptomys cooperi

meadow jumping mouse–Napeozapus insignis

dire or timber wolf–Canis dirus or lupus.  The preliminary report says the fossil material compares favorably to the latter but tooth size overlaps between the 2 species  and I bet it’s from the former.  Ronald Nowak, the world’s foremost authority on Pleistocene canids, doesn’t think timber wolves ever colonized the southeast.

black bear–Ursus americanus

raccoon–Procyon lotor

weasel sp.–Mustela

striped skunk–Mephitis mephitis

river otter–Lutra canadensis

cougar–Puma concolor

bobcat–Lynx rufus

*long-nosed peccary–Mylohyus nasatus

*flat-headed peccary–Platygonus compressus

white tail deer–Odocoileus virginianus

caribou–Rangifer tarandus

References

Guthrie, R. Dale

The Nature of Paleolithic Art

The University of Chicago Press 2006

Martin, Robert

“A Preliminary List of Late Pleistocene Mammals from the Peccary Room of Yarbrough Cave, Bartow County, Georgia”

Palidicola 3 (2) 33-39 May 2001

http://www.forums.caves.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5308

Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga.  Our hotel was right around the corner from this abomination.  This is hell on earth for nature lovers like me.

The Etowah Indian Mounds were closed on Sunday, and the area around the nearby Red Top Mountain State Park looked like an ugly reclamation project, plus I couldn’t even find the darn place.  Then we hit Atlanta and my spirits sank.  I became bitter and contemplated canceling my Nature Conservancy membership because they’ve preserved no places close to where I regularly travel that I can use.  All I wanted was a pleasant brief walk where I could enjoy some birds and trees.  We stopped for lunch in Covington, a suburb on the east side of Atlanta, and there were almost no trees or birds in sight–the whole enclave is one giant parking lot.  There is still some rural land between Atlanta and Augusta, but by then my mood had soured further, and my daughter was driving and I didn’t feel like making her stop.  It depresses me when I think of how far I have to travel to see nature.  That’s why I’m now going to slip into my fantasy of living on the Broad River in eastern Georgia during the Pleistocene.  Here’s a typical day in the life I imagine.

December 23, 36,000 BP

I awake next to 1 of my 3 concubines at 7:00 am (my wife doesn’t like wilderness and refuses to join my Pleistocene fantasy.)  It’s nice and warm under my buffalo blanket.  I get up eager to go on an excursion.  My concubine stays in the bed–I kept her up late because I had venison liver for supper and that always increases my libido.  I go outside and milk the cow, shovel out the stall, and let her in the pasture.  I feed the chickens and geese and break the ice on the latter’s water tank.  There’s frost everywhere except near the poultry houses where the heat from the manure keeps the ground warm.  It’s sunny and breezy.  The wind has died down compared to yesterday when a cold front pushed through.  I bring in a couple of baskets of wood for the woodstoves.  Concubine #2 has my breakfast ready–grilled cheese on whole wheat sourdough.  Every single ingredient was grown and made from scratch as is all of my food.

After breakfast I go to my garage and start up my 4-wheel drive, a vehicle that runs on wood alcohol which I also manufacture.  I open the automatic door and make sure it’s closed behind me when I leave, so no dangerous animals can get inside.  The walls around my garden and orchard are adjacent to thickets of prickly pear cactus which I planted to discourage animals from climbing the wall.  More of the purple fruit than I can consume remains–available for peccaries and Jefferson’s ground sloths, the only animals that eat the fruit this time of year.  Black bears, though they don’t hibernate in the south, are mostly inactive now.

