Category Archives: Europe

Episode 053: Dragons

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It’s our one-year anniversary! To celebrate, I’ve opened up a Patreon bonus episode for anyone to listen to. Just click the link below and you can listen in your browser:

bonus episode – Salty Animals

This week’s episode is about dragons, specifically dragons of western/English-speaking tradition. Even narrowing it down like that leaves us with a lot of ground to cover! Thanks to Emily whose suggestion of the Komodo dragon as a topic started this whole ball rolling.

A dragon from the game Flight Rising, specifically one of MY dragons. Her name is Lily. She’s so pretty.

The Lambton worm:

A spitting cobra:

A Nile crocodile:

Deinosuchus skeleton and two humans for scale. I stole this off the internet as usual so I don’t know who the people are. They look pretty happy to be in the picture:

St. George and the Dragon (REENACTMENT):

Klagenfurt dragon statue:

A wooly rhino skull:

The star of the show today, the Komodo dragon!

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week let’s celebrate the podcast’s one-year anniversary with a big episode about dragons. Emily suggested komodo dragons as a topic, and then it all just spiraled out of control from there.

But first, a bit of housekeeping. Since it’s our one-year anniversary I’ve unlocked a Patreon episode so that anyone can listen. This one’s about salty animals. There’s a link in the show notes. Just click it and it’ll take you to the page where you can listen on your browser. You don’t need a Patreon login or anything.

Second, I got a polite correction recently from a listener about subspecies. Podbean is being a butt so I can’t actually see the comment, just read it in the email they sent, so I’m not sure who to thank. But they pointed out that “when the subspecies name is the same as the species name, it means it’s the first subspecies formally described, or the nominate subspecies.” In other words, Panthera tigris tigris didn’t get that second tigris because it’s extra tigery, it got it because it was the first tiger subspecies described. Although it is extra tigery.

So now, let’s learn about dragons.

Until the early 13th century or so, the word dragon wasn’t part of the English language. We swiped it from French, which in turn got it from Latin, which took it from Greek. Before the word dragon became a common word, dragon-like creatures were frequently called worms. A worm used to mean any animal that was snakey in shape. Old stories of dragons in English folklore are frequently snakier than modern dragons. For instance, the Lambton worm.

The story goes that a man called John Lambton went fishing one Easter Sunday instead of going to church, and as punishment he caught not fish but a black leech-like creature with nine holes on each side of its head. He flung it into a well in disgust, and joined the crusades to atone for fishing on the Sabbath. But while he was gone, the worm grew enormous. It killed people and livestock, uprooted trees, and even blighted crops with its poisonous breath. It couldn’t be killed, either, because if it was chopped in two, its pieces rejoined.

When John Lambton returned from the crusades seven years later and found out what had happened, he sought the advice of a local wise woman about what to do. Then he covered a suit of armor with sharp spines, and wearing it, lured the worm into the river Wear, where it tried to squeeze him to death. But the spines cut it up into pieces that were swept away by the river so they couldn’t rejoin. The end.

I don’t want to derail the dragon talk too much here, but I’m just going to point out that the sea lamprey has seven little holes behind each eye called branchial openings. It’s also eel-like and can be partially black, and it’s gross. If you want to learn more about it, and about my irrational dislike of this interesting animal, you can go back and listen to episode three.

Anyway, even after English adopted the word dragon, it didn’t mean dragon exactly. It was just a word for a big snake, especially one with mythical attributes or enormous size. But artists the world over are fond of adding wings and legs to reptiles, especially to snakes. Snakes just look so…undecorated. Gradually dragon took on its current meaning, that of a reptile with four legs, possibly a pair of wings, decorative horns and spikes and spines, and the ability to breathe fire. Actual. Fire.

That kind of dragon simply can’t exist except in folklore and fiction. But human creativity aside, many aspects of the dragon, at least the dragons of western tradition, are based on those of real-life animals.

If you’ve listened to episode 12, about the wyvern, the basilisk, and the cockatrice, you may remember the confusion among those terms and what they stand for. Technically all three are types of dragons, since the definition of dragon is actually pretty loose. In that episode, we discussed the king cobra as the possible source of many stories of the basilisk.

The king cobra doesn’t spit venom, but many species of cobra do. While cobra venom won’t hurt you very much if it just touches undamaged skin, it will hurt your eyes if it gets into them. And spitting cobras aim for the eyes. The venom is actually sprayed directly from the cobra’s fangs, which have tiny holes in the front that work sort of like a spray bottle. Some species of cobra can spit venom over six feet, or two meters, and they can also inject venom by biting. Cobra venom can cause blindness if enough gets in the eyes, and it certainly causes eye pain and swelling. Not only that, but a few other species of venomous snake, such as the Mangshan pit viper, sometimes also spit venom.

As far as I’m concerned, a big snake that sprays venom at your eyes is a good basis for the story of a dragon that breathes fire. I’d almost rather deal with a firebreather, to be honest, because I know to stop, drop, and roll if I catch on fire. Be safe, kids. This has been a public service announcement.

Crocodiles have undoubtedly influenced dragon mythology. In fact, so many common dragon traits are present in crocodiles that if you discount the wings and firebreathing, crocodiles basically are dragons. The biggest crocodile living today is the saltwater crocodile, which can grow over 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and which lives in southeast Asia, eastern India, and northern Australia. The second biggest crocodile is the Nile crocodile, which can grow nearly as long, and which lives throughout much of Africa around rivers, lakes, and swamps. Male saltwater crocodiles are typically larger than females, while female Nile crocodiles are typically larger than males.

While crocodiles look like big lizards, they’re actually more closely related to birds and dinosaurs. They can also live a long time, occasionally over a hundred years. All crocodiles are good swimmers with webbed feet that help them change directions quickly. They can also run pretty fast out of water. A crocodile’s back is heavily armored with thick scales and osteoderms, or scutes, which are bony deposits in the skin. Crocodiles have long jaws studded with 80 teeth, and if a croc loses a tooth, another grows in its place. It can just keep replacing its teeth up to 50 times. It has good night vision, a good sense of smell, good hearing, and special sensory pits on its jaws that allow a croc to hunt and escape danger even in complete darkness. A croc’s stomach contains acid that would make even the bearded vulture envious, so it has no problem digesting bones, hooves, and horns efficiently, a good thing since Crocodiles usually swallow their prey whole. And crocodiles have the strongest bite of any living animal, stronger even than a great white shark.

Of course, there used to be bigger crocodiles. Do you want to learn about gigantic extinct crocodiles? OF COURSE YOU DO, that is basically why we’re all here.

Okay, so, there used to be a 35-foot, or almost 11-meter-long crocodile called Deinosuchus that lived around 75 million years ago in what is now North America. It basically looked like a modern crocodile, but its rear teeth were shorter and blunter than its front teeth. They were adapted to crush its prey rather than bite through it, probably because with a bite force that was probably stronger than a T. rex’s, it didn’t want to accidentally bite a big chunk out of the dinosaurs it ate. Yeah. It ate dinosaurs.

So crocodiles probably did a lot to inspire dragon folklore. There’s still a lot of mythology wrapped around the crocodile today, for that matter. You know those little birds that are supposed to clean crocodile teeth? Not actually a thing. I’ve lived my whole life thinking that was pretty neat, only to find it’s a myth.

Sometimes in spring a croc will lie in the water with sticks on its snout. When a bird flies down to pick up a stick for nesting, the crocodile will grab the bird and eat it. This is a real thing that happens, not a myth. Crocodiles are actually pretty smart. And sometimes they hunt in packs.

One of the most famous traditional dragon stories in the English language is that of St. George and the Dragon, which probably originated from stories brought back to Britain during the Crusades. The story became especially popular in the 13th century and there are many versions.

According to the story, a venomous dragon lived in a pond near a city, and had poisoned not only its pond, but the entire countryside. To keep the dragon from approaching the city, the people had to feed it their own children. Each day the people held a terrible lottery to see who had to send one of their children to the pond for the dragon to eat. One day the princess was chosen, and despite all the king’s gold and silver he had to send his daughter to be eaten by the dragon.

Fortunately for her, St. George just happened to be riding by. The dragon emerged from its pond and St. George thought, oh no, we’re not having any of that, and charged it. He wounded it with his lance, then had the princess give him her girdle to use as a collar. A girdle in this case was something between a decorative belt and a ribbon tied around the waist. As soon as St. George tied the girdle around the dragon’s neck, it became meek as a puppy and followed him back to the city.

Naturally, everyone was terrified, but St. George said he would kill the dragon if the king and his people would convert to Christianity. They did, he did, and that was the end of the dragon.

While crocodiles and big snakes undoubtedly strongly influenced dragon lore, something else did too. There’s a reason dragons are so often supposed to live in caves, for instance. Caves are good places to find fossils of huge extinct animals.

In Klagenfurt in Austria there’s a monument of a dragon, called the lindorm or lindwurm, that was erected in 1593. It still stands today, together with a statue of Hercules that was added almost 40 years later. The dragon statue is based on a story of the region. The story goes that a dragon lived near the lake and on foggy days would leap out of the fog and attack people. Sometimes people could hear its roaring over the noise of the river. Finally the duke had a tower built and filled it with brave knights. They fastened a barbed chain to a collar on a bull, and when the dragon came and swallowed the bull, the chain caught in its throat and tethered it to the tower. The knights came out and killed the dragon.

The original story probably dates to around the 12th century, but it was given new life in 1335 when a skull was found in a local gravel pit. It was clearly a dragon skull and in fact it’s still on display in a local museum. The monument’s artist based the shape of the dragon’s head on the skull. In 1935 the skull was identified as that of a wooly rhinoceros.

Other dragon stories probably started when someone saw huge fossils they couldn’t identify. Dragons, after all, can look like just about anything. Stories of benevolent dragons living on Mount Pilatus in Switzerland may have started by pterodactyl fossils that are frequently found in the area. In 1421 a farmer saw a dragon flying to the mountain, and it was so close to him that the farmer fainted. When he woke, he found a stone left for him by the dragon, which had healing properties. The dragonstone is in a local museum these days and has been identified as a meteorite.

It occurs to me that if one were rich, and by one I mean me, one could take a dragon tour through Europe and visit all these awesome monuments and museums. That would be part of my expedition to search for the tatzelwurm in the Alps.

We’ll finish up at the animal I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the Komodo dragon. While in many respects the Komodo dragon is a real-life dragon, it probably didn’t influence traditional dragon stories in the western world because no one in Europe knew anything about it until 1910. It only lives on five small islands, notably Komodo, but it’s also found on the island of Flores where the Homo floresiensis remains were found.

There were rumors for years of a type of land crocodile found on Komodo. Dutch sailors said it actually breathed fire and could even fly. In 1910, a Dutch Colonial Administration official from Flores took some soldiers to Komodo and searched for the dragon. They shot one, and Peter Ouwens, director of the Zoological Museum in Bogor, Java, hired hunters who killed two more. Ouwens studied the lizards and published a formal description in 1912. In direct contrast to many governments of the time, who were apparently trying to drive as many species to extinction as possible, in 1915 the Dutch government listed the Komodo dragon as protected.

Keep in mind that at this time, people were completely bonkers about dinosaurs and other megafauna. The Komodo dragon got incredibly famous in a very short amount of time. A 1926 scientific expedition that brought back two live dragons and twelve preserved ones actually inspired the 1933 movie King Kong. Since Komodo dragons displayed in zoos proved to be huge draws, but didn’t survive long in captivity back then, if the dragon hadn’t already been protected it probably would have been driven to extinction by collectors capturing them for zoos and killing them to sell to museums as taxidermied specimens.

Researchers used to think that the Komodo dragon, which is a type of monitor lizard, demonstrated island gigantism, where some species that are typically not so big grow larger when a population is restricted to an island. Island dwarfism is its opposite, where big animals like elephants evolve to become smaller in an island habitat. But many species of monitor lizard are large even though they don’t live on islands, and it turns out that a close relative of the Komodo dragon lived in Australia until around 50,000 years ago. In fact, the first aboriginal settlers of Australia might have encountered it.

It was called Megalania and it was the largest straight-up lizard, as opposed to dinosaur, that’s ever been found. While we don’t have any complete skeletons, some researchers estimate it grew to around 18 feet long, or 5.5 meters, although older estimates had it up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters. Either way, it was much bigger than the Komodo dragon, which can grow just over ten feet long, or more than 3 meters.

Like the crocodile, the Komodo dragon’s skin contains osteoderms. It almost looks like it’s covered with tiny spines up close. Also like the crocodile, it grows new teeth when it loses old ones, which frankly is something I wish mammals could do because how useful would that be? It can run faster than a crocodile, can swim and dive well when it needs to although it prefers to stay on land, and when it’s young it can climb trees. Older dragons are too heavy to climb trees, but an adult can stand on its hind legs using its tail as a prop. It likes to dig burrows to sleep in, and females may dig nesting burrows 30 feet long, or 9 meters.

