The wild and wanton wallaby

We have an important cryptozoological anniversary on our hands here in Denmark today. A red-necked wallaby have now been on the loose for a year since it ran away from its owner, a farmer on the Danish island Ærø in the spring of 2012. Despite the winter and spring 2012/2013 being very cold and nasty, the animal is probably having the time of its life. It is regularly seen by locals, and it has been moving around all over the island. The owner, who is something of a wallaby afficionado (he's got 15 all together) has been trying to catch the animal on and off for most of the year, but is is proving difficult, and since it is doing so well, he isn't trying to hard. Locals are even now trying to persuade him to release some more, and make them into a tourist attraction.

Rampant marsupials are nothing new in Denmark. This wallby is not the first, and will probably not be the last. Most of the sightings during the years (and they stretch back about a century) are of red-necked wallabies. They are a tough and very adaptable species having no problems with the danish climate. One set of sightings though, from the early 1960's are a wee bit different. That particular kangaroo was described as being very big - close to 2 meters, and bright red. Giant red kangaroo anyone? This was in the southern parts of the island Zealand, about 50 km's southwest of the danish capital of Copenhagen. It was seen 7 times all together, and then disappeared without a trace.

It was a wolf!

Ever since the alleged wolf was found dead in northwestern Denmark on November 16th., speculation has been rife as to the actual identity of the animal, and the actual cause of death. The Danish Veterinary Institute has now published their findings and conclusions.

First of all - the animal was not shot or poisoned or anything sinister. The poor thing was suffering from some form of tumour in the chest cavity - not cancerous, but caused by some form of inflammation. The tumour ended up being so large the animal couldn't eat, and finally wasn't able to breath.Not an easy death by any means.

There was of course morons celebrating that the "monster" was dead, but the general feeling was one of sadness. A lot of people would have liked to have free-roaming wolves in Denmark. But not this time.

And then there was the matter of identity - wolf, wolf-dog hybrid, wolflike dogbreed or something else?? The first detailed anatomical examination of the dead animal could not give a definitive answer. Some dog breeds are extremely wolf-like, or a wolf is very doglike so to speak, so we all had to wait for a DNA analysis.

It was indeed a bonafide wolf. According to the genetic analysis it must have come from the German population, so it had been on quite a walkabout before it ended up in northern Denmark. Nobody knows for how long it has been here, but probably for at least a year. I have a sighting from the border area with Germany from early 2011 from a girl of 16 who thought she saw a wolf running across the road early one morning when she was on her bycicle driving to school. This could have been the first entry of the wolf into Denmark.

Anyway - what is certain is that the now dead wolf represents the first confirmed wolf-sighting in Denmark in 199 years! Not bad. I wonder what comes next?

Alas poor wolf - an update

The possible wolf that showed up in Denmark recently - and in my last post - elicited the kind of reactions you would expect. A lot of people were over the moon about it, talking about how fantastic it would be to have this large predator back in Denmark. And of course the panic mongers started coming out of the woodwork, screaming about what all those treehugging greenie f****** hippies would say when the wolf attacked their child - which it would certainly do, because we know from scientific sources (Little Red Riding Hood and so forth) that wolves are bloodthirsty killers...bla, bla, bla.And could we please send a lot of hunters and policemen out there and kill it as quickly as possible.

Fortunately not everybody lost their head in such an obvious manner. The environmental authorities mounted a whole string of automatic cameras all over the area and supplied the animal with plenty of bait - dead deer and various other juicy pieces of meat - and then sat back and waited. It almost ended in a major stampede, as some started to offer rewards for a definite picture of the animal. Luckily the reward offer was withdrawn before people started galloping all over the restricted area where the "wolf" was seen

Alas poor wolf - the story did not have a happy ending. As can be seen from this link:

http://jyllands-posten.dk/indland/article4913999.ece

the animal was found dead a couple of days ago. Everybody feared it had been shot by some vigilante type or poisoned, but it seems the poor animal died from starvation inspite of the large number of camerabaits. It is now going to be dissected to determine the exact course of death, and a DNA-test will be performed to see whether it was in fact a wolf, and if so from what population.

Stay tuned for further developments.

The first wolf in Denmark in 200 years?

Strange things are a foot in northern Denmark. On October 14th, a group of birdwatchers in Thy National Park in northern Denmark saw and photographed what they believed were a wolf. One of the admittedly not very good pictures can be seen here: http://www.fugleognatur.dk/gallery.asp?mode=ShowLarge&ID=197198 The animal was seen rather late in the day and at a fair distance, but for almost half an hour. It is a rather exciting find, if it is indeed a wolf, as the closest confirmed wolf sighting was a young animal in northern Germany about 100 km south of the danish-german border a couple of years ago. And that's some 500 km south of Thy National Park. There has been sightings of a wolf-like animal in the area for the last couple of years, 4 sightings that I know of at least, but this is the first time anyone has taken a photograph. There has also been sightings in the area around Silkeborg, a densely wooded area filled with lakes about 200 km further south. These sightings have been going on for many years. I have documented a lot of these, including a couple of cases where people have heard wolves (yes - plural) howling.