I leave the security of my fort behind and drive on the dirt road that leads to the Broad River.  I use a steam roller, every so often, to grade the road and keep it in good condition.  The first 50 yards around the fort are a mowed hayfield that I keep clear of trees so it serves as a firebreak.  Uncontrolled forest fires are a hazard of living in pure wilderness.  The small herd of wild horses grazing on it now ignores me.  There’s a black stallion, 2 brown mares, a spotted mare, and 2 black yearling colts.  I slowly drive past them and into an open woods of uneven aged trees.  Tawny grass and patches of saplings and brush grows between giants.  I pass by a small grove of black walnuts, some ancient, some of moderate age.  Several specimens are 12 feet in circumference.  The road slopes toward the river, still more than a mile away, and it leads me through a forest dominated by beech, hickory, and Critchfield’s spruce.  I stop the vehicle and examine a few of the trees.  Many are over 70 feet tall and more than 6 feet in diameter.  I hear several gray squirrels barking in alarm, and I search the bare winter tree tops for a hawk.  Instead I see a big black weasel climbing a hickory.  It’s a fisher, an animal that’s been absent in modern day Georgia since at least colonial times.

The article that went along with this photo claims fishers can take down big dogs like German Shepherds.  No way.

The barking stops and the chase begins round and round the tree.  I get my binoculars and follow the deadly race for life.  The fisher follows closely behind the squirrel, seemingly certain to catch his next meal, but the frantic rodent ventures on a slim branch and leaps to a nearby beech, escaping the fisher which doesn’t dare test his weight on that flimsy branch.

The forest sounds alive.  I hear crows and blue jays and a pileated woodpecker.  I check an old standing snag, its top rotted away.  A hairy woodpecker taps on the white oak next to it.  The oak is growing in a slight gulley and leans precariously.  Bits of bark flutter to the ground.  I get back in my vehicle, drive about 1/4 mile, and see something dead on the road.  Of course, it’s not roadkill–there’s no traffic here.  I stop and emerge from my vehicle and recognize what it is–the partially eaten remains of a porcupine.  I see fisher tracks all around.  I carefully shove the carcass off the side of the road with my foot because a quill could puncture my tire.  I’m thorough about this.  A sudden whir of wings startles me.  I catch a glimpse of several blue passenger pigeons.  These are stragglers from the main colony that passed overhead 4 months ago.  I’m not sure where the main colony is located, but I know it’s vast and surely takes over miles of forest.

The road slopes sharply and it isn’t long before I spot my 14 foot motor boat tied to an enormous 200 year old red maple.  I untie the boat, start the engine, and take the boat down the river.  Anchored poles with flags mark the locations of fish traps and passes through shoals and sunken snags.  During the dry season these are easy to find without the flags but we recently suffered a rain/sleet event that lasted 3 straight days and the river’s a little high.  I easily navigate through two red-flagged poles that mark a submerged snag and a shallow boulder.  The water is clear and I can see submerged rocks in some places and sandy bottoms in others.  Fish and mussels of many kinds are visible.

A bluff on the Broad River.  During the Pleistocene the water was likely clear, not brown with sediment from erosion.  Agricultural run off beginning early in the 19th century turned all of Georgia’s rivers muddy looking. In the 18th century William Bartram referred to this clear water as “pellucid.”

On the right is a forest of water oak and sycamore.  On the left is an impenetrable thicket of river cane.  A tapir stares at me from inside the stand of cane.  I’ve noticed that many present day nocturnal animals are active during all hours of the day in the Pleistocene.  Another creek flows into the river from here.  This creek is a long chain of beaver dams and ponds.  In fact I call it Beaver Dam Creek.  I’ve explored this area before.  It’s a mix of open marsh, ponds, canebrakes, and wet meadows grazed by long-horned bison and giant beavers (Castor ohioensis).  Beavers (Castor canadensis) inhabiting this area have felled so many trees that they’ve been forced to dig canals to safely access the more distant trees.  In the process they’ve created favorable habitat for their much larger cousins which grow to the size of a bear.  One of the beaver lodges is even located at the mouth of the creek.  An otter sits on top of the lodge and gnaws on a sucker fish.