The Komodo dragon eats anything, from carrion to baby Komodo dragons to humans, but it especially likes deer and wild pigs. Its sense of smell is so acute, it can smell a dying animal almost six miles away, or 9 ½ km. It will swallow smaller prey whole but will tear chunks off of bigger carcasses.

We’re still learning about the Komodo dragon. For a long time researchers thought it had a nasty dirty mouth full of rotten meat, which infected its prey with bacteria when bitten. But it turns out that the Komodo dragon is actually venomous. This is still somewhat controversial, since the Komodo dragon’s saliva does contain 57 strains of bacteria and some researchers think that’s more toxic than its venom. Whatever the case, you do not want to be bitten by a Komodo dragon.

It’s primarily an ambush predator, and when it attacks an animal, it gives it a bite with its huge serrated teeth. If the animal gets away, no problem. The dragon’s venom contains anticoagulants so it will probably die of blood loss. As for the dragon itself, its blood actually contains antimicrobial proteins. Researchers hope to develop new antibiotics from the proteins.

Komodo dragon eggs are big, about the size of grapefruits. The mother dragon guards her nest until the babies hatch, and some researchers have observed mothers defending their babies for short periods after they hatch. Baby dragons mostly live in trees and eat insects, lizards, birds’ eggs, and other small prey. If they want to approach a grown-up dragon’s kill to eat some of it, a baby will roll around in poop first or in the stinky parts of the dead animal’s guts so the adult dragons won’t eat the baby. Captive female dragons occasionally lay fertile eggs even though they’ve never mated, a process known as parthenogesis.

Komodo dragons look dumb. They’re probably not exactly geniuses even compared to crocodiles. But dragons kept in captivity sometimes play with items in their enclosures, which is pretty neat. If even a Komodo dragon can take time out of its busy schedule to play, you can too.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 052: British Big Cats

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Here’s another in the 2018 series of out-of-place animals, this time ABCs–alien big cats: big cats where there shouldn’t be any big cats. Like the British Isles, where no one should find a lynx or puma wandering around these days. But not only do people see big cats in Britain, they sometimes catch or kill them too.

The Eurasian lynx:

The European wildcat:

The puma:

A photo of the Beast of Bodmin Moor:

Mr. Tinkler’s unexpected serval:

The Kellas cat:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week’s episode is about some more out of place animals, but a specific type. There are so many reports of big cats in places where big cats should not be, especially black panthers, that cryptozoologists have a term for them: ABCs, or Alien Big Cats. Thanks again to Maureen for the topic suggestion!

There are whole books written about ABCs, so I won’t be able to do more than touch on the highlights in this episode. Big cat reports from Great Britain are especially common, so that’s what I’ll focus on this time.

Many reports of black panthers turn out to be large domestic cats seen at a distance, where tricks of perspective and poor light contribute to the cat looking much bigger than it really is. Some big cat reports turn out to be real animals that escaped from captivity, but other reports are not so easy to explain away.

The British Isles only fully separated from mainland Europe about 8,000 years ago as the land rose due to isostatic rebound after the weight of glaciers was gone and due to rising sea levels from melted glaciers. Before that, it was connected to what is now Denmark and the Netherlands via a large area of marshland for several thousand years. We know one European big cat crossed into Britain during that time: the Eurasian lynx, which only went extinct in Britain about 1,500 years ago. Other ice age big cats went extinct long before, around 25 to 30,000 years ago, or 12,000 years ago in the case of the cave lion.

Of all the big cats that once lived in Britain, only the Eurasian lynx is still around. It now lives in parts of Asia and Europe on up to Siberia. It’s larger than the related North American bobcat and the Canadian lynx, but still nowhere near as big as tigers and lions. The Eurasian lynx stands about 28 inches tall at the shoulder, or 70 cm, and is heavily built with thick spotted fur and a short bobtail. The tip of its tail is black although the rest of the animal is mostly buff to orangey-brown with darker brown spots, and it has long black tufts of fur on the tips of its ears. It’s a distinctive animal.

There is one other wild cat that we know still lives in Britain, the European wildcat. It used to live throughout the British Isles but now only remains in Scotland, although it also lives in parts of Europe. At first glance the wildcat looks like a domestic cat with tabby markings, but it’s a little larger and more heavily built than most domestic breeds. But since it can and does interbreed with the closely related domestic cat, it can be hard to tell the wildcat apart from a feral domestic tabby. It’s also very rare. Only a few hundred remain in the Scottish highlands at most, possibly only a few dozen. In the last few years, Scotland has worked hard to protect the remaining wildcats. An active program to neuter all feral domestic and hybrid cats in the West Highlands has helped reduce the number of crossbreedings, and more land has been designated as a wildcat haven.

There are very old stories of a vicious big cat in Britain, with the first mention in a Welsh manuscript dating to some time before 1250, called the Black Book of Carmarthen. It’s a collection of histories and legends told in verse. A fragment of a poem frequently referred to as Pa gur after the first two words of the first line, or more descriptively, Arthur and the Porter, is about King Arthur and probably dates to around 1100. The Cath Palug is mentioned in the stanza right at the end before the rest of the poem is lost due to damage. I’ll quote an English translation of the last few lines, because I was an English major and will use any excuse to read poetry out loud.

“Cei the fair went to Mona

To devastate Lleown.

His shield was ready

Against Cath Palug

When the people welcomed him.

Who pierced the Cath Palug?

Nine score before dawn

Would fall for its food.”

Kay was Arthur’s foster-brother, but in this poem he’s described as Arthur’s nephew. Lleown possibly means lions, and Mona is Ynys Môn, or Anglesey. The cat was a monster that had already killed 180 men when Kay finally defeated it. But the Cath Palug appears in other Arthur legends, and from them we can learn a bit more about it. In some stories it was the offspring of Henwen, the great white sow, who was chased into the sea and gave birth to a black kitten. The kitten swam to the island of Ynys Mon where the sons of Palug raised it, only for it to turn into a monster. In other versions of the story, a man fishing in a lake swore to dedicate his first catch to God, but broke his oath. On his third cast he caught a black kitten, which he kept and raised. But it grew enormous and killed him, his family, and anyone else who came near the lake. Sir Kay, or Arthur in other versions of the story, polished his shield so the cat would attack its reflection and not the man.

The Cath Palug was probably not a real cat but an animal of folklore. There’s always a possibility, of course, that the stories were based on the European lynx. But the lynx is not black even as a cub, and it’s not a dangerous animal to humans the way tigers sometimes are.

The first modern report of an Alien Big Cat in Britain comes from about 1770. The writer William Cobbett described seeing a gray cat the size of a Spaniel dog when he was a boy. It climbed into a hollow elm tree near Waverley Abbey, a ruin in Surrey. Later in his life, while traveling in Canada, he saw a wild gray cat, possibly a lynx, and thought it looked like the cat he saw in England.

Lynxes are occasionally killed or captured in Britain. In 1903 a lynx was shot and killed in Devon after it killed two dogs. The animal was taxidermied and given to a local museum, which labeled it as a Eurasian lynx—but a study of the animal published in 2013 proved that it was a Canadian lynx that had been kept in captivity for at least part of its life. In 1927 newspapers reported a lynx caught in Scotland. I found a copy of the article from the Sunday Post dated the 16th of January 1927, which I’ll quote part of:

“Shepherds reported having seen an animal like a leopard, but without spots on its coat, stalking the sheep in the heather. A farmer who set a steel trap on a mountainside was astonished to find the following morning that he had captured a large, fierce, yellow animal of unknown species. He obtained a gun and, cautiously approaching it, shot it. The body was sent to the London Zoo, where it was identified as that of a lynx… Two other specimens have been killed in Scotland recently. How they reached there is unknown, but it is believed that they must have escaped from some traveling menagerie.”

Unfortunately the article doesn’t give much information about the animal. It’s only called large, fierce, and yellow, and the shepherds who’d seen it before it was trapped said it looked like a leopard without spots. That’s strange if this really was a lynx, because while some individual lynxes may have spots that don’t show up well against the background coat, all lynxes have spots. They also have bobtails and the distinctive black ear tufts, but those details aren’t reported.

It’s possible the poor cat wasn’t a lynx at all but a puma. The puma, also called a cougar or mountain lion, is native to the Americas. It’s bigger than a lynx, standing almost three feet tall at the shoulder, or 90 cm, and is usually tawny in color with lighter belly, and has a long tail that may show some faint ringing. You’d think that the London Zoo expert who examined the animal would know the difference between a long-tailed puma and a short-tailed lynx, though, so who knows what it really was? But in 1980 an honest-to-goodness puma was captured in Scotland. The puma spent the remainder of her life at the Highland Wildlife Park zoo, where they named her Felicity, and after she died was taxidermied and is now in the Inverness Museum. Felicity was probably an escaped or released pet, since the zoo director reported that she liked being tickled. Wild animals don’t typically like to be tickled.

Many other large cats of various species have been killed or captured in Britain. In most, if not all, cases the animals were probably exotic pets that were either released when they became too difficult to manage, or escaped and weren’t reported because the owners didn’t have a license to own the animal in the first place. But there are many other sightings of more mysterious large cats.

The Surrey Puma is one of the earliest cases. The first sightings were made in the 1930s around the Surrey/Hampshire border, but since this is the same area where William Cobbett saw his Spaniel-sized gray cat, many people think that 1770 account is the earliest known. In 1955 a woman walking her dog saw a puma-like cat slinking away from a dead calf, which it had evidently been feeding on. Many reports followed through the 1960s. Naturalists who examined paw prints discovered in the area identified the prints as made by dogs. Occasionally someone would snap a photo, but they were always too blurry to be conclusive—until 2014. One quiet Friday morning a man named Allan Tinkler, from Molesey in north Surrey, was eating breakfast with his children when he saw a strange cat in his garden. It stayed in the yard for over half an hour and was definitely not a domestic cat. I’ve got one of the pictures he took in the show notes, and it clearly shows a small wildcat called a serval.

The serval is a long-legged, large-eared African cat with spots over most of its body and some stripes along the neck and shoulders. It turned out that this particular serval was an escaped pet, and its owner retrieved it safely and took it home. They also had a license to keep it. Servals are frequently kept as pets and will sometimes cross-breed with domestic cats, producing tame kittens with serval-like markings. This hybridization is the basis of the domestic cat breed called the Savannah cat.

Obviously that serval wasn’t the cause of sightings going back decades or even centuries, but with no clear photos or captured animals, we can’t guess what the Surrey Puma might really be.

The Beast of Bodmin Moor is another case that received a lot of attention starting in the late 1970s. Bodmin Moor is in Cornwall, England, and over the years people have reported seeing big cats in the area, brown or black in color and about the size of a German shepherd, with long tails. One persistent rumor is that in 1978, when a circus owner named Mary Chipperfield had to close her zoo in Plymouth, she released three pumas onto the moor rather than give them to Dartmoor Zoo. Supposedly the Beast of Bodmin Moor is a descendant of these pumas.

In 1994, after something killed a number of sheep on the moor, the local MP called for an official investigation into the beast. A biologist and a zoologist headed the investigation. They looked at the sheep supposedly killed by a big cat, at tracks, photographs, and video footage, and conducted a search of the moor. Their conclusion, after six months, was that there was no evidence for any big cats of any type living on the moor. The tracks were made by dogs, the sheep carcasses did not show signs of being killed or eaten by cats, and the photos and videos showed domestic cats seen in places where scale was hard to judge.

Locals weren’t at all appeased. Many people were convinced big cats lived on the moor. A few days after the official report, a boy found the skull of a big cat near the River Fowey. But the Natural History Museum in London, which examined the skull, determined that it was from a leopard that had been prepared for taxidermy after death, and was probably taken from a leopard-skin rug.

Mysterious big cats have been spotted all over Britain, and considering how many exotic cats have been caught and killed over the years, it’s clear something is going on. It’s unlikely that any exotic species have successfully established breeding populations in Britain, but it’s not completely out of the question. But there is one other possibility.

For a long time the Kellas cat, or cait sìth, which means ‘fairy cat,’ was thought to be a Scottish folktale. It was a big black cat flecked with white, and with a white spot on its chest, that was supposed to be an omen of doom or even a type of evil spirit. Then a gamekeeper caught one in a fox snare in 1984, and in the following years a few more were shot or captured. It turns out that the Kellas cat is a landrace population of hybrids between European wildcats and domestic cats. A landrace is a locally adapted animal—not a subspecies, although in some cases it could eventually develop into one, but not really a separate breed of animal, although traits of a landrace population can be standardized into a breed through selective breeding. In the case of the Kellas cat, it’s black with a white spot on the chest, and has long white guardhairs that give it a flecked appearance.

While the Kellas cat is not much bigger or heavier than a domestic cat, it’s possible that at least some sightings of mysterious big cats are actually Kellas cat sightings. And honestly, if I had the choice between seeing an escaped exotic pet and seeing a fairy cat, I’ll take the fairy cat every time.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 048: Out of Place Animals

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Happy New Year! Let’s learn about a few animals that have shown up in places where they just shouldn’t be. How did they get there, and why? Sometimes we know, sometimes it remains a mystery.