I have also collected a few sightings in the area just around the border with Germany, so the possibility of a wolf in Denmark is not that remote. As of now everybody, self included is waiting for more people with big lenses to get out there and take some better pictures. But unfortunately we are also waiting for the inevitable panic reactions, people demanding that the animal be shot or farmers claiming that a lone wolf have killed 200 of their cows or sheep or whatever, and that there children are in grave danger the moment they step out the door. Reactions like this almost makes you wish it is in fact just a stray dog, but it looks rather convincing to me. Stay tuned for further developments.

A beast of a bezoar

This little piece of writing is perhaps not so much a matter of cryptozzology as a piece of magic - or at least pertaining to magic. Quite a lot of us have read the Harry Potter books and have read the famous scene where Harry saves a poisoned Ron Weazley by shoving a bezoar down his throat. Now, I have always imagined bezoars, which are "stones" that forms in the stomach of goats and various other cloven-hoofed animals, to be rather small, and indeed in the Harry Potter stories that's exactly what they are, so imagine my surprise, when leafing through an old book about daily life in Denmark in olden days, I came across this picture.

This is a mighty whopper of a bezoar - in fact it is almost as big as an ostrich egg. It has been mounted in silver in Amsterdam sometime in the early 1600's. It can now be found in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. For now you have to make do with this old b/w photo of it. It is still in the museum's collections (I've checked) but it is not currently on display. I have requested permission to see and photograph it, and hopefully obtain some better quality photographs sometime during this autum. It may not be obvious from the picture, but the bezoar has actually been hollowed out and mounted as a drinking vessel. As Harry Potter so clearly tells us, bezoars can, or were at least believed to, neutralize any form of poison, so a drinking vessel made of a bezoar would protect any king or noble lord against any attempt on their life using poison. Well worth the investment one would imagine.

The dog-loving shieldbearer part 2

It seems that I haven't been doing my homework properly. Several people have called my attention to the fact, that the extinct fly which may still be living in southern Denmark and northern Germany, is in fact not extinct. It was rediscovered in Spain in 2009 and 2010. Oh well - nevertheless, I intend to carry on looking for it here, as this would be several hundred kilometers outside of its formerly known distribution.But given the fact, that it now can be found in Spain, and possible in Denmark and Germany, it might be worth for all entomologist to keep and eye out for it.

The strange case of the dog-loving shieldbearer

Crypto-entomologi is a fairly small field of study. Although I have never considered myself an entomologist, I have nurtured a growing interest in insects the last 5 or 6 years. I have even managed to rediscover a beetle everybody thought had died out in Denmark in the early 1990's, but nothing REALLY cryptozoological - until now that is. Some weeks ago I got an e-mail from a friend of a friend - well, you now how it goes. This person lives in southwestern Denmark, only about a mile from the german border. He had been out one day taking a walk, when he stumpled upon a very dead something - probably a fox or a dog. It stank to high heaven, and as could be expected, it was absolutely covered in flies. Most of these were blowflies of one species or another, and as such rather dull. But there was one that was rather special. It was fairly large, something like a centimeter, bluish black, none of which was remarkable in any way. But this thing also had a big round orange head! He described the fly as looking like it was ferrying a brightly coloured pearl around. At first I thought he had been imagining things, but suddenly something started to stir in a deep, dusty and slightly cobwebbed recess of my memory vaults. I had read something somewhere about a fly looking like that, and a fondness for althings dead and festering. Enter Thyreophora cynophila, the dog-loving shieldbearer. The name refers to a shield like outgrowth on the thorax of the males, and the fact that the first specimens were caught on a dead dog.Thyreophora does infact have this strange swollen and rather colourful head. This is were the spirit of cryptozoology rears its head and snorts, because Thyreophora has not been seen for something like 150 years!! Unfortunately my correspondant had no camera, and no menas of catching the fly, and he hasn't seen it since. But I have managed to dig up one other person who claims to have seen another one of these strange insects, although a couple of years ago. It intrigued him enought to try and make a drawing of it. Although I have seen the drawing, and he has promised me a copy, I still haven't received it, but I will publish it as soon as I do. What to do now? Is there really a supposedly extinct insect, awaiting rediscovery out there? And furthermore several hundred kilometers north of its former distribution? I don't know. I have visited the area and done a thorough search without any luck - but the danish summer have been rather cold, windy and generally dismal so far, and the insectlife has been less than overwhelming, so... Anyway - if the weather improves, I intend to go there and put out some nice juicy carcasses for the local insectlife to feast upon, and then hopefully catch a dog-loving shieldbearer.