Tufted Capuchin (Cebus apella)

There are about 10 slots left in Mammalthon 2! Come by the site on May 3 to take part in the craziness, and if you'd like to contribute to The Wildlife Center, a wildlife hospital, and receive your own custom-made original art, look to the right-hand navigation bar for more information.

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The tufted capuchin, which is also known as the brown capuchin or the black-capped capuchin, is a monkey that lives in the forests of South America. It eats nuts—whose shells it cracks with a stone—and fruit. The tufted species is the only capuchin that carries its tail in a coil, like this one here.

Mammals of New Mexico Week: Spotted Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus spilosoma)

Please consider participating in the second 24 Mammals in 24 Hours Marathon! You get to support a great cause that helps animals and get your own custom original drawing. Look in the right-side navigation bar of this page for more information.

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According to the American Society of Mammalogists, New Mexico has five species of ground squirrels in the Spermophilus genus. In my parents' neighborhood, you can frequently see them rushing across the road, but I'm not sure which species those are. The spotted ground squirrel, like this one, likes to burrow into sandy soil. Animal Diversity Web describes the varying landscapes the spotted ground squirrel calls home in all the western states it lives in, and I like the picture the list of habitats evokes: drifted sand along rivers, creosote and blackbrush, short-grass mesas, the banks of arroyos, gravelly sand along highways, low shrubs, sand hills, sand dunes, yucca grass, sage-grass.

When they want to send an alert signal to each other, spotted ground squirrels stomp their hind feet.

Mammals of New Mexico Week: Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana)

The 24-Hour Mammalthon has been rescheduled. It is now on May 3, 2008. There are still several slots available, so look over in the right-hand navigation bar and reserve your mammal today. It's for a good cause.

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The pronghorn is often called an antelope, but it's not really an antelope. Another nickname for it is speed goat, but it's not a goat, either. In fact, it's in a class—or rather, family—of its own as the only member of the Antilocapridae.

There are antlers, like deer have, and there are horns, like cows and antelope have. Do you know the difference? Antlers are made of bone and are shed each year. Horns are made of compressed hair growing on a bony core and are permanent. Then there are what pronghorns have. Their horns are keratinous, like bovine horns, but they're branched, like deer antlers, and pronghorns shed them each year like deer do. In fact, no bovines are known to shed their whole horns the way pronghorns do. This seems to me to be the main factor that's keeping the pronghorn in its own separate family instead of among the bovines.

Before Europeans came to America, there were tens of millions of pronghorn here. Around the turn of the century, they were nearly killed off; now there are about a million left, it seems. The fastest land animal in the western hemisphere, pronghorn apparently evolved solely in North America, never migrating anywhere else. Ivan T. Sanderson has this to say:

Nothing at all like these animals is known anywhere; they are a solitary leftover from pre-glacial times, when their tribe was much more varied…In a matter of speaking, they are a sort of minor experiment in 'antelopes,' initiated by Nature and then dropped.

I take issue with the "minor" part. Seeing pronghorn on the flatlands of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico was one of the things I most looked forward to as a child when we'd drive from our house in Midland, TX, to see my grandparents in Tatum, NM. I have a vivid memory of seeing them jump over a barbed-wire fence, but everyone—including my dad and Ivan T.—says they can't jump fences. It must have been a daydream.

This pronghorn, along with the rest of the New Mexico mammals this week, is dedicated to the memory of Maleta Scrivner, a dear family friend who loved dogs and desert animals.

Mammals of New Mexico Week: Jaguar (Panthera onca)

The 24-Hour Mammalthon slots are filling up! Reserve yours now—the Mammalthon is this Saturday! Look over to the right to find out more.

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We're looking at New Mexico's mammals to get ready for this weekend's mammalthon, which benefits The Wildlife Center in northern New Mexico, a wonderful wildlife hospital. Today, let's talk about a mammal The Wildlife Center has not yet treated.

Although I tend to associate jaguars with rain forest habitats, it turns out that at one time, they ranged as far north as northern Arizona. These biggest of North American cats were seemingly extirpated from the U.S. by the ranchers and others who had economic reason to want them dead, and the guns to kill them with. In 1963, the last one was killed. However, in 1996, a mountain lion hunter in southern New Mexico got a big surprise when his dogs cornered not a lion, but a jaguar. Since then, the same hunter photographed another of the animals, and motion-sensor cameras have snapped a couple pictures of jaguars in Arizona.