Some of Pablo Escobar’s hippos:

King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur who was discovered almost frozen to death in London:

A little alligator captured in a koi pond. In Maryland. Which is not where gators live:

A monk parakeet eating pizza in Brooklyn, because of course it is:

How did these beavers get into a Devon river? They’re not telling:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Happy new year! Let’s ring in the new year with some out-of-place animals. Sometimes an animal shows up in a place where it just shouldn’t be, and while the animal itself isn’t a mystery, how it got there is. In this episode we’ll chase down the solutions to a few of these mysteries, and ponder a few others we can’t solve.

We’ll start with some hippos that aren’t hanging out in Africa where they belong, but are living in Columbia, South America. In this case, we do know what happened. Back in the 1980s, a guy named Pablo Escobar had a private zoo that contained four hippos, along with other animals. Escobar was not a nice person. He was a drug lord who grew obscenely rich from selling cocaine and killing anyone who didn’t agree with him. In 1993 the police raided his estate and Escobar was killed in a shoot-out. The government took over the estate and turned it into a park, and most of the animals were given to zoos. But the hippos stayed. The estate had a lake that they lived in, and they weren’t hurting anything.

But after a few decades, the four hippos turned into forty. The hippos have expanded their range from the park to neighboring rivers. Sometimes a hippo wanders into a neighboring town or ranch. Hippos can be dangerous—in fact, they’re the most dangerous animal in Africa, killing more people than any other animal. But the locals like the hippos. At this point the government is torn between needing to keep the people and environment safe from these out-of-place animals, and preserving animals that everyone agrees are really awesome. In 2010 the government started a program to castrate the males, which will stop the population from growing, although castrating a wild hippo is not easy so the program is not necessarily going to work.

This is what a hippo sounds like:

[hippo sound]

In December 2011, someone found an unusual animal in London, a ring-tailed lemur. Even if you don’t know what it is, you know what it is. The vets who treated the animal named him King Julien after the character from the movie Madagascar. Lemurs are primates, only found in the island country of Madagascar, so what was one doing in London on a below-freezing day? Poor King Julien almost died of hypothermia and dehydration.

King Julien was very tame, so had probably been someone’s pet. People are allowed to own lemurs in England, but only with a special license. Ring-tailed lemurs are popular exotic pets, and part of the reason they’re endangered in the wild is because they’re frequently captured for sale on the black market. I tried to find out what had happened to King Julien, without luck, but hopefully he recovered fully and now lives in a zoo or wildlife sanctuary where he can be properly cared for and can hang out with other lemurs.

This is what a ring-tailed lemur sounds like:

[ring-tailed lemur sound]

Unfortunately for many animals kept as exotic pets, once the people who buy them realize owning an alligator, for instance, is not as fun as it sounds, the animals are often just dumped outside to fend for themselves. The kind of person who would buy an exotic animal in the first place is probably not the kind of person who bothers to learn how to take care of it.

Back in the mid-20th century, if you took a vacation to Florida and went into a souvenir shop, you could buy a live baby alligator for a few bucks. Baby alligators are cute, like big lizards. But they grow fast, they eat a lot, they make a mess, and they often get sick because they’re not properly taken care of. I like to think I know a fair amount about animals, but I wouldn’t know how to take care of a baby alligator. And if it was 1950 and I couldn’t just look that information up online, or find it in the local library, I’d probably not do a very good job.

Now I know you’ve heard about sewer alligators. The story goes that back in the days when baby alligators were cheap pets, people would bring them home as souvenirs, realize very soon that they didn’t actually want an alligator as a pet, and would flush them down the toilet to get rid of them. Some of the flushed baby alligators survived, and grew up in the safety and relative warmth of the New York City sewers, eating rats. Every so often a maintenance worker would get the shock of shining a flashlight down a sewer tunnel and seeing the reflection of alligator eyes. In the stories, the gators were always enormous.

So did this ever happen? Did alligators ever really live in the sewers of New York or any other city? Alligators have actually been found in sewers, although it’s not known if they were survivors of being flushed or if they were released aboveground and found their way to the nearest water through storm drains. In 2010 a two-foot-long, or 60-centimeter, baby alligator was found in the sewer in New York City. In 1984 a Nile crocodile was captured in the Paris sewers. But a sewer is not a good habitat for any living thing, especially not a reptile. Any alligators found in sewers haven’t been there long—they wouldn’t survive long, and they certainly couldn’t breed in a cold, lightless environment.

But alligators don’t just turn up in sewers. They’re forever being found in people’s ponds, and not in Florida or surrounding areas like you’d think. As just one of many possible examples, in 2015 a guy in Maryland, in the northeastern United States, found a three foot, or .9 meter, alligator in his koi pond. Probably he did not have any koi left by the time police officers caught the gator and relocated it to a local zoo.

This is what an American alligator sounds like:

[alligator sound]

It’s not too unusual to find a bird somewhere outside of its natural range. While migrating birds have amazing skills at navigating long distances, sometimes a bird is blown off course by a storm, or joins a flock of closely related birds that then fly somewhere other than its usual migration route. But sometimes the presence of out-of-place birds aren’t so easy to figure out.

For instance, the Brooklyn parrots. Brooklyn is part of New York City, not a particularly welcoming place for tropical birds. But there’s a population of wild parrots called monk parakeets, or Quaker parrots, that have been living in the city for over 50 years. And no one’s sure where they came from.

The monk parakeet is from Argentina. It’s smallish, around 11 inches long or 29 cm, with a 19 inch wingspan, or 48 cm. It’s a cheerful bright green in color with pale gray forehead and breast, and some blue on the wings. It eats plants of all kinds and builds elaborate multi-family nests called apartments by weaving twigs together.

It’s also been a popular pet for a long time. It learns to mimic speech easily, is intelligent and hardy, and lives 15 to 20 years, or even longer. But because so many feral populations have developed in North America and Australia, some areas no longer allow monk parakeets as pets at all.

The Brooklyn parrots are probably escaped birds from pet stores and especially from shipping crates full of birds imported from Argentina. Thousands of the parrots were sold as pets in the United States during the 60s and 70s. The first report of parrots living in New York City comes from December 1970, when an article about them appeared in the New York Times. Since then, the origin of the parrots has achieved urban legend status, with unsubstantiated stories of heroic releases of captive birds from sinking cargo ships, a mass release of captive birds from an abandoned aviary, and so forth. In the mid-2000s, a poaching ring trapped birds to sell on the black market, but the ring was busted and the birds freed.

Populations of monk parakeets also live in Chicago, Austin TX, Brussels, Belgium, and many other cities. Because their droppings don’t harm statues and other structures the way pigeon droppings do, and studies of urban birds reveal that they aren’t a threat to native species, many cities have stopped trying to exterminate the birds. Their large nests do frequently have to be removed from power transformers.

This is what a monk parakeet sounds like:

[monk parakeet sound]

I always think of beavers as a North American animal, but the Eurasian beaver is native to—you guessed it—Europe and Asia. But like the North American beaver, the Eurasian beaver was almost driven to extinction by humans, who wanted its fur and a substance called castoreum that is still used in perfumes and cigarettes. Castoreum is produced by the beaver to scent mark their territory, and a beaver’s castor sacs is found right next to the anal glands. Another reason to quit smoking!

So by 1900, the Eurasian beaver was almost extinct throughout its range. Only a few small populations remained. In England, Scotland, and Wales it went extinct completely by the 16th century. But after conservation efforts throughout Europe and Asia, beavers have started to be reintroduced into their historic ranges. The first official reintroduction of beavers into Scotland occurred in 2009 and the animals are doing well.

In 2013, people in Devon, England started seeing beavers along the River Otter. The next year they had babies. No one had any idea where the beavers had come from—Devon is too far from Scotland for the Scottish beavers to have migrated there naturally, and anyway the Scottish beavers are closely monitored. If three had gone missing, the researchers in charge of them would know.

It led to a lot of controversy in Devon, to say the least. Fishers and farmers worried that the beavers would mess up the river, carry diseases, and in general cause havoc. And since the beavers hadn’t been officially introduced, no one knew whether these were even the right kind of beaver for England and if they were healthy. But locals liked having beavers around—they are really cute animals, after all. When the government agency Natural England announced it would capture the beavers and put them in a zoo, locals protested so strenuously that the plan was changed. Instead, the beavers were captured, examined by veterinarians to make sure they were Eurasian beavers and disease free, and rereleased. This happened in 2015. The beavers were healthy, they were the right species, and they were returned to the river. Still, no one one knows how they got there.

Beavers are actually good for fish and the local environment. Beaver ponds create winter habitat for many types of fish, and beaver dams don’t stop fish like salmon that migrate upriver to spawn. The presence of beaver dams helps reduce flooding, improves water quality, and creates cover for lots of fish and animals. And while some people believe beavers spread the giardia parasite, which causes a bacterial infection sometimes called beaver fever, giardia is actually mostly spread by humans and our domesticated animals, especially dogs. Giardiasis causes nasty diarrhea and other intestinal distress that can go on for weeks, and it’s why you don’t ever drink water that hasn’t been treated in some way.

The beavers in Devon are doing well and have spread into neighboring waterways. They got in the news again a little over a year ago, in October of 2016, when a rich guy decided he didn’t like them. Sir Benjamin Slade, who has a great name but who is clearly a prime jerk, posted a reward of 1,000 pounds to anyone who would kill the beavers who’d moved onto his estate, because he didn’t like that they were felling some of his trees. Dude, you are rich. Hire somebody to plant more trees for you. Besides, beavers have brought tourists to Devon who hope to catch a glimpse of the animals, which helps the local economy, Mr. Slade, if that IS your real name.

Anyway, this is what a beaver sounds like:

[beaver sound]

There are so many out-of-place animal reports that there’s no way to cover more than a few in one episode, so I’ll definitely revisit the topic. Until then, keep an eye out for anything unusual walking through your back yard.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 047: Strange Horses

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It’s the last episode of 2017 and we’re going out in style, learning about some unusual horses!

A Przewalski’s horse PHOTO TAKEN BY ME AT HELSINKI ZOO I cropped out as many poops as I could:

A Heck horse, also sometimes called a tarpan. Photo taken by *squints* Klaus Rudloff in Berlin:

A Moyle breed horse with a bossed forehead:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re going to learn about an animal I’ve been bonkers crazy about since I was a kid, the horse. But not just regular horses. We’re going to learn about some strange and little-known horses, the best kind of all.

All domestic horses are the same subspecies, Equus ferus caballus, even though the various breeds may look very different. Even mustangs and other populations of wild horses—more properly called feral horses—are the same subspecies. Feral just means a domestic animal that lives like a wild animal, like a stray dog. Only one truly wild horse remains these days, Przewalski’s [pzha-VALski’s] horse, Equus ferus przewalskii. I’ve been pronouncing it Perzwalski’s horse my whole life until today. So let’s start the episode by talking about that one.

Przewalski’s horse is native to the steppes of central Asia, especially Mongolia. It’s currently considered a subspecies of horse, but some researchers think it should be its own species. It went extinct in the wild in 1969. Fortunately, in 1900 15 of the horses had been captured and sold to various zoos. Some of the pairs reproduced, but by 1945, only 13 of the descendants remained. Of those 13, two were hybrids, one of them with a domestic horse, one of them with a tarpan. More about tarpans in a minute. Nine of the 13 were used in a careful breeding program, which was so successful that by 1992, Przewalski’s horse started to be reintroduced to the wild.

I’ve seen Przewalski’s horses, by the way. They had some in the Helsinki Zoo. Check the show notes for a picture taken by me and not swiped by me off the internet.

Przewalski’s horse is stockier than domestic horses, dun in color with a pale belly, with a short, erect mane. The legs are frequently faintly striped. The average horse stands about 13 hands high at the withers, which is the shoulder hump, or four feet four inches, or 132 cm. Its social structure is pretty much the same as the domestic horse’s. It lives in bands consisting of a group of mares and their young, and a stallion that leads the band to grazing areas and water while keeping watch for danger. A solitary stallion may sometimes challenge a stallion with a band of mares, which leads to a fight, which is pretty much the basis of 80% of the horse stories I read as a kid. So exciting.

So what about the tarpan? It was also called the Eurasian wild horse, and it went extinct—for good, unfortunately—in 1918 at the very latest, but probably much earlier. Its scientific name is Equus ferus ferus, and it’s probably the wild horse that gave rise to the modern domesticated horse. But we don’t know for sure, because we don’t know for sure that the tarpans alive in the 18th and 19th centuries were even real tarpans. They might have been hybrids of local domestic horses and Przewalski’s horses, or just feral domestic horses.

