Wildlife in Your Life

Here's the hummer after she landed.

Neither do kangaroo but they are still wild animals and thus unpredictable.

Kangaroo Attacks in Australia Spotlight Growing Turf War

Roo mauling!" the headlines screamed after a 13-year-old boy was attacked by a kangaroo as the boy looked for a lost golf ball on a green in Grafton, Australia

National geographic news

Kangaroos don't look like they could have much upper body strength at all. I mean, I could be missing something having never lived around them, but I'd suspect that a strong human with any reasonable skill at throwing punches would wipe the floor with one of them.

If you've never thought about it.....

People tend to underrate humans based on their perception of the average human. Human athletes can be miles different from that general assessment.

As I've heard this story, in Roberto Duran's younger days at some sort of a carnival, somebody told him the lightweight division was a bunch of bullshit and that he had a friend who could take Duran's best punch and not even blink and when Duran asked who this friend might be, the guy walked over to a horse who had something to do with the carnival and, before anybody could say anything or try to tell Duran how stupid it was to try to KO a horse, knocked the horse cold with a single punch. They said it was about a month before Duran could use the hand again, but the horse did get the worst of the encounter.

Kangaroos pack a HUGE amount of power in their hind legs, and they have claws. The males kick each other during breeding season and claw out huge clots of fur from each other's stomachs. Without protection a human would be disembowled almost instantly.

From their hands, or their feet (forelegs or hindlegs if you prefer...?

Hind legs. Kangaroo's rear back on their tail and bring both hind legs up to kick with. They also jump and chest-butt each other and kick with their hind feet while coming down.

Dasha and I walked around Forest Hills Cemetery with our cameras today. We followed a blue heron around the little pond taking photos and video (click to view video):

Thanks rosborne. You got it right. Roos have an inch long claw on their hind legs, the claw is what does the damage. Plus they are deceptivly small looking average male is as tall as a man.

Sounds like an animal which has been saved by isolation. A human boxer would just circle away from the tail/kick thing and punch their lights out and any sort of a real predator would quickly render them extinct.

What I've just exposed you to for the first time, obviously, is one of the major arguments against Steve Gould's new vision of evolutionism, i.e. punctuated equilibria, or "punk eek".

Punk eek is an attempt to do an end run around two of the hugest problems with ordinary Darwinian evolution, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, and the Haldane Dilemma and related problems with population genetics. The claim is that all meaningful evolutionary advancement occurs amongst tiny groups of animals in isolated environments.

One of the problems with the (new) theory is that it involves a requirement for parochially adapted creatures to spread out and overwhelm globally adapted creatures countiless millions of times while, in real life as we all know, the first time you ever introduce ordinary dogs and cats and rats or globally adapted predators to one of Darwin's little island paradises, the exotic animals all get wiped out.

The roo is such a case which has simply gotten lucky somehow.

In fact, when Jack Johnson was training for the fight with Tommy Burns in Australia, a roo hopped by and somebody bet Johnson a hundred dollars he couldn't catch him and Johnson, used to running down rabbits for sport in Texas, chased the roo for several miles until the roo keeled over dead from exhaustion, hauled the roo back to camp where he was made into dinner for the company, and then beat the stuffings out of Burns the next day.

Jack Johnson's own autobiography is a more interesting book than "White Hope" by the way.

I know, I know, what if.....

The reality of it is however that the thought of standing his ground and fighting it out with Johnson simply did not occur to the roo nor was Johnson concerned that it might. The roo knew that a real man, i.e. an American, was after him, and simply ran until he could run no further, and died.

Australia had some of the coolest and most effective predators on the planet. Roo's are not only fast, but strong and well adapted. They survived, but the predators have gone.

Of course, the native predators are usually the first to go when a new super-predator (H. Sapiens) evolves or moves into the area.

We can only speculate on the actual result of a bare handed and bare pawed fight between Roo and H. Sapien. But one thing is for certain, a well armed Marine with all the technology available to him would be more than a match for any array of 'naturally' armed predators.

See if yoiu can believe this: statistics apparently indicate that of all the dangerous animals kept in zoos in the world, the one responsible for the most and the most grevious injuries to human handlers is the cassowary. Fangs and claws still count for something in the wild, but part of it apparently is attitude.

I was bird hunting yesterday and put up a whitetail that was eating from a bait pile (not mine). I could see her looking at me broadside at only about 60 yards, raised my shotgun, put the bead right on her pumpstation... and .... said "Bang!" and she snorted and ran off into the woods.

Just for you non-hunters, I was loaded with #6 birdshot that at that distance would have bounced off her hide anyway, or blinded her, besides, firearms deer season doesn't open for another month. I was just testing my nerves. They passed.

You were right not to try the birdshot on a deer. I've heard that if you can get close enough, it's possible to take a deer out with a left hook, but it has to be a good one. You might want to get onto YouTube and catch the scene of that first Duran/Leonard fight in Montreal to see how that's done. The idea would be to get the deer thinking too much about the overhand right and then follow the right up with the left hook.

How did the 'Wildlife in your life' thread turn into a mixed genus boxing match?

Here's something from my back yard more dangerous than a crazed sparrow... if you eat it (poisonous).

What kind of little lizards are those?

I think they're salamanders.

When I was in Vermont and New Hampshire, hiking the Appalachian Trail, I saw those friggin' orange lizards everywhere.