Up above a bald eagle chases an osprey, forcing it to drop a fish.  The eagle turns and drives off a turkey vulture.  A great blue heron, oblivious to this action, takes flight.  A group of wood ducks fly overhead.  An old bull mastodon, standing on the shore, stares at me, making me feel as if I’m an intruder in his world.  The animals here have no fear of man, and I have to be careful.  I steer the boat away from him.  The mouth of the Broad River widens as I approach its confluence with the Savannah.  I near a bluff forest on the right.  I face the bluff–a 130 foot high rocky cliff.  Butternut and paw paw trees are common in the forest above.  The offspring of some of these trees now grow in my orchard back at the fort.

I spot the blue flag on top of the pole next to my fish trap at the confluence of the 2 rivers.  I cut the boat engine and tie the boat to the pole.  The current causes the boat to drift downstream but the rope holds taut.  I eat lunch–a smoked turkey sandwich, an apple, and some hazlenuts.  A belted kingfisher calls and flies along the shore, searching for minnows.  When I’m done eating I check the contents of the hoop net I placed at the funnel point of the trap I constructed of rocks.  I dump a chain pickerel, 3 channel catfish, 3 white catfish, 4 small bullheads, 2 redeye bass, 1 largemouth bass, 1 crappie, 6 spotted sucker fish, 7 bluegills, 11 redear sunfish, and 3 spotted sunfish into the livewell.  During summer I often catch shad and mullet and the occasion eel.  I have to go farther down river to catch stripers and sturgeon.  I’ve yet to find a species of fish that is extinct in the present.  I untie the rope, restart the engine, and head back to the fort.

I re-enter the Broad River, boating upstream.  A flock of noisy, green and yellow parrakeets fly by the shore.  Swans and black ducks float on the surface of the water.  The mastodon that had been standing near shore earlier is gone, but I see a v-shaped wake heading toward the front of my boat.  The head surfaces.  I quickly steer the boat away, not wanting to collide with the giant beaver.  Nevertheless, the impact seems inevitable.  The beaver sees the bow of the boat at the last moment and ducks deeper.  The water is so clear I can see the beast swimming  just over a sandy bottom.  Happily, it avoided the propeller.  I didnt want to have to mercy kill the animal.  Beaver meat is delicious but I get all I need by trapping beavers and muskrats out of my rice pond back at the fort.

I disembark from my boat back near the road and cover it with a tarp.  On the way back to the fort 3 long-nosed peccaries run across the road in front of me.  Back in the garage, I dump the contents of the live well into my aquarium where I can retrieve the fish when I’m ready to process them.  I check in with my concubines and make sure they don’t need anything before I go survey the upland part of my road.  The road to a chestnut ridge is gently rolling and goes through an oak and pine savannah.  The tree composition consists of black oak, post oak, shortleaf pines, and white pines–fire resistant species.  Tawny waste high grass and bushy thickets grow between the trees.  The road also bisects windthrows and areas blackened by recent fires. 

A flock of 70 hen turkeys forages alongside the road.  They’re headed northwest in the same direction I’m traveling. 

White tail deer in a small grove of Osage Orange.  (I don’t really know what kind of trees those are, but in my fantasy, that’s what they are. This is actually hunting club land somewhere in Texas.)

In the distance I see a herd of elk cows.  Closer, in a grove of Osage orange, are some whitetail deer.  I see whitetail deer, elk, and fugitive deer (an extinct species) almost everyday.  Even herds of caribou travel through on occasion, and less often I’ll se a stag-moose by the river.  Llamas and flat-headed peccaries are also common but I see none today.

An oak savannah.  This one is somewhere in Wisconsin, I think.

Behind a fallen oak, a bobcat is waiting to ambush the flock of turkeys which are headed right toward him.  The bobcat stares at my vehicle, wide-eyed, and retreats.  I’ve accidentally foiled his hunt.  Animals have no inordinate fear of people, but strange noises, such as my auto engine, may unsettle them.

Up ahead, a flock of vultures and magpies surround the remains of a horse.  These vultures are related to old world vultures and don’t live in present day North America.  This part of the road goes through an expansive meadow and I see 2 bull elk together–possibly part of a bachelor herd.