We do know that wild horses lived throughout Europe and parts of Asia during the Pleistocene. We have cave paintings 30,000 years old that are so good, scientists can determine a lot about the wild horse’s conformation and coat patterns and colors. We know our ancestors killed and ate horses long before anyone realized how useful it would be to tame such a strong animal and let it do the hard tasks of pulling carts and plows. The horse was domesticated about 6,000 years ago in various places at different times across Eurasia, and it’s possible that different subspecies of horse were domesticated, of which the tarpan was one. But we’re not sure how many subspecies of wild horse there were. We know about Przewalski’s horse since it’s still around, and we know a fair bit about the tarpan because it survived well into modern times. There were probably others, including what might be a type of tarpan that lived in forests.

There’s an interesting etymological fact that might point to the forest tarpan as a distinct type of wild horse. This comes from Willy Ley’s marvelous book, The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn, which I’ve read numerous times since I was a kid. A lot of the information is dated since it was first published in the 1940s, but it was cutting edge at the time. Also, the book was already old when I was a kid. I’m not that old. Anyway, Ley writes that there was an unusual Bavarian insult used when someone in southern Germany wanted to call someone else stupid. In other parts of German-speaking Europe, a stupid person is called an Esel, or donkey. But the Bavarian term is Waldesel, which means forest donkey. Ordinary donkeys are called Steinesel, or rock donkey. So some researchers think, or thought 80 years ago, that the Waldesel referred to the forest tarpan. It was supposed to be gray with a black stripe down the spine called an eel stripe, and like other wild horses had a big, donkey-like head.

At some point, when horses were fully domesticated, the wild horses became a pest. They stole domestic mares and ate fodder meant for livestock. So not only were they hunted for meat, they were killed just to get rid of them. By the late 19th century, tarpans were already rare, whether they were really wild horses or hybrids of wild and domestic horses. The last one was killed in the wild in 1879 or the first few days of 1880, the last one in captivity died in the early 20th century—reports vary as to whether it was in 1909, 1917, or 1918, and there are some doubts that these last horses were actually tarpans.

The tarpan looked a lot like Przewalski’s horse: small, stocky, and with a large head, with short mane and tail. They were mostly bay in color—that’s brown with black mane and tail—but dun, black, gray, and other shades were also present. Unlike Przewalski’s horse, the mane fell across the neck like the domestic horse, but was shorter.

So is the tarpan really extinct? If you go online you can find tarpans for sale. What’s up with that?

As early as 1780, people realized the tarpan needed help to survive. That’s when the Polish government established a wildlife park to protect the tarpans living there, but it closed in 1806 and the horses were given to local farmers. A small number of tarpans were kept in zoos. In the 1930s and after, people have tried to breed a horse that closely resembles the tarpan, starting with domestic stock that probably have recent tarpan ancestors. Various breeds of horse have resulted, notably the Heck horse, often called a tarpan. It isn’t really a tarpan, but it sure is beautiful.

There are many horses in folklore, from Pegasus to the kelpie, centaurs to unicorns, but very few actual mystery horses. I looked, believe me. The kelpie, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a Scottish water spirit that sometimes appears as a pony with a sopping wet mane. Don’t try to catch it. The second you touch it, it’ll drag you into the water and drown you.

Anyway, I dug around and found not a mystery horse, but something really interesting about horses with horns—not like a unicorn’s horn, but something even stranger. Something real.

Every so often there are reports of a horse with a pair of horns on the forehead. Sometimes they’re described as tiny, although older accounts are more sensational. For instance, an 1837 account from a South American explorer talks about a horse with four-inch long horns like a bull’s, and another with horns three inches long. That would be about 8 cm to 10 cm.

Well, there are a few breeds of horse with what are called bossed foreheads. Basically this means the forehead sometimes has a pair of bony bulges or points above the eyes or near the ears that do look like tiny fur-covered horns like those seen in giraffes, or horn buds where horns could grow. Sometimes a horse will have only one of the bumps, but mostly they grow in pairs. Moyle horses, a North American breed, have the bossed forehead, as do the Datong from China and the Carthusian Andalusians. All three of these breeds are rare. Sometimes the trait appears in other breeds.

Now, these are no three- or four-inch horns. They’re just little bumps maybe a centimeter or so long, or about half an inch. It’s also not clear whether they’re real horns or just calcium deposits of some kind, but since they do seem to be situated consistently in spots where horns could reasonably expect to grow, it’s possible they are due to a genetic glitch that fails to fully suppress an ancient gene sequence that once grew horns. The problem is, as far as we know, there are no horse ancestors that ever grew horns.

While warts and bumps are as common in horses as they are in any mammal, this particular kind of horn-like bump doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else on a horse, even on those with bossed foreheads. A bossed forehead is also supposedly linked with high endurance, but as far as I know there are no real studies about the condition. So if you know someone who’s thinking about going into veterinary medicine, zoology, or a related field, suggest bossed foreheads as a particular topic of study. And then tell them to let me know their findings.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 046: The Other Loch Ness Monsters

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There’s more in Loch Ness than one big mystery animal. This week we look at a few smaller mystery animals lurking in the cold depths of the lake.

Further reading:

Here’s Nessie: A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness by Karl P.N. Shuker

The goliath frog:

The Wels catfish (also, River Monsters is the best):

An amphipod:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Back in episode 29, I dismissed Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, as probably not a real animal. But this week we’re heading back to Loch Ness to see what other monsters might lurk in its murky depths.

WHAAAAA? Other Loch Ness monsters???

Yes, really! See, ever since the first sightings of Nessie in the 1930s, Loch Ness has been studied and examined so closely that it would be more surprising if no one had ever spotted other mystery animals.

The source of most of the information in this episode is from zoologist Karl Shuker’s book Here’s Nessie! A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness. Check the show notes for a link if you’re interested in buying your own copy of the book.

Our first non-Nessie mystery dates from 1934, but it happened, supposedly, sometime in the 1880s. It appeared in the Northern Chronicle, an Inverness newspaper, on January 31, 1934. The article relates that a ship in Loch Ness hit a submerged reef called Johnnie’s Point and sank one night. Luckily no one died. The next day a local diving expert named Duncan Macdonald was hired to determine if the wreck could be raised, but he couldn’t spot the wreck during his dive.

Later that evening, some of the ship’s crew who had heard stories about strange creatures living in Loch Ness asked Macdonald whether he’d seen anything unusual. After some urging, Macdonald finally admitted that he had seen a frog-like creature the size of a good-sized goat sitting on a rock ledge some 30 feet, or 9 meters, underwater. It didn’t bother him so he didn’t bother it.

There are a lot of problems with this account, of course. For one thing, we don’t know who wrote it—the article has no byline. It’s also a secondhand account. In fact, the article ends with this line: quote “The story, exactly as given, was told by Mr Donald Fraser, lock-keeper, Fort Augustus, who often heard the diver (his own grand-uncle) tell it many years ago.” unquote

Plus, of course, frogs don’t grow as big as goats. The biggest frog is the goliath frog, which can grow over a foot, or 32 cm, in length nose to tail, or butt I guess since frogs don’t have tails, which is pretty darn big but not anywhere near as big as a goat. The goliath frog also only lives in fast-moving rivers in a few small parts of Africa, not cold, murky lakes in Scotland, and its tadpoles only feed one one type of plant. In other words, even if someone did release a goliath frog into Loch Ness in the 1880s—which is pretty farfetched—it wouldn’t have survived for long.

The biggest frog that ever lived, as far as we know, lived about 65 million years ago and wasn’t all that much bigger than the goliath frog, only 16 inches long, or 41 cm. It had little horns above its eyes, which gives it its name, devil frog. Its descendants, South American horned frogs, also have little horns but are much smaller.

So what might Mr. Macdonald have seen, assuming he didn’t just make it all up? Some species of catfish can grow really big, but catfish aren’t native to Scotland. It’s always possible that a few Wels catfish, native to parts of Europe, were introduced into Loch Ness as a sport fish but didn’t survive long enough to establish a breeding population in the cold waters. Catfish have wide mouths, although their eyes are small, and might be mistaken for a frog if seen head-on in poor light. Plus, the Wels catfish can grow to 16 feet long, or 5 meters.

Then again, since the article was published during the height of the first Loch Ness monster frenzy, it might all have been fabricated from beginning to end.

A 1972 search for Nessie by the same team that announced that famous underwater photograph of a flipper, which later turned out to be mostly painted on, filmed something in the loch that wasn’t just paint. They were small, pale blobs on the grainy film. The team called them bumblebees from their shape.

Then in July of 1981, a different company searching not for Nessie but for a shipwreck from 1952 filmed some strange white creatures at the bottom of the loch. One of the searchers described them as giant white tadpoles, two or three inches long, or about 5 to 7 cm. Another searcher described them as resembling white mice but moving jerkily.

The search for the wreck lasted three weeks and the white mystery animals were spotted more than once, but not frequently. Afterwards, the company sent video of them to Dr. P Humphrey Greenwood, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Since this was the 1980s, of course, the film was videotape, not digital, but Dr. Greenwood got some of the frames computer enhanced. Probably on a computer that had less actual computing power than my phone. Anyway, the enhancement showed that the animals seemed to have three pairs of limbs. Dr. Greenwood tentatively identified them as bottom-dwelling crustaceans, but not ones native to Loch Ness.

Over the years many people have made suggestions as to what these mystery crustaceans might be. I’m going out on a limb here and declaring that they are not baby Loch Ness monsters. Karl Shuker suggests the white mice footage, at least, might be some kind of amphipod.

We’ve met amphipods before in a couple of episodes, mostly because some species exhibit deep-sea gigantism. Amphipods are shrimp-like crustaceans that live throughout the world in both the ocean and fresh water, and most species are quite small. While they do have more than three pairs of legs—eight pairs, in fact, plus two pairs of antennae—the 1981 videotape wasn’t of high quality and details might easily have been lost. Some of the almost 10,000 known species of amphipod are white or pale in color and grow to the right size to be the ones filmed in Loch Ness. But no amphipods of that description have ever been caught in Loch Ness.

New amphipods are discovered all the time, of course. They’re simply everywhere, and the smallest species are only a millimeter long. But because they’re so common, it’s also easy to transport them from one body of water to another. A rare amphipod discovered in Alpine lakes only a few years ago is already threatened by a different, more common species of amphipod introduced to one of the lakes by accident. So it’s possible that the white mice crustaceans in Loch Ness traveled there on someone’s boat.

That’s certainly the case with another creature found in Loch Ness in 1981, but we know exactly what this one is. It’s a flatworm native to North America, a bit over an inch long, or 3 cm, and only about 5 millimeters wide. It attaches its cocoons to boat bottoms, and in this case it was brought to Loch Ness by equipment used to hunt for Nessie. Spoiler alert: they didn’t find her.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 042: Mystery Bears

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This week we’re going to learn about bears, including a bunch of m y s t e r y  b e a r s!

Hi! I am a panda bear!

A polar bear:

A spectacled bear:

A baby spectacled bear OMG LOOK AT THAT BABY:

The giant short-faced bear was indeed giant:

Further reading:

Shuker Nature

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

I’m in the mood for a bona fide mystery animal, and I bet you are too. So this week let’s learn about some mystery bears.

There are eight species of bears alive today that we know of: brown, polar, spectacled, sloth, sun, Asian and American black bears, and the giant panda. The other ones you may have heard of, like grizzlies, are subspecies of those eight. For a long time pandas were not considered bears at all, but more closely related to raccoons. These days they’re definitely in the bear box, but they’ve evolved in a completely different direction from other bears for some 19 million years, which is why they’re so different.

Before we get into the mysteries, let’s talk about just how different pandas are from other bears. As you probably know, the panda eats bamboo almost exclusively, unlike all other bears which are either omnivorous or, in the case of the polar bear, carnivorous. To survive on bamboo, the panda has evolved a lot of unusual adaptations. The front paws, for instance, have five toes just like all bears, and also a thumb. The thumb is actually a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves.

Bamboo is not very nutritious. It’s certainly low in protein, especially considering that while the panda eats almost nothing but bamboo, it still has the digestive system of a carnivore. Special microbes in the panda’s intestines help break down the bamboo so the panda can digest it, but it takes a lot of bamboo to provide the energy a panda needs. A panda eats 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo leaves, stems, and shoots every day, or 9-14 kg, which means it also poops a whole lot. Seriously, it poops something like 40 times a day. And it still doesn’t have a lot of energy. It mostly just sits around eating and pooping. But while the panda just chews leaves all the time, it still has bear fangs and it will eat meat and eggs when it can. Researchers think that the panda only became exclusively a bamboo eater about two million years ago.

The panda lives in the mountains of China in only a few places. It used to also live in the lowlands but farming and other development drove it into more remote areas. There are about 50 pandas in captivity these days and somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 pandas in the wild, with the population finally increasing after laws protecting pandas from poaching started to be enforced.

The people of China knew about the panda for centuries, although they were considered rare and elusive even in the olden days, but it wasn’t until 1869 that anyone from outside of China had a clue that gigantic roly-poly black and white bamboo-eating six-toed bears were real. Seriously, would you believe that? In 1869 a French missionary and naturalist bought a dead panda from some hunters, dissected it to study, and sent the skin to a zoologist friend in Paris.

