A Few bits on Scottish Environmental Conservation

[auld argonian]

Okay...you take the bow and arrows...I'm gonna take a large firearm...and lots of very big bullets. I appreciate a challenge as much as the next guy but those piggie things are frightening (and I understand that they don't smell too good, either).

But on a lighter note; I refer you to the most excellent book, "A Walk In The Woods" by the remarkable Bill Bryson (also "In A Sunburned Country" and "Shakespeare: The World As Stage" by the same author) for a great perspective on bears and cross-country hikers. It is hilarious and Bryson's partner Katz had the best possible solution to provide sustenance while hiking through bear country: a backpack full of Snickers bars.

Yum....

Best

AA

[ThistleDown]

But on a lighter note; I refer you to the most excellent book, "A Walk In The Woods" by the remarkable Bill Bryson (also "In A Sunburned Country" and "Shakespeare: The World As Stage" by the same author) for a great perspective on bears and cross-country hikers. It is hilarious and Bryson's partner Katz had the best possible solution to provide sustenance while hiking through bear country: a backpack full of Snickers bars.AA

Also by Bryson: "Notes from a Small Island" and "Mother Tongue"

[Lallans]

[QUOTE=Alan H;884660]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ica#Black_Bear

17 fatal Black Bear attacks in Canada and the USA in the 200's

7 fatal attacks in the USA and Canada in the 1990's

0 in the 1980's

4 in the 1970's.

UNQUOTE

I once attended a lecture by a black bear expert who, because he loved them, reluctantly admitted that black bears carry a (presently) rare and random gene mutation that, when it emerges, causes them to hunt humans. This is not what Farley Mowat would have taught us if he had ever got around to bears.

But on a lighter note; I refer you to the most excellent book, "A Walk In The Woods" by the remarkable Bill Bryson (also "In A Sunburned Country" and "Shakespeare: The World As Stage" by the same author) for a great perspective on bears and cross-country hikers. It is hilarious and Bryson's partner Katz had the best possible solution to provide sustenance while hiking through bear country: a backpack full of Snickers bars.

AA

Bryson is an interesting case of a brilliant writer, an American who bonded with the UK and who makes quite a living interpreting Americans to the British and vice versa. As Canucks, we can get to read both the US and UK versions of his books and it's interesting, if you're a fan, to see what is left out of each version. The US version, for instance, will skip the explanations of what a garage door opener is, which sorts of things are in turn carefully explained in the UK version. But it also means that when travelling to the US and the UK and buying Bryson's books, one has to be careful not to buy the same one twice (they have different titles in each country). A Walk In The Woods and the language books that were mentioned are indeed among his finest works and those only come in one version as far as I know. The man is dead funny.

[Lallans]

Back again... since this thread got posted and the photos of the Scottish wildcats showed up, I've been struggling with trying to recover the memory of a long-ago short story in Playboy (yes I DID read the articles), the story being an account of a Highlander who poaches a giant salmon and then has a fearsome and I think unsucessful struggle to get it home on his back while being stalked by the hungry wildcats who are after the fish. I didn't much get it at the time, assuming that the author was going on about wild house cats, not Wildcats, a separate species. I was in fact quite young at the time of first reading- I imagine my parents would have said that I was far too young for Playboy but I was careful not to ask them and I have retained little of the story except that the man had a strangely hard time getting his fish home.

OK, this is really fishing (sorry for the intentional pun), buy I don't suppose anyone who was more mature at the time of publication remembers anything about the story? The Playboy of the era was consistently hiring the world's finest writers, so I imagine the story was written by some contemporary Scottish literary giant and, not liking to leave things half-understood, I'd like another crack at it.

[auld argonian]

I remember the story and I remember the illustration on the title page of the story but I can't remember the title.

I understand that there's a box set of CD-roms that contain some huge number of Playboy back issues...in the interest of research, I'm sure that one of our members who has this set will certainly look it up...

Best

AA

[Alan H]

The places you find Natural History information!

[cormacmacguardhe]

Living in a bit more rural of an area, about 25 miles east of Bellingham in the Cascade foothills, we do encounter a few more of the wild ones. We have an almost nightly visit from a pair of racoons who enjoy the dry catfood we put out for the stray cats. As long as they have the catfood they do not bother the cats. On our daily walks my wife and I do find coyote scat, and the occasional bear scat. We did live for awhile on a two acre piece of land, and lost some of our chickens a goose, and possibly a cat or two to the coyote pack that lived in the valley behind us.
Several time I have been allowed to see the small herd of elk that pass through the area, the bull has an enormous rack of antlers, I am amazed that he can hold his head up. Eagles are a frequent sight especially along the river.
Re-introducing species, sounds like a nice idea, but after such long periods of time the fesibility of thier survival could be in question.
I remember reading somewhere that the deer population on the east coast is actually greater now than when the first european settlers landed. Due in large part to the europeans wiping out the large predators. The deer around here are actually more noticed closer to the city then out here. They like the flowers and the gardens in town.

[Jock Scot]

Let me assure every one that there is no danger whatsoever of a Scottish Wildcat attacking anyone in normal conditions. Like any animal, they will turn nasty if cornered, or they are defending their young.

However if some one could provide me with several decades of back copies of Playboy, I might be able to find time to do a spot of research for this long lost article on the Scottish Wildcat.

[Lallans]

I remember the story and I remember the illustration on the title page of the story but I can't remember the title.
(snip)
Best

AA

Funny, I too remember the illustration quite clearly. This is probably because Playboy is such a visual medium....

Let me assure every one that there is no danger whatsoever of a Scottish Wildcat attacking anyone in normal conditions. Like any animal, they will turn nasty if cornered, or they are defending their young.

My memory is that the Scottish wildcats were attacking the giant fish on the poacher's back. I did think the whole notion was a bit contrived at the time, but something similar (but less dramatic) wouldn't surprise me too much even in a house cat. I rather think that the struggle to get the salmon back to the man's croft was the whole point of the story- sort of a Highland version of The Old Man and the Sea perhaps.

WildcatTrivia: The North American lynks mentioned earlier are famous for following people through the woods, apparently out of harmless curiousity since I don't believe there has been a single instance of a lynk attacking anyone. I've never seen a lynk doing this- they are in fact really hard to see- but I come across tracks in the snow where you could see that some hiking tourists had been tailed by such a cat. One of the toughest and bravest old guys I ever met was so unnerved by the cats' habits that he used to carry a club with him when walking at dusk, on his way back from his 1930s town job to his family farm up in the Appalachian foothills. He said that almost every time he turned around quickly there would be a lynk in sight, staring at him. As to whether or not the story grew in the telling, I cannot say.

[MacBean]

Today those people are known as the Cattanachs, Davidsons, Macphersons, Macphails, Macgillivrays, Macqueens, Shaws, Farquharsons, Macthomases, Macritchies and their leading family, the Mackintoshes. It could be that the clan of the cats earlier included the Macmillans, the Macgillonies, the Macsorlies, the Macmartins and the Camerons, but who knows today, a thousand years down the line?

Hey, what about me?!