Past the meadow is a grove of large, virgin, white pines.  Detached from the grove are 2 amazingly enormous white pines.  Both are 180 feet tall.  In between these 2 and the rest of the grove is a colony of blueberry bushes growing between some fallen and well-decayed tree trunks.  This time of year only a few red leaves cling on the upright branches.  A storm and fire divided these 2 trees from the rest of the grove and blueberries grow in that space instead.

White pines.

I finally reach the ridge.  A creek bottom adjacent to the ridge supports another extensive patch of river cane, but the ridge is quite different.  Here, on the high rocky hill is a beautiful stand of chestnut and chestnut oak with an undergrowth of chinquapin. The wildlife has already decimated this year’s chestnut crop but acorns still litter the ground.  Here, and on the open woodlands fox squirrels abound.  A black male with a gray mask chases a reddish-colored female: first along the ground, then up and around a tree trunk.  I love these large multi-colored squirrels. 

On the return back a dire wolf lopes along the road, a big limp rabbit in its mouth.  He stays ahead of my slowly moving vehicles for 200 yards before jogging into the tall grass of the big meadow.

Back at the fort, I spend a couple hours cleaning the fish.  The pickerel and sucker fish make good pickled fish–the vinegar dissolves the numerous bones.  I stick the bass and larger catfish in the freezer.  The bass are better after they’ve been frozen anyway because the musky flavor breaks down.  I fry the smaller catfish and some of the bream for supper.

After supper I fill the generator with wood alcohol and rekindle the fires in the woodstoves.  We listen to wolves howl close outside while we watch a movie.  Concubine #2 reminds me it’s her turn tonight so we turn in.

Mountain or woolly tapir (Tapirus pinchaque).  Of the 4 species of tapir in the world, this is the only one that inhabits a temperate forest.  The others are tropical.  The extinct Vero tapir also inhabited temperate forests as far north as what today is Kansas.  Like the Vero tapir, the mountain tapir is likely headed toward extinction.  There are only 9 in zoos and less than 2500 in the wild.

Jaw bone of a Vero tapir.  The partial jaw of a tapir is the only Pleistocene fossil reported from Anderson Spring Cave in Walker County, Georgia.  The ridged teeth are evidence they browse rather than graze.

View from inside Anderson Spring Cave, Walker County, Georgia.  The jaw bone of a tapir was found here.

The type specimen of the Vero tapir was found in Vero Beach, Florida in 1915, and it was associated with human bones dating to about 14,000 BP–a find that caused considerable controversy at the time because mainstream archaeologists refused to believe humans lived in North America prior to 6,000 BP.  Apparently, the Vero tapir was a fairly common species in the Pleistocene southeast.  In Georgia fossils of the Vero tapir have been found at Ladds Mountain, Bartow County; Anderson Spring Cave, Walker County; the Isle of Hope site and Savannah River dredgings in Chatham County; and at Watkins Quarry in Glynn County.  Northern Alabama fossil sites produced tapir bones too.  Both Cave ACb-3 and Bell Cave were the final resting places for a few tapirs.  In the latter site tapir fossils were associated with caribou and long-nosed peccary bones–what an odd mix of ungulates.  This suggests the Vero tapir was a temperate species, capable of surviving subfreezing temperatures.  The still extant (though probably not for long) mountain tapir lives in cloud forests above 6500 feet in elevation in Peru, so it’s not all that unusual for a tapir species to live in a temperate climate, though the 3 other living species inhabit the tropics.

Extant tapirs are big strong animals weighing up to 600 pounds.  The Vero tapir was slightly larger than this, and it must have been a tough creature able to fend off big cats, wolves, and bears.  When cornered they bite and put up a ferocious battle, but more often they shake off their attackers by running through dense vegetation or diving into deep water.  Their tough hides keep them from getting scrapes and abrasions while stampeding through brush.  A recent television documentary on National Geographic Wild showed film of vampire bats feeding upon tapirs which ignored the pesky bloodsuckers.  Deer were much more sensitive and vigilant about keeping the bats from biting them, perhaps explaining why vampire bats are extinct in North America.  The bats need beasts with thick skins that can’t detect them.