So it’s possible that there are other mystery bears out there, known to the locals who don’t realize their bears are special, just waiting to be spotted by someone who knows a thing or two about bears.

In 1920 a Swedish scientist named Sten Bergman was shown the pelt of a bear by locals during an expedition to the Kamchatka Peninsula. That’s in the very eastern part of Russia on the Pacific coast and is sparsely populated. It’s mountainous with a cluster of active volcanos and it’s well known for the brown bears that live in the area. The Kamchatka brown bears are among the largest brown bear subspecies in the world, almost the size of the closely related Kodiak brown bear. When it stands on its hind legs it can be almost ten feet tall, or 3 meters. It’s mostly harmless to humans. Mostly. It hardly ever kills people. Just, you know, occasionally. The Kamchatka brown bears have long brown fur, sometimes pale brown but usually a sort of medium brown. They’re certainly not black. But the pelt that Dr. Bergman was shown was jet black and had short fur. But it was definitely a bear pelt, and the pelt was definitely enormous—much larger than a brown bear pelt. Bergman also saw a huge skull supposedly from one of the black bears, and a paw print 15” long and 10” wide, or 38 cm by 25 ½ cm.

Unfortunately none of the giant black bears have turned up since, living or dead. It’s possible that the bear was an unusually large brown bear with anomalous fur. Brown bears do have considerable variability in both the color and length of their fur, so it’s not out of the question that occasionally a brown bear is born that is actually black. It’s also possible that this black bear is actually a different species of bear, but that it’s either gone extinct or is extremely rare and only lives in far remote areas of Siberia these days.

But the Kamchatka Peninsula has another mystery bear for us to ponder. In 1987 a hunter named Rodion Sivolobov bought a giant white bear skin from locals. It looked like a big polar bear pelt, but the locals assured him it was from a very specific, very rare type of local bear.

They called it the irkuiem and described it as large but with a relatively small head, relatively short hind legs, and an unusual method of running. It supposedly runs in a sort of rocking motion, bringing both hind legs up to the forelegs, then throwing the forelegs forward together to start a new stride–more like a rabbit’s bounding run than a bear’s typical gait.

Sivolobov sent samples of the pelt to various zoologists in Russia, but they said there wasn’t much they could determine without a skull. But with DNA testing so much more advanced these days, it would be REALLY NICE if Sivolobov would get right on that and get his white bear pelt tested. If it really exists and if he’s not scared he was sold a marked-up polar bear skin with a tall tale.

The polar bear lives in the Arctic and is so closely related to the brown bear that the two species occasionally crossbreed when their range overlaps. Technically polar bears are marine mammals since they hunt seals on sea ice and spend a lot of time in the water. Sometimes a polar bear will drift for long distances on a piece of sea ice, or may swim for days, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean.

Polar bear feet are huge, around 12 inches wide or 30 cm, which helps keep the bear from sinking in the snow since its weight is more widely distributed on broad paws. Think snowshoes. Broad feet also helps it swim faster. The paw pads are bumpy so it’s less likely to slip on ice, and the claws are short and strong for digging in snow and ice. The polar bear stays warm because its body is heavily insulated with fat, plus its fur is thick with a soft undercoat that insulates so well that polar bears really are virtually invisible to heat-sensing radar. Male polar bears grow long fur on their forelegs, apparently because lady polar bears find that attractive. Unlike most other bears, polar bears don’t hibernate.

Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German naturalist who took part in explorations of Kamchatka Peninsula and other areas. He’s the guy that Steller’s sea-cow is named after and one day it’s getting its own episode. Anyway, in 1751 Steller wrote a book called, in English, Beasts of the Sea, and in it he mentions a report of a white sea-bear. He didn’t see it himself, but here’s his account, which I’ve taken from Karl Shuker’s excellent blog ShukerNature. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Here’s the quote:

“Report, as I gather from the account of the people, has declared that the sea-bear, as it is called by the Rutheni and other people is different. They say it is an amphibious sea beast very like a bear, but very fierce, both on land and in the water. They told likewise, that in the year 1736 it had overturned a boat and torn two men to pieces; that they were very much alarmed when they heard the sound of its voice, which was like the growl of a bear, and that they fled from their chase of the otter and seals on the sea and hastened back to land. They say that it is covered with white fur; that it lives near the Kuril Islands, and is more numerous toward Japan; that here it is seldom seen. I myself do not know how far to believe this report, for no one has ever seen one, either slain or cast up dead upon the shore.”

Shuker suggests that this report may actually be of a fur seal, which is found in the area and has sometimes been called a sea-bear. Then again, fur seals aren’t white. They’re gray or brown and would appear darker in the water.

The Kuril Islands are a string of 56 volcanic islands that stretch between the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan to the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula, a distance of about 810 miles, or 1300 km. Some of the largest islands are inhabited by brown bears, but it’s far from the Arctic. Polar bears get overheated easily in warmer areas, so a population of polar bears—or even a stray one—is unlikely that far south.

There are also stories of pure white bears in the forests of Hubei province in China. It’s always possible this is a garbled account of the panda, but maybe not.

In 1864, Inuit hunters supposedly killed a huge bear with yellowish fur. Naturalist Roderick McFarlane acquired the skin and skull and sent them to the Smithsonian, which promptly lost them. That’s the story, anyway. In fact, the Smithsonian did misplace the skin and skull for a while, but zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam found and examined them. He decided it was a new species of bear due to the skull’s odd shape and the light tan color of the fur.

Older polar bears do tend to have yellowish fur so maybe that’s all this bear was. But it might have been something else. As I mentioned earlier, polar bears and various subspecies of brown bear do sometimes crossbreed and produce fertile young. It’s rare, but it happens occasionally both in the wild and in captivity. The resulting babies show traits of both polar bears and brown bears, and tend to be pale brown or tan in color with darker brown paws. Then again, there’s a MonsterQuest episode that I haven’t actually seen where a paleontologist examines the McFarlane skull and states it’s just that of a young female brown bear.

For having only eight species, bears are remarkably widespread and vary considerably in diet and appearance. The sloth bear mostly eats insects, for instance. It lives in India and has shaggy black fur with a pale muzzle and white claws, big floppy ears, and a white V-shaped mark on the chest. It lacks upper incisors, which helps it slurp up insects.

Sloth bears are actually pretty darn awesome. Males often help raise the cubs and mothers carry their babies around on their backs. The sloth bear doesn’t hibernate, probably because it doesn’t really get cold where it lives.

The spectacled bear lives in South America. It’s the last close relative of the giant short-faced bear that went extinct about 11,000 years ago. The spectacled bear is mostly black, although some individuals may appear brown or reddish, and most but not all have lighter markings on the face and chest. Its head is much less bearlike than other bears, with a rounded face and short snout. It mostly eats plants and lives in the Andes Mountains and surrounding areas. It spends a lot of time in trees, and will even build a little platform in a tree to sleep on or store food on.

And you know what? Paddington Bear is modeled on the spectacled bear.

The spectacled bear is not especially scary. Its relative, the giant short-faced bear, was another story. It lived in North America, especially in California, and its remains have been found in the La Brea tar pits. But it also lived as far south as Mississippi. And it was huge. It was simply enormous. It stood up to 6 feet at the shoulder, or 1.8 meters, and twice that when standing on its hind legs. One website I read pointed out that regulation height for a basketball rim is ten feet, which means a giant short-faced bear could dunk the ball every time without doing anything more strenuous than standing up. It was probably an omnivore like most modern bears, but we have mastodon bones that show tooth marks from the short-faced bear.

Naturally, as with just about any extinct animal, people keep hoping they’re not really extinct and occasionally someone reports seeing a giant short-faced bear. Some cryptozoologists speculate that the Kamchatka Peninsula mystery bears may actually be short-faced bears, but since short-faced bear fossils have only been found in North America, it’s probably not likely that there would be any living in Russia. Besides, the short-faced bear would have looked very different from the brown bear, probably shaped more like a colossal spectacled bear. Locals would definitely notice the difference. Moreover, it’s not likely to live in the same area that already has a population of brown bears, since both animals would then be competing for the same resources.

Personally, while the giant short-faced bear is awesome to imagine, I’m perfectly happy with it not wandering around in the forests. Because I like to hike. And I worry enough about the relatively small and harmless American black bear as it is.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 040: Bone-eating vultures

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This week we look at a couple of unusual vultures, the bearded vulture and the Egyptian vulture. Thanks to Maureen J. who recommended this week’s topic!

The bearded vulture, badass bird:

This bearded vulture is probably thinking about eating bones right now:

The Egyptian vulture cares about its appearance:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Halloween is over, we’re all pretty sick of candy, and it’s time to move on to something besides monsters. Something that is not associated with Halloween candy in any way, preferably. I ate, like, three bags of gummy spiders by myself this year.

Special thanks to Maureen J. who recently made several topic recommendations. One of her suggestions in particular is taking me down various research rabbit holes, which is a lot of fun but means it’ll be a while before that episode is ready. So in the meantime let’s learn about one of her other suggested topics, vultures.

Vultures are divided into two big groups, old world and new world vultures. The two groups are related, but not closely. Today we’re only looking two old world vultures, and in fact, let’s start with a bird that’s considered an old world vulture but is actually not any more closely related to them than the new world vultures are. That’s the bearded vulture.

The bearded vulture lives in the high mountains in parts of Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe, and like other vultures it spends a lot of its time waiting for animals to die or just looking for already-dead animals that it can eat. Unlike most other vultures it often gets impatient and cuts out the waiting part by hunting small animals. It especially likes tortoises. Like golden eagles, the bearded vulture will scoop up a tortoise, carry it way way up high, and drop it. Then it coasts down and eats the smashed tortoise. There are stories that the bearded vulture will also sometimes attack larger prey with its wings, driving the animal over a cliff where it plunges to its death. This is a hardcore bird.

To add to the general air of all bearded vultures secretly being members of Norwegian death metal bands, they also wear corpse makeup. I don’t mean the bird’s ordinary coloring, although it is pretty impressive. Unlike other vultures, it doesn’t have a bald head. Adult birds have white heads with a black band from the eye to the base of the bill that continues in a sort of mustache hanging from either side of the bill. The rest of the bird is dark gray, brown, and cream-colored. No, I mean the bearded vulture actually rubs soil and dust containing ferrous oxide on its body to stain the feathers a rusty red, apparently because it just likes the way it looks. In fact, researchers think the color is a status symbol. A bird that has the time and energy to spend hours preening red dirt into its feathers is a bird that has its life nicely sorted. It also indicates to other bearded vultures that the bird has a big territory and knows it well, since the dust bathing is done in secret.

But let’s face it, the most metal thing about this bird is what it eats. The rotting flesh of dead animals? Pfft, that’s for other scavengers. Most of the time the bearded vulture doesn’t pay any attention to meat. It just wants the bones.

The bearded vulture’s stomach is specialized to digest even large bones in about 24 hours. Bone marrow has a high nutritional content, higher even than muscle tissue, but most animals find it difficult to get to the marrow easily enough to extract the nutrients without more effort than it’s worth. The bearded vulture just picks a bone and either swallows it whole, or, if the bone is too big to swallow, either drops it from a height the same way it does with tortoises or batters it against a rock with its bill until it shatters. But it can swallow bones up to 11 inches long, or 28 cm.

Most vultures regurgitate partially digested food for their babies. The bearded vulture naturally doesn’t do anything that soft. Instead, the parent vultures carry bones back to the nest and the babies swallow them. Young birds don’t leave the nest until they’re three or four months old, and they may continue to rely on their parents for food and help for up to two years.

The bearded vulture is a big bird with long, strong legs. Its wingspan can be over nine feet wide, or 2.8 meters, and the bird may weigh over 17 pounds, or 7.5 kilograms. It can carry bones and tortoises that weigh almost as much as it does.

The bearded vulture is also called the lammergeier, which is German for lamb-hawk. In many ways it’s more like a hawk than a vulture, and in fact falconers have sometimes kept them as tame birds. In the past, unfortunately people thought the bearded vulture killed children and lambs, which is why they’re mostly extinct in Europe—they were all killed.

The bearded vulture is most closely related to the Egyptian vulture, which also happens to be one of the smallest vultures in the world. It’s still a pretty big bird, though, with a wingspan up to about 5 ½ feet, or 170 cm.

The Egyptian vulture is white with black flight feathers, but like the bearded vulture, it will rub its feathers with rust-colored dirt to stain them red. While it has a floof of longer feathers on the back of its head and neck that’s called a hackle, its face is bare of feathers and is also a surprisingly bright shade of yellow or orange. The tip of the hooked beak is black. Both the Egyptian vulture and the bearded vulture have wedge-shaped tails, unlike all other vultures.

