Animal Intelligence

The Associated Press has an odd piece of animal news:
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines. “You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario,” said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. [...]

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If I’m not careful, this is going to turn from “Animal Intelligence” into “Cute Interspecies Friendships”. Here’s a dog that’s willingly taking care of some abandoned kittens.

I have no idea what is being said in Japanese here. As with many of these stories, this comes via frykitty.

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The London Daily Mail has further information about the ‘Cambodian jungle-girl’ I mentioned on Monday. Apparently she doesn’t like civilization and would rather return to her ‘wild’ way of life:

She speaks in grunts, crawls instead of walking —and now she wants to go back to live in the jungle…Filthy and naked when she was discovered, [...]

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Dave sent in the story of Rochom P’ngieng, a 27-year-old Cambodian woman who has been living wild in the jungle for the past nineteen years. According to the BBC News:

A Cambodian girl who disappeared aged eight has been found after reportedly living wild in the jungle for 19 years. Rochom P’ngieng’s father says he has [...]

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Here’s a piece of fluff (but a cute piece of fluff) — a Sumatran Tiger Cub from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Maybe I need to introduce a “cute” category.

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Dogster recently pointed to a Discovery Channel article from last June. This piece, by Jennifer Veigas, notes that animal intelligence is often difficult to measure.

People generally define intelligence in terms that place our own species at the apex, but recent studies on other animals suggest skills such as abstract thinking, problem solving, reasoning, and language [...]

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Here’s an interesting story from from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (originally from the LA Times).

Dead drug lord’s hippos on the loose in Colombia
Sunday, December 24, 2006
By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
PUERTO TRIUNFO, Colombia — Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar’s pleasure palace, a 5,500-acre estate where the notorious drug lord held court over million-dollar cocaine deals, parties [...]

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Interspecies friendships are awesome. Here are some photographs from Tanja Askani of a deer and a rabbit who are apparently pals.

Askani is a photographer and animal scientist. She has a book entitled Kinship with the Wolf: The Amazing Story of the Woman Who Lives with Wolves. From the Amazon page:
Czech author and animal scientist Askani [...]

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Animal Intelligence reader Nicole forwarded a story about birds who have learned to “rap”. That is, certain birds living in cities have learned to modify their song to increase their chances of finding a mate. Here’s the full text of the article:

Birds living in cities are performing a type of “avian rap” while their rural [...]

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