The tapir’s unusual looking and prominent proboscis is utilitarian.  It’s prehensile and used to grip and strip branches of leaves.  They eat forest vegetation such as ferns, leaves, and succulent plants.  Their preferred habitat is moist woodlands and river bottomlands.  During the Pleistocene whenever climatic conditions favored the spread of woodlands tapir populations in southeastern North America probably expanded.  Unfavorable climatic conditions probably limited them to riverine corridors.  Modern tapirs are considered keystone species because they’re important seed dispersers.  Wax palms and highland lupines decline in abundance whenever mountain tapirs are hunted out of a region.  Certain plant species were likely more abundant during the Pleistocene,  thanks to the Vero tapir’s inefficient digestive system.  Some unknown species of plants may have even become extinct after tapirs were gone.

The terminal radiocarbon date for the Vero tapir in southeastern North America is 11,450.  This translates to a calender year date of 13,300 BP.  They probably lasted in isolated pockets for 2 or 3 thousand years longer, but they’ve been gone a long time now.  The mountain tapir has been discussed as a candidate for Pleistocene rewilding in North America.  This won’t happen.  The mountain tapir is expected to become extinct in the wild by the end of the decade.  It needs continuous stretches of cloud forest–patchy forests are inadequate.  All captive individuals are descendents of 2 individuals, so it will inbreed itself to death in zoos as well.  Last month, black rhinos were declared extinct in the wild. Our modern forests are already impoverished and devoid of diversity.  The loss of yet 2 more species of megafauna is unspeakably sad.

A map of the extent of the glaciers that covered North America during the Ice Age.  This depicts the Last Glacial Maximum.  During much of the Ice Age, the glaciers weren’t this large, but were still much more expanded than they are  today.  The range of many species of birds, especially ducks and geese which today summer in places that were miles under glaciers then, must have been pushed farther south.  This is a neat map that also shows loess formation.

Snowy owl about to catch a small rodent.

Snowy owls prefer open tundra habitats and nest on the ground.  During the Ice Age, tundra habitat was displaced much farther south than it is today.  Winter appearances of snowy owls in the southeast were probably common.  During the cold spell of the early 19th century they expanded their winter range south along the coastline because the open landscape of coastal dunes resembled their preferred habitat of tundra.  Grasslands expanded during Ice Age stadials, so snowy owls would’ve headed south to inland areas as well as the coast then. 

I’m not aware of any snowy owl sightings in Georgia since 1900.  There was a sighting in Springhill, Tennessee in 2009, but that was the first in that state since 1989.  They still invade Wisconsin and Ohio on a consistent basis.  The following youtube video shows a snowy owl in Toledo, Ohio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=S4fWoUxH3h8

It may not be harsh winters that cause snowy owls to extend their range south.  Some scientists think their population increases following lemming population explosions, and this explains why they may be more commonly seen during some winters.  Lemmings and mice are their primary food, though these large owls will prey on rabbits, squirrels, ptarmigans, grouse, and other owls.  J.J. Audubon observed them fishing.  He writes that the owls lay flat next to streams and snatch fish with their talons.  Others report them taking fish by diving from the wing like ospreys.  They are also a danger to cats and small house dogs.  A snowy owl killed a small house dog on a Wisconsin suburbanites back porch recently.

Atlantic puffins.

I’m unaware of any puffin sightings in Georgia since 1900.  But during the Ice Age, enormous colonies of these birds nested on rocky coastlines much farther south than they do today.  The ocean receded then, exposing many isolated islands where they could nest unmolested by predators.  Puffins probably often occurred off Georgia’s coast during Pleistocene winters.  This species nests in burrows and feeds upon small fish which it captures by swimming underwater.  The burrows of a colony are linked together underground like a maze. 

No fossil evidence of these 2 species has been found in the south, but I’m certain they would have made a birdwatcher’s checklist during Ice Age winters.