The Egyptian vulture doesn’t just live around Egypt. There are three subspecies that live in parts of Africa, Asia, and southwestern Europe. It prefers lower mountains and hills, and some populations migrate while others live in the same area year round. Overall, Egyptian vultures are endangered, and while they’re protected, they do tend to get electrocuted on power lines. This is also a problem for other big birds that live around people, like eagles.

Egyptian vultures eat carrion, not bones, but they also eat insects, fish, rotting fruit, and occasionally kill small mammals and reptiles. They also really like eating the eggs of other birds, but if an egg is too big for the vulture to swallow, it will pick up rocks and throw them at the egg until it breaks. That’s not the only tool use Egyptian vultures show. They like to gather wool to line their nests, and sometimes a vulture will pick up a stick in its bill and collect wool on the stick to more easily transport. That’s pretty sophisticated in the bird world.

Egyptian vultures also eat dung, especially from cows. Researchers think they do this for carotenoid pigments present in the dung, which helps keep the vulture’s face bright yellow or orange. Who knew vultures were so particular about their appearance?

Because the Egyptian vulture is smaller than other vultures, it often has to wait its turn at the carcasses it scavenges. Its slender bill is ideal for reaching smaller pieces of meat that other vultures have overlooked.

Bearded vultures are solitary except for mated pairs, but Egyptian vultures are more social. Sometimes Egyptian vultures will build their nests near other vulture nests on cliffs and in big trees. In those cases, babies will climb into each others’ nests to get more food.

One subspecies of Egyptian vulture lives in the Canary Islands and are bigger and heavier than the other subspecies. The Canary Islands were first colonized around 2,500 years ago. Genetic research shows that the Canary Islands vultures arrived at about the same time as the human settlers and their cattle. This is a rare but happy example of the arrival of humans actually helping a species thrive instead of driving them to extinction. Unfortunately these days the Canary Islands vultures are rare. Only about 25 breeding pairs remain.

One interesting thing about both Egyptian and bearded vultures. They mate for life, but sometimes a pair will accept a second male into their little family. Both males will mate with the female and help raise the babies. This increases the likelihood that the chicks will survive to adulthood.

Life is tough out there in the wild. Babies can use all the help they can get. Even if they are bone-eating death bird babies.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 039: The Devil’s Footprints

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Happy Halloween, everyone! This week’s episode is about a spooky occurrence in 1855, where people in Devon woke to find small hoofprints all over the place, even on roofs. Join us in an attempt to figure out just what animal might have made the devil’s footprints!

The footprints as drawn by the Rev. Ellacombe from newspaper accounts:

The h*ckin adorable wood mouse:

Link to lots of pictures of jumping wood mice omg

Wood mouse prints from jumping, from Leutscher via Dash (see further reading, below):

Mystery print from 2009:

Further reading:

The Devil’s Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855 edited by Mike Dash

HALLOWEEN BONUS AW YISS! I’ve unlocked the following Patreon bonus episodes so everyone can listen. You should be able to open them in your browser without needing a Patreon login:

Animals That Glow

The Beast of Busco

Weird Teeth

Carnivorous Plants

Also thank you for buying a lot of copies of my book Skytown:

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast Halloween episode for 2017. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This is the best time of the year if you like candy, ghost stories, monsters, wearing spooky costumes, and buying all the bat decorations in Target. I have so many bat decorations. I’ve stopped taking them down after Halloween and my room looks like a bat cave.

Before we get started, a quick heads-up that I’ve unlocked a few of the older Patreon bonus episodes so that anyone can listen to them. They won’t show up in your feed but I have links to the specific episodes in this week’s show notes so you can go listen to them in your browser if you’re interested. You don’t even need a Patreon login. I hope you enjoy them as an extra Halloween treat.

Another reminder that I have a novel available through Fox Spirit Books. It’s called Skytown and it’s a fun steampunk adventure story. I’ll put a link in the shownotes if you want to learn more.

Oh, and if you want a Strange Animals Podcast sticker, just send me your mailing address at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com and I’ll mail you one!

Now, on with the spooky Halloween episode!

This week’s episode is something that has baffled me since I read about it as a kid. It’s baffled everyone for more than 150 years. I’ll tell you now that while I make one suggestion that seems plausible to me, it’s by no means a perfect match for the creature that made…the devil’s footprints.

/reverb reverb reverb

The winter of 1855 was especially bitter in England. Around Devon, the rivers froze solid and temperatures stayed below freezing almost every day and night from January to March. On the night of February 8 it snowed, but towards dawn a brief thaw turned the falling snow to rain before the temperature dropped again and a frost fell. When residents of Devon woke on the morning of February 9, they found some 4” of snow on the ground, or 10 cm. They also found small hoofprints everywhere.

These weren’t ordinary hoofprints. A donkey or pony hadn’t gotten loose during the night and wandered around. Some of the prints did look like a donkey’s, but some appeared cloven, more like a large goat’s hoof. And the stride was short, only about 8” between most prints, or a little over 20 cm, sometimes about double that. Besides, the prints appeared in places where a donkey couldn’t possibly have left prints: on rooftops, inside gardens with tall walls and locked gates. Even a nimble goat couldn’t have managed that without someone hearing a goat bounding around. Sometimes a line of prints would walk right up to an obstacle, like a haystack or hedge, and continue on the other side as though the obstacle didn’t exist. Tracks began or ended abruptly as though the animal had dropped from or flown into the sky.

And there were untold thousands of the prints. Some villages had prints in almost every yard. They appeared in churchyards among gravestones, in gardens and on doorsteps, in fields and roads. They meandered from place to place or sometimes continued in a straight line. And they appeared to be made not by a four-footed animal but by something walking on its hind legs, placing one hoof nearly in front of the other.

People tracked some of the prints for miles without coming across any clue as to what had made them. A few forward thinkers made sketches of the prints and jotted down notes. By February 13, reports of the strange footprints had made it into the local newspapers.

Beyond the often maddeningly vague newspaper accounts, most of what we know about the hoofprints comes from the Reverend H.T. Ellacombe, who was vicar of the parish of Clyst St George from 1850 to 1885. He collected letters and sketches and made his own notes about the event, since some of the prints appeared in his own rectory grounds. Local historian Major Antony Gibbs discovered Ellacombe’s bundle of notes and letters in 1952, tucked away in a church office gathering dust.

But a series of letters published in 1855 by the Illustrated London News has been more influential than Ellacombe’s information. The letters were written by someone who signed himself “South Devon,” and we know from Ellacombe that South Devon was a 19-year-old local man whom Ellacombe called “young D’Urban.”

William D’Urban’s letters were exciting, to say the least. If you’ve heard anything about the devil’s footprints before, it was probably mostly details from D’Urban’s account. According to him, all the prints were identical in size, the stride likewise did not vary, and the prints were one unbroken trail at least 40 miles and as much as 100 miles in length, or 64 to 160 kilometers. This has sometimes been garbled in later retellings as a perfectly straight trail 100 miles long. D’Urban was also the one who claimed the prints continued from one side of the River Exe to the other side, two miles distant. It’s not clear if the river was frozen at this point, although it was frozen so solid by late February that an enterprising stove manufacturer ran pipes from the gas main onto the river ice and cooked an entire dinner for 30 on it while people skated all around him and probably tripped over the gas pipes. Moreover, the river is an estuary of the sea so has tides, and at low tide it’s barely a few hundred yards wide in some areas, or say 200 meters, and barely four feet deep, or about 1.2 meters.

Even at the time, D’Urban’s account was refuted by other locals, whose letters responding to South Devon’s letters were printed in follow-up issues of the paper. Apparently newspapers back then were like really slow social media. People wrote letters in response to other letters they’d seen in the newspaper, and other people wrote letters in response to those letters. Old timey people really needed Facebook. And cameras, because we don’t have very many sketches of the footprints and the ones we do have aren’t very detailed.

So what did the tracks really look like? As far as we know, most of the tracks were about 4 inches long, or 10 cm, and 2.75 inches across, or 7 cm. They did vary in size and shape from place to place, which argues that more than one animal made them and that hoaxers weren’t involved, since hoaxers would leave identical prints. I’ll put Ellacombe’s drawings of the prints, which he copied from newspaper reports, in the show notes to give you an idea of what they looked like. When you hear the word hoofprint it’s easy to think of a crisp, well-marked round hoof, maybe even with a horseshoe, but these prints were kind of wobbly in shape—not unexpected since they were all somewhat distorted by the night’s thaw and refreeze.

One of the people who wrote in to denounce some of D’Urban’s details was a Reverend G.M. Musgrave, vicar of Exmouth, and one of the things Musgrave also mentions is that he himself had suggested to his parishioners that the tracks were made by kangaroos escaped from a private menagerie. But, he admits, he didn’t actually believe this, he was only trying to stop his parishioners from believing that the devil had walked through their town.

The devil only started getting blamed for the footprints once it was clear no one really knew what had caused them. Lots of animals were suggested as culprits, most of which were about as likely as Musgrave’s kangaroos. Among the suggestions were badgers, rats or mice, hares, wolves, cats, monkeys, toads, or various birds. One anonymous letter-writer said that a friend had examined the tracks, noted that some of them showed claw marks, and suggested the animal might be an otter—mostly as a way to explain how the trail passed under low branches without disturbing them and through a six-inch, or 15 cm, pipe.

Other suggestions were even more outlandish, like the runaway balloon trailing a rope theory. Or the complex and largely irrational theory proposed in 1973 that seven Romany tribes conspired to lay the tracks in one night using stilts made from stepladders, in an attempt to scare some other tribes away. Or the 1972 theory that UFOs were measuring…something…with lasers and the tracks were left as a result, by lasers. Measuring things.

Leaving aside the theories that are clearly farfetched, like animals escaped from menageries and UFOs, and going with the assumption that whatever left the tracks was likely a real animal native to England, what might have left the devil’s footprints? I’m going out on a limb and suggesting maybe it wasn’t the devil.

Badgers, otters, and wolves leave tracks much too large to fit the bill. Toads are cold-blooded and would not be active in the snow. Birds do not leave miles of prints in snow at night, not even owls hunting mice on the ground, as they sometimes do. The tracks of deer would probably be recognized no matter how distorted the melting snow might have made them, and there are no reports of dew claw marks that deer prints show.

What about cats? Cats leave small neat footprints in snow with prints nearly in front of each other. With the brief thaw, feral cats might be out hunting for mice and other animals around houses and gardens, exactly where many prints were found. Cats can climb well, and a small cat might be able to accomplish some of the astonishing feats reported, like getting through dense hedges or larger pipes. And we do have a witness whose report is interesting. A tenant of Aller Farm in Dawlish, the only person we know to have been outside during the night in question, said that his cat had left tracks in the snow, and that the thaw and rain melted them, after which they froze again into small hoof-like shapes. So it’s possible that at least some of the prints were made by cats.

Rats sometimes hop through snow on all four feet, leaving deeper impressions that do look remarkably like the hoofprints seen. Rats can also get through quite small spaces and climb well. The main drawbacks of this theory are that hopping rats leave clear tail prints and rats don’t hop for miles. Rats also usually leave prints larger than the ones found. But again, it’s possible that at least some of the prints were made by rats.

Finally, what about mice? When I was a kid, this argument seemed ridiculously weak. I had pet mice. I knew there was no way a mouse could leave a horseshoe shaped print in the snow. But I was only familiar with pet white mice and house mice. There’s a type of mouse common throughout Europe that I think might be our culprit. Let’s find out why, and learn about the wood mouse.

The wood mouse, also called the long-tailed field mouse, is as adorable as the otter but won’t kill you. It’s a cute little rodent with a long tail, sandy-brown or orangey fur, white or gray belly and legs, and big ears. Not counting its tail, it’s about 6 to 15 cm long, or 2 ½ to 6 inches long, and its tail can be as long as its body. It mostly eats seeds and nuts, although it will also eat roots, shoots, berries and other fruit, moss, fungi, snails, and insects when seeds aren’t available.

Like many rodents, it discovered a long time ago that humans are useful nuisances, so it frequently lives around houses and barns, although not usually in houses. It generally lives in burrows it digs in fields, gardens, or among the roots of trees, although sometimes it will make its nest in birdhouses, hollow logs, or in thick vegetation. The nesting chamber of a mouse’s burrow is lined with leaves, grass, and moss, and it may also dig chambers where it stores extra food.

In warm weather wood mice aren’t very social, but in winter they will sleep in pairs or groups to stay warm. They don’t hibernate, but in especially cold weather they become torpid. They’re nocturnal animals, good climbers, jumpers, and swimmers.

While it forages, a wood mouse will pick up small items like leaves and twigs and place them in conspicuous locations to mark certain areas. As far as researchers know, wood mice and humans are the only animals to mark trails with items, known as way-marking. A mouse’s typical winter territory is around 2000 square meters, or half an acre.

