Animal News

It's been a weird month for displaced animals of all stripe, genus, and species.  Wild animals seem to be popping-up where they don't belong all over the world!  Whether this is evidence of humanity's continued encroachment on their territories, indicative of some kind of natural change in diet (such as a loss of prey), or some other reason(s), no one can say, but no one can deny it's happening.

In Knoxville, TN, a black bear that had been spotted on a college campus, as well as roaming the city, was captured and will be released into the wild once it has been tagged.  Bears getting into American cities is not exactly rare, but this is about the third or fourth report of such I've heard so far this year, and they're certainly not limited to the Smokey Mountain area.

The whales who have been stuck in the Sacramento River are said to be nearing the San Francisco Bridge.  Once in the Bay, experts expect them to find their way back into the Pacific with few or no problems.

The young boy who shot the new "Hogzilla" received the bleached skull from his dad as a gift.  He also received a normal boar's bleached skull, which is about half the size of Hogzilla's.  The first boar to be called "Hogzilla" was actually caught in another state last year and, like this account, became the subject of much scrutiny.  But, as I reported on the old blog, the National Geographic channel got several experts together to measure the hog's corpse and they determined that, while its measurements had been slightly overestimated, the hog was very real and very much oversized.