Still, it may be a stretch, or wishful thinking, to call jaguars mammals of New Mexico. It seems that female jaguars tend to stay in one place, while males roam around impregnating the ladies hither and yon. The jaguars spotted (ha) in New Mexico and Arizona have all been males who have wandered north from breeding populations in Mexico. And the Bush administration is planning to build a little 700-mile fence along our border with Mexico, which will prevent jaguars from crossing over as surely as it will people. And that will be the end of jaguars in the United States once again.

The New York Times: "Gone for Decades, Jaguars Steal Back to the Southwest"
Scientific American: "U.S. Jaguars Threatened by Mexico Border Fence"

Mammals of New Mexico Week: American Pika (Ochotona princeps)

Just a few more days until Mammalthon 2, which is this Saturday, April 19! Look over there to the right to learn all about it. See you then!

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To gear up for this weekend's 24 Mammals in 24 Hours drawing marathon, I'm featuring the mammals of New Mexico this week! The Wildlife Center, a wildlife hospital in northern New Mexico, will be receiving all the proceeds from the mammalthon, so what better way to honor their work than by meeting a few of New Mexico's mammals?

This is an American pika. It's related to rabbits, and it does kind of look like a short-eared rabbit. It's tiny, though, the size of a tennis ball, or so I read. It makes a great little noise that sounds like it's saying "Eep!" It lives in the mountains of western North America, in piles of talus, which is the rubbly rock that you can find on mountain peaks.

You probably noticed that this particular pika has a mouthful of greenery. Pikas don't hibernate. Instead, they spend the summer gathering grass, which they pile up and dry to create stacks of hay! All winter long, they eat the hay they made and huddle under the snow, which insulates them from cold temperatures.

That's part of the problem now facing pika populations. In addition to needing insulation from extreme cold, pikas have such thick coats—which they don't shed—that they die in temperatures higher than the mid-70s Fahrenheit. Therefore, they're confined to high elevations. But we're undergoing something known as global warming these days, and that has two implications for pikas. First of all, they have to go higher and higher to find temperatures cool enough for them to survive. Second, the higher temperatures also mean less snow cover, and the pikas don't have any insulation from freezing.

Scientists are finding many empty colonies where they expected to find lively pika populations. In some of them, there are hay piles left half eaten.

ABC News: "Route to Extinction Goes Up Mountains, Scientists Say"

Daily Mammal Now: Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis)

The second Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammal Extravaganza is coming April 19! Reserve your own special mammal now: just click the "donate" button in the right-hand navigation bar. Get an original, custom-made work of art and help animals at the same time!

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Today is the inaugural installment of a new periodic Daily Mammal spotlight feature, which I'm calling Daily Mammal Now. (I admit that I got the idea from Dr. Phil's "Dr. Phil Now." I just don't have the newsy-sounding arrangement of my theme song to play for these special "Now" episodes. In fact, no theme song at all.) Daily Mammal Now (like Dr. Phil Now) will focus on mammals that have been in the news. If you see a mammal in the news, please drop me an e-mail or comment on this site to tip me off! Get the scoop if you have a nose for news!

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article called "Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why." Alarmingly, certain populations of bats in New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts have been stricken with what they're calling White Nose Syndrome. Is it a virus? Is it caused by exposure to a toxin? Is it bacterial? Well, no one knows. What they do know is that it makes the bats very thin and sometimes spotted with a white fungus. Since last winter, it's been killing bats who should have been peacefully hibernating. Instead, they're staggering out of caves and mines in broad daylight in the dead of winter and dropping dead. One scientist quoted in the article calls them "dead bats flying."

This particular bat, the Indiana bat, has been on the federal endangered species list for four decades now. The major threats to its survival are human-caused: commercialization of the bats' cave habitats, pesticides, "human disturbance," and the like. While some Indiana bat populations seemed to be on the upswing, now White Nose Syndrome threatens to knock them back down again. Scientists fear that the syndrome could cause extinctions of several species.

The phenomenon reminds me of Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious catastrophe that has been killing bees, and the lethal fungus that attacks frogs. Unlike Dr. Phil on his topics, there's not much I can say about these strange syndromes. I'm baffled, and all I can do is read the news and see what happens. What do you think?

24 MAMMALS IN 24 HOURS: Mammalthon 2 is coming April 19!

Last December, 36 beautiful, generous, animal-loving art aficionados participated in the first Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammal Marathon. I stayed up for 24 hours straight and drew a mammal an hour (almost). People who donated to Defenders of Wildlife got to request a mammal, see it appear during the 24-hour mammalthon, and then receive the original drawing in the mail. It was unbelievably fun, and we raised more than $800 for Defenders.

