“That’s a sign of things to happen,” said Thangamani, director of the SUNY Center for Vector-Borne Diseases. “We are anticipating a real uptick in the number of ticks submitted to our lab. This is going to be a huge year for the ticks. Technically every year is a huge year for the ticks, but we are seeing a gradual increase in the number of ticks humans encounter and submit to the lab. This trend will continue.”
National News Deer are leaping to their deaths off this Pennsylvania bypass
Posted March 21, 2022 9:49 a.m. EDT Updated March 21, 2022 9:51 a.m. EDT AddThis Sharing Buttons Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to LinkedInShare to GmailShare to Yahoo MailShare to More
By CNN Newsource
Johnsonburg, Pa. — Deer have been leaping to their deaths in a northwest Pennsylvania town.
The residents working to save them say the animals plummet off a bypass.
"Recently, since we lived on the other side of the bypass, we've had 25 deer jump to their death in a populated area," said Bill Boylan. "That end of the bypass is probably more dangerous than any other area."
Boylan and other residents said they tried reaching out to the Pennsylvania state Department of Transportation, but they did not get the response they were hoping for.
In May 1850, a 20-year-old Potawatomi tribal leader named Simon Pokagon was camping at the headwaters of Michigan’s Manistee River during trapping season when a far-off gurgling sound startled him. It seemed as if “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the deep forests towards me,” he later wrote. “As I listened more intently, I concluded that instead of the tramping of horses it was distant thunder; and yet the morning was clear, calm, and beautiful.” The mysterious sound came “nearer and nearer,” until Pokagon deduced its source: “While I gazed in wonder and astonishment, I beheld moving toward me in an unbroken front millions of pigeons, the first I had seen that season.”
These were passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius, at the time the most abundant bird in North America and possibly the world. Throughout the 19th century, witnesses had described similar sightings of pigeon migrations: how they took hours to pass over a single spot, darkening the firmament and rendering normal conversation inaudible. Pokagon remembered how sometimes a traveling flock, arriving at a deep valley, would “pour its living mass” hundreds of feet into a downward plunge. “I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America,” he wrote, “yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.”
"Catching coyotes can be difficult if the proper steps aren't taken while setting the trap. Learn the proper steps to trapping by watching Casey Shoopman make a dirt hole set for coyotes and bobcats."
Odds are you’ve never seen a possum of these proportions. The giant critter that Dan Antilla shot on November 10 just outside of his home in Linwood, Minnesota looks like a real-life R.O.U.S, or Rodent of Unusual Size, from The Princess Bride—though opossums are not actually rodents but marsupials. Technicalities aside, the nocturnal creature had been breaking into and stealing eggs from Antilla’s chicken coop for several weeks before he laid eyes on it.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has confirmed the presence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in birds in two additional states — a flock of commercial broiler chickens in Fulton County, Kentucky, and a backyard flock of mixed species birds in Fauquier County, Virginia.
Last week, the first case was confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in Dubois County, Indiana. This was the first confirmed case of HPAI in commercial poultry in the United States since 2020.
White-tailed deer on Staten Island have been found carrying the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus, marking the first time the variant has been reported in wild animals.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that white-tailed deer are easily infected by the virus. The results are likely to intensify concerns that deer, which are widely distributed across the United States and live near humans, could become a reservoir for the virus and a potential source of new variants.