All this is interesting, but why do I think the devil’s footprints were mostly made by wood mice? Well, wood mice flee from predators by hopping on all four legs. They’re built like tiny kangaroos, with long hind legs and comparatively short forelegs. I had a hard time finding information about wood mice jumping, just references to their ability to jump sometimes quite long distances. Then I found an awesome site by a photographer with lots of action shots of the wood mice around their garden. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Unfortunately the page hasn’t been updated for a while, but it’s full of photos of mice in mid-leap. The photographer puts food out and apparently sets up cameras that react to movement—like mini trail cams. It’s clear just from these shots that wood mice can and do jump a lot.

Unlike a rat, a jumping wood mouse doesn’t leave much of a tail mark in snow. It can also keep up this hopping gait for a long time, which it would do since it’s a more efficient way to travel through snow taller than the animal is high. It jumps with its feet together so the print it leaves behind roughly resembles a V shape where the two sides of the V don’t connect. Any amount of thawing and refreezing can turn that print into a cloven hoof print or a donkey-like hoof print.

Moreover, mice can get through extremely small holes and pipes, can burrow straight through haystacks, can hop across roofs without making noise. Where people reported finding prints that vanish in the middle of open fields, the mouse could have disappeared into a burrow, been picked off by an owl, or just stopped hopping and started walking, leaving footprints so small and shallow they likely didn’t survive the thaw.

But why were there so many prints on this particular night? Remember, the winter had been harsh but that particular night there was a brief thaw. It’s very possible that even slightly warmer weather would bring hungry mice out in droves to forage. The unusual weather conditions distorting otherwise barely noticeable tracks into hoofprints, and human nature, did the rest.

But if that’s the case, why haven’t people reported seeing the same mysterious prints at other times? Actually, they have, both before and after 1855.

The earliest account anyone has found in the papers was an 1840 report in the London Times of strange prints in Scotland. Other accounts date from the 1850s, 1890, the 1920s, the 1950s, and so on until 2009.

Some of these accounts are of much larger prints, some don’t match up with the hoofprints seen in 1855, but some sound similar. In 1957, for instance, when Lynda Hanson in Hull was a child, a line of cloven hoofprints 4” long and 12” apart appeared in her family’s garden in about an inch of snow that had fallen overnight. They vanished in the middle of the garden. Ms. Hanson notes that the family dog didn’t bark. He probably would have barked at the devil. Just saying.

Another interesting report comes from a sighting in late 1962 or early 1963. Zoologist Alfred Leutscher, writing in the April 20, 1965 edition of Animals and expanding on a talk he gave to the Zoological Society of London about the sighting, explains some tracks he found in Epping Forest. I’ll quote from his description. “It was during a search for snow tracks in Epping Forest, in the severe winter of 1962-3, that I came across dozens of trails of the wood mouse, each consisting of small ‘V-shaped’ marks regularly spaced out and conforming to the measurements which were given a hundred years ago. When I found them I was totally unaware of their significance.”

There are problems with this, of course. While the account says the tracks were identical to those reported in 1855, they’re described as V-shaped rather than hooflike. I have no doubt Leutscher’s prints were from wood mice, but whether they were the same type of thing seen in 1855 in Devon, we can’t know for sure since the reports from the 1855 sighting are so unclear.

Like I said, while the wood mouse is a good candidate for what caused the devil’s footprints, it’s not perfect. Why would mice be hopping around on snow-covered roofs, for instance? But nothing else fits the evidence we have as well as the wood mouse does.

In 2009, Jill Wade of North Devon woke up to snow and found a line of hoof-like prints across her garden. A zoologist who examined the prints suggested they might be those of a rabbit or hare, although since the prints were only 5” long, or 12.5 cm, that would have to be a little baby bunny. But the great thing in this case is we have photographs. Good ones. I’ll put one in the show notes. It definitely looks like a hoofprint—and it also looks like little animal legs made it.

One interesting thing. The wide part of a wood mouse’s print, the one that would make the rear of a hoofprint, is actually at the animal’s front. So anyone following the devil’s tracks in 1855 was following them backwards. Assuming the culprit really was a horde of hungry wood mice, and not the actual devil.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening, and Happy Halloween!

 

Episode 038: The Canvey Island Monster

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This week we’re looking at the confusing and mysterious Canvey Island Monster! Is it really a monster? Is it just a fish, and if so what kind? And who’s telling the truth about what washed up when and where?

The initial article in a Canvey Island newspaper, from CanveyIsland.org.

The photo shown on many sites, with the implication or statement that it accompanied the article above:

The photo found by Garth Haslam of Anomoly (highly recommended reading at that link!). Note the enormous difference in font between this newspaper text and the clipping above:

A monkfish:

See also the Frontiers of Zoology page (and scroll way down for the full text of the “mermaid” description).

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

We’re getting closer and closer to Halloween. Things are getting weird. This week we’re going to learn about something called the Canvey Island Monster.

Canvey is a seven square mile, or 18 ½ square km, island off the southern coast of England not far from London. It’s barely above sea level and on Jan 31, 1953, a tidal surge overtopped the sea wall in the night and drowned 58 people. Its marshes are home to lots of plants and animals, including some insects that at one point were thought extinct. It was also a fashionable vacation area in Victorian times and can claim lots of ghost, such as one story told by night fishermen who sometimes see a Viking standing on the mudflats staring out to sea. He supposedly drowned while waiting for his ship to return. But Canvey Island’s big claim to fame these days is something that happened late in the same year of the big flood, 1953.

This is the story as reported pretty much everywhere. Some time in November of 1953, a body washed ashore. We don’t know exactly what day it was or who found it. It was lying in shallow water, and its finders pulled it farther ashore and covered it with seaweed, presumably so nothing would bother it and it wouldn’t wash back out with the tide. They went for the police, but the police had no idea what they were looking at. They called “the government” who sent two zoologists to identify the body. But the zoologists didn’t know what it was either. They had the body incinerated and left without making an official report.

So what did the body look like? It measured about two and a half feet long, or about 76 centimeters. It’s described as a marine animal with thick brownish-red skin, protruding eyes in a pulpy head, sharp teeth, and gills, but it also had hind legs with no forelegs. Remarkably, its feet each had five toes that together were shaped roughly like a horseshoe. The zoologists reportedly said it looked as though it would be able to walk upright on its legs.

Then, in summer of 1954, another one washed ashore. This one was bigger, almost 4 feet long or 120 cm. It weighed about 25 pounds, or 11.3 kilograms. A short article appeared on August 13, 1954 in either the Canvey Chronicle or the Canvey News. There is a clipping on CanveyIsland.org and if you look at the show notes you can see it there too, along with a photograph of the creature.

The headline reads “Fish with feet found on beach.” I’ll read the entire article since it’s very short:

“A fish with feet was found on the beach at Canvey on Tuesday by the Rev. Joseph D. Overs. He described the fish as being over four feet long with staring eyes and a large mouth. Underneath, on its stomach, it had two feet, each with five toes. It was dead and had apparently been damaged by being washed against the rocks. A peculiar fish was found in almost the same place last year and identified as a pocket or ‘fiddler fish.’”

Under that is a subheading titled SEAL TOO and the sentence “For the first time within living memory a seal was seen in Benfleet Creek, near the bridge, on Tuesday.”

All this seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. There’s a lot to unpack and a lot more information that sheds light on the events. But first let’s take a quick detour to find out what that November 1953 body might have been. What’s a fiddler fish?

There’s a fiddler ray, sometimes called a banjo ray, which I’m delighted to learn is a type of guitarfish. Guitarfish are only slightly guitar shaped. They mostly look like little sharks if you smooshed the shark’s head flat. The fiddler ray has a rounder flattened head than a guitarfish. It lives around Australia and likes shallow, sandy bays, where it eats mostly shellfish and crabs. It’s harmless and edible. But it’s not reddish-brown, it doesn’t have sharp teeth, and it certainly doesn’t have anything that could be called legs by any stretch of the imagination.

I couldn’t find any other marine animals called fiddler fish. As for pocket fish, Google helpfully offered me an urban dictionary entry, gadgets used when fishing, stock photos of plastic fish in shirt pockets, a cookbook, and some miscellaneous entries about video games and songs I’ve never heard of. I couldn’t find an actual fish called a pocket fish.

So we’ll go with the fiddler ray as mentioned in the article. But I just can’t connect a fiddler ray with the thing that supposedly washed up onshore in 1953.

It also seems odd that the newspaper article doesn’t mention the two zoologists supposedly sent by “the government” who couldn’t identify the 1953 monster. For that matter, it doesn’t say that the 1954 fish was the same type of thing found in 1953. It just says “a peculiar fish was found in almost the same place last year”. Not the same kind of fish. The same place. I’ll come back to that in a few minutes.

As it happens, I didn’t have to look too hard to find out how this got so scrambled. I discovered an excellent website called Anomalies that really digs into the topic. A link is in the show notes if you want to read more.

In 1959–only about five years after the weird thing washed ashore on Canvey Island–writer and radio personality Frank Edwards published a book called Stranger Than Science. It’s since been reprinted many times and I have clear memories of reading it as a kid, although I don’t remember anything about the Canvey Island monster. It was a popular book and full of…less than stellar research.

Edwards’ book is the main source used for subsequent accounts of the Canvey Island monster, including the Wikipedia page. It’s Edwards who claims there were two such monsters, Edwards who describes the feet as having toes arranged in a U shape, Edwards who introduces us to the mysterious government-sent zoologists who tell everyone the monster is a bipedal marine animal but it’s okay, it’s harmless, hey, let’s just burn this body and tell no one.

It appears that Edwards made a lot of this up. For instance, there were no baffled zoologists. Why would you even send a pair of zoologists to look at a fish? You’d send an ichthyologist or marine biologist of some kind. Just because someone is trained in the study of animals doesn’t mean they’re good at identifying fish.

The 1954 newspaper story was picked up by the Associated Press, but the full text of the AP article is even shorter than the original, although slightly more sensational, as follows: “A grotesque sea creature four feet long and with two five-toed feet was found on the beach here Tuesday by Reverend Joseph D. Overs. He described the thing, which was dead, as ‘a sort of fish with staring eyes and a large mouth underneath. It has two perfect feet, each with five pink toes.’”

The original 1954 article says that Reverend Joseph D. Overs found the body. According to the CanveyIsland.org page, while Overs was a reverend, he wasn’t the local vicar or anything like that. Apparently he was a reverend of the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain, with a handful of parishioners who met for services at his lodging house. But he was better known as the island’s photographer, and was popular and well-liked. He took the photo of the fish himself, although he may not actually have been the one to find it. The webpage suggests that the reporter included Overs’ title of reverend to give the article more zing and that Overs didn’t usually use his title.

The CanveyIsland.org site is for residents, with a chatty tone, and many of the comments are from people who knew Overs. One 2011 comment about the mystery fish monster, left by a Colin Day, reads: “I was THERE. I was a young lad of nine at the time. I noticed a group of peers in a crowd on the beach. Kids were prodding it with their spades. I ACTUALLY TOUCHED IT! I thought it was a person at first as I could only see part of it through the crowd. Its flesh was NOT fish-like scales. It was a pinkish color and looked like wobbly human flesh with cellulite, orange peel texture. I remember shouting to the other kids ‘It’s a mermaid’ over and over.”

While the fish itself is long gone–no one’s sure what happened to it, but a deep hole in the sand was probably involved, because I bet it stank–we do have that single black and white photograph. What does it show?

It’s a wide-bodied fish with a huge gaping mouth, fins or projections of some kind to either side, and a long, tapering tail. Since it’s a face-on photo, it’s hard to get a good idea of where the fins are situated. They seem to be near the massive head but might be farther back. The fish appears pale, at least in comparison to the dark ground, and we have the eyewitness description of at least one little boy that it was pink, although Edwards claims it was reddish-brown.

Locals are convinced it was an angler fish, and ichthyologists have suggested an anglerfish species known as a monkfish or a related species called a frogfish. Let’s take a look at both.

The monkfish is broad and flattish, with a tapering tail, a big wide mouth with sharp teeth, and two roughly triangular fins jutting out from its sides. It lives in the ocean around England, as well as in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. It hunts among seaweed near the ocean floor, sometimes using its muscular fins to walk itself along instead of swimming. Its skin does not have scales but it is bumpy. Like other angler fish, it has a lure on its head, modified from a dorsal fin spine, that it can move around to attract small fish and other prey. When something touches the lure, YOMP, the monkfish gulps it down. Like the sabertooth fish we talked about in episode 34, the monkfish has an expandable stomach and can swallow prey as big as it is. And it can get big–almost seven feet long for a big female, or over 2 meters.

The frogfish prefers tropical and subtropical oceans, although it does live in the Mediterranean. It’s smaller than the monkfish, barely more than a foot long or around 35 centimeters, and it’s rounded rather than flattened. Some species of frogfish have elaborate filaments called spinules all over their bodies that help them blend in with seaweed and other plants. The frogfish frankly doesn’t look much like the fish in the picture, and is too small to fit the description, but it does have one thing in the plus column that the monkfish doesn’t. Many species are orange, yellow, or pink in color. The monkfish is dark.