It's time for Mammalthon 2! This time, the contributions will be going to The Wildlife Center, a wonderful wildlife rehabilitation hospital in northern New Mexico. Spring means baby season and hundreds of injured and orphaned baby animals that need a place to recuperate and some help getting back into the wild. Your participation in Mammalthon 2 will help make sure these babies, and all the other animals The Wildlife Center rehabilitates, get the care they need.

Here's what you do. Click the donate button you see below or in the right-side navigation bar. When prompted, request any mammal—any mammal in the whole world, even if I've already drawn it (although I'll really love you if I haven't).

If you donate at least $35, you'll get to help The Wildlife Center, see your mammal appear during the mammalthon on April 19, and then receive the original drawing in the mail! If you donate at least $50, that original drawing will come matted and ready to frame.

The first 24 requests will be filled during the actual mammalthon (I hope I hope!). Like last time, I'll work hard to draw any additional requests (back orders) in the order they were made as quickly as I can.

(The drawings are done with markers and colored pencil on tracing paper. They're 100 percent original works. Both matted and non-matted drawings come with a warm gray piece of heavy art paper to put behind the tracing paper and really make the colors pop.)

The mammalthon is a fun way to support art and animals at the same time. Mammalthon drawings make great gifts, too! Even if you can't donate this time, please stop by on April 19th. The comments and support are what keep me going during the long long hours of drawing, and they mean so much!

CONTEST! Five Deer Mice: Aztec Mouse, California Mouse, Canyon Mouse, Gleaning Mouse, Hooper's Deer Mouse

April 19: Daily Mammal 24-Hour Mammal Marathon 2! Details later this week.

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Those of you who have been following the Daily Mammal from the start know how daunting the rodents are. Nearly half of the 5,000 named mammal species are rodents, and as Ivan T. Sanderson says in Living Mammals of the World, "whole slews of these look almost exactly alike." Not only are there are thousands and thousands of them, something I had not considered when I decided to begin this project, but there aren't very good photos of a great many of them. A while back, I drew a set of five sleeping dormice, and found it heartening to check several rodents off the list at once. Here's another of those multi-mouse drawings. This time we're tackling five deer mice (major hantavirus carriers), of the Peromyscus genus.

I didn't have photographs of a single one of these mice. Instead, I had photographs of Peromyscus species that are much more common in the US, and I had very detailed descriptions of these five species from the species accounts in Mammalian Species, which I download in PDF from Virginia Hayssen's website. Now, let me tell you, I do not as yet speak the language of zoology, but I'm going to learn it. There are standard names for describing animals' fur, or pelage, as we mammalogists call it: ochre, buffy, tawny, and a wash of brown may all mean tan to you and me, but not to those whose eyes are trained to discern the nuances. Would my biologist readers let me know where I can get a chart or something that shows what those colors really are? I read that Munsell Soil Color Charts are used for describing pelage—is that where these names come from? I'd like to know.

Anyway, in drawing these mice, I had only the scientific descriptions to go on, and only my experience with acrylic paints to help me decipher the meaning of the colors. (Well, that and the fact that I've known three cocker spaniels named Buffy.) Here's where you come in.

CONTEST: I'm going to type, below, some hints from the descriptions of these mice. The first person to identify in a comment to this post which of the five is which wins this drawing, matted and ready for framing. Ted is not eligible. Here we go.

Aztec mouse (P. aztecus):

• Dorsal coloration is pale ochre mixed with black
• Sides are reddish
• Underparts are light buff
• A black orbital ring is present
• Size is medium

California mouse (P. californicus):

• Annulations are not thoroughly concealed
• Color is generally blackish brown above, sides ochraceous-tawny, venter pale olive gray to buffy brown
• Largest species of the genus in the United States

Canyon mouse (P. crinitus)

• Feet white
• Dorsal pelage silky
• Dorsal individual hairs lead-gray at base, succeeded by ochraceous to buffy subterminal band, and tipped with brown or back; dark grayish bases of hairs sometimes visible through buffy to pale grayish shade of dorsum
• Hairs of forehead, nose, and face appearing slightly more grayish than body
• Venter white
• Size small to medium for genus

Gleaning mouse (P. spicilegus)

• Unworn pelage has upperparts rich, tawny approaching ocherous rufous, dusky and dusky-tipped hairs uniformly distributed throughout upperparts
• Black or nearly black orbital ring extends posteriorly into a grizzled area between the eye and the base of the ear
• White feet
• Tail blackish-brown above, white below with coarse annulations
• Medium in size for the genus

Hooper's deer mouse (P. hooperi)

• Upper parts grayish with faint to moderate wash of brown
• Underparts pale cream
• Hind feet and lower legs whitish
• Medium size for genus

Good luck!