But there are more than 200 species of anglerfish known. Many are seldom seen because they live so far down on the bottom of the ocean. In fact, the deep sea anglerfish is the one you’ve probably heard of, the one where the male bites the much bigger female and actually fuses to her body. He remains with her the rest of her life, basically just acting as a built-in egg fertilizer.

In July 1833, six men on a deep-sea fishing vessel caught a three-foot long or just under one meter long fish they claimed was a mermaid. In their sworn statement later they described it carefully, and it’s clear from the description that they had actually caught some species of anglerfish. I won’t quote the entire description here because it’s long, but I’ll link to the Frontiers of Zoology website where I found it. Its back was light gray and its front, as they said–actually the underparts of the fish–were white. They even described its lure, which they thought was some sort of hearing apparatus. So nine-year-old Colin Day was right, in a way. He’d seen a mermaid. And I’m happy to report that the fishermen who’d caught the mermaid in 1833 carefully released it back into the ocean. Because it’s bad luck to harm a mermaid.

So it’s entirely possible that the Canvey Island monster is a species of anglerfish that’s closely related to the monkfish but is pink like a frogfish. Or maybe it was just a variant color or albino. It’s too bad no one kept the fish, but at least we have a photo.

Or do we? We don’t actually know that that photo accompanied the 1954 article. The Anomalist researcher, Garth Haslam, has tried repeatedly to contact a librarian, reporter, or the author of the CanveyIsland.org site to verify the photo’s presence with the original newspaper article, but no one has replied. The Canvey Island library does have archives of one of the two newspapers from that era…but the 1954 papers are missing. Haslam is understandably frustrated and points out that the original description of the fish doesn’t mention its tail, which is quite long and would have been notable. He suggests the picture may actually accompany a different article entirely. He has managed to track down a bigger clip of the fish photo which includes part of a different article’s text next to it…and you know what? The font type is completely different from the font used in the 1954 article. I think Haslam’s right. I don’t think that photo is of the Canvey Island Monster at all.

This was where I was going to laugh like a vampire and wish you a happy Halloween. But then I went and found an article from the Londonderry Sentinel from August 12, 1954. I used up one of my free introductory British Newspaper Archive page accesses to read it, so you’re going to hear the entire thing even though most of it is identical to the Canvey Island newspaper article. But there is one very important addition at the end.

The headline reads ‘Clergyman Finds Fish with Feet’ and the article reads:

“A large fish with feet was found washed up on the beach at Canvey Island, Essex, on Tuesday, by Reverend Joseph D. Overs, a local clergyman. ‘It was over four feet long with staring eyes and a large mouth. Underneath it had two perfect feet, each with five toes. It was dead and had been damaged by being washed against rocks,’ said Mr. Overs. A similar fish was found almost in the same spot at Canvey last November. Mr. Overs said later that the fish had been identified as a pocket fish.

“The fish, which is also known as angler, sea devil, frog or toad fish, and fishing frog, is a British fish, and the name Angler is said to have been derived from its preying on small fish, which it attacts by moving worm-like filaments attached to the head and mouth.”

Now we know that Frank Edwards didn’t completely invent that November 1953 fish. But even if the newspaper picture didn’t come from the 1954 article—and I’m pretty sure it didn’t—it seems clear from this article that we’re talking about anglerfish anyway. Even the 1953 fish’s identification as a fiddler fish isn’t too surprising, since the fiddler ray does superficially resemble an anglerfish in that it has a large head but a much slenderer body that tapers in a long tail. The angler fish’s fins are strong and thick, and if the body was damaged as Overs reported, the ends of the fins may have been frayed to resemble toes.

But I do have one last thing to add. Remember how in Stranger Than Science, Frank Edwards describes the fish as having five toes arranged in a U shape? Where on earth did that come from? Well, for some reason Edwards was convinced that the Canvey Island Monster was the same thing that left hoofmarks in the snow all over Devonshire in February of 1855. No one else has made that connection and I have no idea why Edwards decided to link them. Devon and Canvey are over 200 miles apart, or about 360 kilometers. But if Edwards wanted to use the Canvey Island Monster to solve the mystery of the devil’s footprints, he had to make people believe not only that the fish was bipedal but that it had feet whose prints would resemble hooves.

I don’t think the Canvey Island monster was out cavorting in the snow in 1855, leaving hundreds of miles of hoofmarks on roofs and in walled gardens. But something left those hoofmarks. But to learn more about the devil’s footprints, you’re going to have to wait for next week.

[thunder crash muahaha!]

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 037: The Dobhar-Chu

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This week we’re in Ireland learning about the dobhar-chú, a vicious creature that might be an otter but might be a KING otter! Either way, it’s a killer.

The weird creature carved on Grace Connolly’s gravestone:

How can such an adorable floof be so MURDEROUS? Eurasian otter:

The giant otter (from South America) imitating a sea serpent (hmm):

Giant otter has teeth:

Further reading:

The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl PN Shuker

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

We’re one week closer to Halloween, and it’s time to learn about a mysterious, deadly animal from Ireland called the Dobhar-chú (pronounced do-war-coo). Appropriately enough, our story starts in a graveyard.

Conwall Cemetery is in the town of Drummans, near the valley of Glenade. In the cemetery is a sandstone grave marker lying flat on the ground. It’s about 4 ½ feet wide and nearly two feet high, or 1.37 by .6 meters, and is dated September 24, 1722. The name on the stone is Grace Con, wife of Ter MacLoghlin. But the main part of the stone is made up of a carving of an animal.

I’ll put a picture of the carving in the show notes. It’s not very clear, but basically, it looks like a heavy-bodied dog with limbs folded beneath it as though it’s crouching. It has a long tail although that has mostly worn off. Its head is small, with tiny ears, and its neck is folded back so that its head lies along its back. A hand holds the hilt of a sword that is plunged into the animal’s neck, with the tip of the sword just visible below the belly.

There are various stories and poems about what happened to Grace Con, or Grace Connolly, but they’re all basically the same. Incidentally, it was Gaelic custom for women to retain their maiden names, which is why Grace’s last name doesn’t match her husband’s.

One morning Grace went down to the lake either to wash or to do laundry, reports differ. When she didn’t return home, her husband Terence McGloughlan went to find her. But when he reached the lake, he found his wife’s body–with a monstrous animal, the dobhar-chú, feeding on it. Terence killed the beast, but as it died it gave a piercing whistle or squeal. The squeal was answered by another animal from the lake, which surfaced and charged Terence.

He fled home just ahead of the monster, leaped on his horse, and galloped away with the monster pursuing. Eventually his horse tired, so Terence dismounted and turned the horse sideways across the road to act as a sort of shield. When the dobhar-chú ducked to run beneath the horse’s belly, Terence stabbed it through the heart.

Dobhar-chú is an Irish term meaning water-hound. It’s used as a name for the Eurasian otter, but can also refer to something called a master otter or king otter. But before we go any farther, let’s get some background on the otters that live in Ireland and Scotland, since the legend of the dobhar-chú is known in both places.

The Eurasian otter lives throughout Europe and Asia. It’s shy, solitary, and territorial. It’s a pretty big animal, and some big adult males can grow as long as four and a half feet, or 1.4 meters, including the tail. Females are smaller. The otter’s toes are webbed, which makes it a good swimmer. It’s dark brown above, grayish-brown below, with white or cream-colored markings around the throat and cheeks. It has a long, slender body and flattened head with tiny ears and sensitive whiskers. Oh, and it’s incredibly cute. Oh my gosh is it cute.

The otter eats fish, frogs, and invertebrates like crayfish. It lives in rivers and lakes and likes plenty of cover around the water’s edge. While it prefers fresh water, it will enter the ocean, but it needs fresh water both to drink and to clean salt from its coat. It’s usually nocturnal and is especially active at dusk and dawn, although if an otter’s territory is along the coast it will be more active during the day since it forages in rock pools at low tide for fish and invertebrates. Sometimes people call otters who live along the coast sea otters, but in Great Britain and most of Europe they’re the same type of otter that lives in freshwater.

Instead of having one den, an otter’s territory has a number of places where it sleeps or just hangs out. Above-ground areas are called couches and are well hidden in dense vegetation and frequently on small islands. Underground areas are called holts. A holt might be dug into a river bank, among a big tree’s roots, or just be a crevice among fallen rocks. A mother otter will have her babies in a holt that’s fairly remote from her usual activities. She usually has two or three babies at a time, called cubs.

An otter marks its territory with droppings that actually smell nice, like new-mown hay. I have not smelled them myself so I can’t vouch for this. The droppings are called spraints. While otters were once common throughout Europe, they’re much rarer these days, mostly because they can’t live in polluted streams, and these days they are totally protected. You’re not even allowed to damage an otter’s couch or holt, much less the otter itself.

Now we know about the otter, but what’s a master otter? According to Irish and Scottish folklore, it’s basically a super-otter. It’s much larger than a regular otter and sometimes appears with scores of regular otters as though leading them, and it may have some magic powers. Carrying its pelt, or part of its pelt, is said to protect someone from injury or shipwreck. One description says it’s white except for black ear tips and a black cross on its back, another says it’s half wolf, half fish. One account from 1684 calls it an Irish crocodile and describes it as “of the pitch of an ordinary greyhound, of a black slimy skin, without hair,” and says it’s also called a water-dog or Anchu. Whatever it is, it’s rare and dangerous.

So what might it be? As it happens, there is a species of otter that sounds a lot like the dobhar-chú. It’s called the giant otter, and while these days a big male is not much more than about 5 and a half feet long, or 1.7 meters, in the past before they were nearly driven extinct for their fur, big males sometimes grew eight feet long, or 2.4 meters. Those lengths don’t even include the tail. The giant otter is brown or reddish in color, but when it’s wet it looks black. It has a white pattern on its throat that individuals use to identify each other, because unlike other otters, the giant otter is social, communicates with its clan members with whistles and other noises, is mostly active during the day, and can be aggressive. All this sure sounds like the dobhar-chú. The only problem is, the giant otter lives in South America, an entire ocean away from Europe.

Could a similar species of giant otter have once lived in Ireland and Scotland? We don’t have very many otter fossils, unfortunately–but we do have a recently discovered fossil of a new otter species from China. It’s been named Siamogale melilutra and it’s twice the size of the giant otter. From its teeth, it probably ate a lot of freshwater shellfish. The fossil dates to 6.24 million years ago, so it’s not likely that it was running around in Ireland in the early 18th century. But it’s interesting to know that really big otters did once exist in Asia, so it’s always possible that a species of rare giant otter also lived in parts of Europe until fairly recently.

Of course, it might be that the dobhar-chú really is just a folktale and not based on a real animal at all. Some accounts of a king otter say it’s the seventh cub of an ordinary otter, and the king otter’s magical attributes also push it farther into the realm of folklore than objective reality. It’s also possible that the dobhar-chú and the king otter are completely different animals, one real, one a folktale, with some confusion between the two since that’s just how people think.

I’m inclined to think that might be the case. So if we assume that the dobhar-chú is just an unusually large otter, does it fit the reported story? Do otters ever attack people?

Otter attacks are extremely rare, and usually only occur if a mother otter feels someone is threatening her cubs. In North America, where the river otter is very similar to the Eurasian otter, only 44 documented cases of an otter attacking a human have been recorded since 1875. Then again, when an otter does attack it can actually kill a human. Heck, the North American river otter occasionally kills alligators. An otter’s bite is similar in strength to that of a big dog, and it will chase people for at least a short distance if provoked. It can run 18 mph, or 30 km per hour. Usain Bolt can sprint 28 mph, or 45 km per hour, but most of us are a lot slower no matter how motivated we are.

In August of 2016, a Quebec woman swimming in a lake was attacked by an otter that repeatedly bit her legs until she managed to reach a dock with a ladder. Fortunately the otter didn’t chase her once she left the water. Needless to say, this is extremely unusual behavior for an otter, but it does happen. In 2014 an eight-year-old boy and his grandmother were swimming in a river in Washington state when an otter attacked the boy. When his grandmother came to his rescue, the otter turned on her. In 2013 a woman swimming in Yellowstone National Park was bitten and clawed by an otter. Her face, arms, and hands were bitten and some bones in her right hand broken. Fortunately, all these people recovered fully, but all of them had to spend time in the hospital.

So if Grace Connolly was in the lake back in 1733, bathing or washing clothes, and an otter took exception to her presence, it might well have killed her. The rest of the story might be embellishment or the otter might have also chased or attacked Grace’s husband before he managed to kill it. Either way, I don’t think we need to hypothesize about a rare giant otter in this case. A regular otter in a bad mood is scary enough.

Those little guys are cute as all get out, but don’t get too close. They bite.

Next week we’ll take a look at another water monster, this one from the sea–a weird and hideous two-legged fish thing–as we get closer and closer to Halloween.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on iTunes or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way. Rewards include stickers and twice-monthly bonus episodes.

Thanks for listening!