Send Your Questions to Mary Pearl

Mary's research and conservation interests include community-based conservation, primate behavior and conservation, and the relationship between biological science and conservation policy.

Use this page to send your questions about North American animals to Mary Pearl. Type your questions in the form that appears when you click on Mary's name above. Your questions and Mary's responses will appear in the North American Animal Questions section below.

These are the most recent questions you have asked Mary and her answers. Scroll through the whole page or click on the animal/topic you are interested in.
• Bald Eagle
• Birds & Bats
• Bobcat
• Cost of Endangered Species
• Coyote
• Groundhog
• Monk Seal
• Puma
• Raccoon
• Rattlesnakes
• Sea Mink
• Snakes
• Whooping Crane
• Winter Animals
• Winter Birds
• Wolf

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Because endangered species are rare, they are usually not seen very often by people. Nocturnal (active at night) animals are harder for people to see. Sometimes endangered species are large or noisy, so when they are in an area, they are not hard to see. I saw a group of 25 very rare birds, the ocellated turkey, walking around a forest clearing in Guatemala. The people with me didn't believe they were endangered! People who work in zoos see endangered species every day, and so do people who study many endangered species.

Finally, there is NO one animal, which, if it died, would single-handedly destroy the food chain and cause people to die. All animals and plants live in communities called ecosystems. Ecosystems are difficult to destroy, because nature has lots of very similar species that act in similar ways. Ecologists (the people who study how ecosystems work) call this duplication "redundancy." So even if a whole species goes extinct, ecosystems still work and nature continues. We want to have all the species survive into the future because diversity is beautiful, but don't worry that your life is in danger if we lose some animals.

Question: Snakes

Mary's Answer

Dear Cody and Forrest:
I love snakes too. I even have a pet snake, a California king female. She is beautiful. It is NOT true that if you put a rattlesnake's head near a wasps's nest, the insects will suck out the poison. I even checked with a friend of mine who is a rattlesnake biologist from Texas, Dr. Michael Foerstner, and after over 10 years working with snakes, he had never heard this story. Wasps don't pay any attention to snakes. Careful about those sea snakes: they are very poisonous! Best wishes, Mary

Question: Winter Animals

Mary's Answer

Question: Winter Birds

Mary's Answer

Dear Sharon, Birds wear their down parkas! Seriously, down -- the stuff that makes very expensive winter wear and comforters puffy and warm, comes from birds (usually geese) and is actually tiny feathers, which are excellent insulators. The little puffy feathers trap tiny bits of air, so that a bird (or person!)'s body is kept warm. On very cold days, you will notice that birds look rounded and chubby. They haven't gained weight -- they are fluffing up the down that keeps them warm. Birds also move into protected areas out of the wind, and stay out of water that might freeze around them. You were kind to give the bird seed and water. When everthing is frozen, they can get thirsty. Many birds appreciate suet in the wintertime, in addition to seed. So many people in the northeastern U.S. feed birds in their backyards that some birds that would ordinarily not spend the winter so far north now live year round in places with cold winters! That's why it's important, if you start feeding birds in the fall and early winter, to make a commitment to keep feeding all the way until spring, when food becomes abundant again.

Question: Groundhogs

Mary's Answer:

Dear Teresa, This was a real surprise! Groundhogs are really exclusively herbivores. Perhaps your daughter saw "her" carrying one of her babies. I have never heard of a groundhog consuming animal prey. Thanks for asking!

Question: Sea Mink

Mary's Answer:

The sea mink was not only redder than the common mink, but twice as large. It inhabited coastal areas and off shore islands from Newfoundland to Massachusetts, but was particularly common on the islands off of Maine. It was hunted to extinction for its beautiful fur and because of its large size. It was only described as a separate species in 1903, based on some bones collected from a site in Brookline, Maine. One was seen by a hunter in the mid-1800s with a trout in its mouth at the mouth of the river, which he reported it gave to its young. There is precious little information left about the sea mink.

Question: Mountain Lions and Coyotes

Mary's Answer:

Margot, Cougars are indeed returning to northern California, and they do eat wild pigs. Their scat would be larger in circumference than coyotes, and while both would have fur, bones, scales and other body parts in the scat, the coyote scat would also reflect a more varied diet. Coyotes will eat grasshoppers, small snakes, garbage, plant materials (seeds and fibrous material) as well as small rodents. Cougars are more exclusively meat-eaters, and range from eating small mammals,lizards and snakes up to larger prey such as deer, elk, horses, cows, and wild pigs. Their scat is more pungent in odor. So while there is some overlap in their diet, they do not compete directly in food or in their home ranges. Mountain lions (or pumas or cougars -- all names for Felis concolor, the official Latin name.) range over larger areas than coyotes.

Question: Raccoons

Mary's Answer:

Marty, Thank you for asking me this question! Lots of people think that raccoons wash their food -- in fact, the German word for raccoon is literally "wash-bear". However, they do not wash their food in the sense that people do. In the spring and early summer, their diet includes lots of food items along streams and ponds. They can often be seen handling this food in water, but that is because wetting their forepaws increases their tactile sensitivity, a sense that is an important part of their means of perceiving their environment. Later on in the summer and the fall, when they consume mostly upland food items such as acorns, they do not carry these other food items to a water source. You may be interested to know that there IS an animal that does consciously wash its food -- some snow monkeys (Macaca fuscata) in Japan have been observed to scoop up handfuls of seeds mixed in with sand on the seashore, and then toss them into the water -- they pause as the sand grains sink, and then scoop up the floating seeds. In this way they can enjoy eating their food without grit!

Question: Bobcat

Mary's Answer:

Thanks for writing, Alison. Bobcats ("Felis rufus"), also known as the American red lynx, are smaller than mountain lions, and have fared better than other predators (animals that eat other animals) in avoiding elimination by humans. Although they aren't plentiful anywhere, they can be found all over north America, from Canada to Mexico. They are successful because they are flexible about how and where they live -- they will eat a variety of foods (from mice to deer), live in a variety of kinds of habitats, and they have little trouble finding mates and reproducing. Male lynxes are territorial, and will fight one another during the breeding season. The lynx is easy to identify because it is the only cat with a tuft of fur on the top of each ear.

Question: Monk Seal

Answer:

Hawaiian monk seals live north and west of the Hawaiian islands. It almost became extinct a century ago, but under protection (it is illegal to hunt them) it has made a slow recovery. Now there may be as many as 1,500 animals, mostly living within the boundaries of the Hawaiian Islands and Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuges. Its close relative, the Caribbean monk seal, was not so lucky. It never occurred in large groups, like most other seals. It was hunted whenever seen, and by 1850 was rare. In 1886 a small herd was found off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and 49 were killed. More were killed at the same place in 1911. Since that time, one or two seals have been spotted off of Key West, Florida and southern Jamaica -- but by now, most people think the Caribbean monk seal is extinct.

Question: Gray Wolf

Mary's Answer:

Dear Laura: Before Europeans came to settle in North America, gray, or timber wolves ranged from the Arctic circle to central Mexico. They were so numerous, that the Massachusetts Bay Company paid a bounty (reward) of a penny a dead wolf. The last wolf in New England was killed in the 1860s. By the 1920s, wolves had been exterminated almost everywhere, except for a few groups in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, the gray wolf was listed as endangered. Since then, the Minnesota population has grown to nearly 2,000, and the wolves are no longer considered endangered. Because livestock owners are still afraid wolves will harm their animals, the government has promised to compensate owners for their losses to wolves. However, the wolves seem to prefer wild prey.

Question:Whooping Crane

Mary's Answer:

I don't think anybody knows more about cranes than the International Crane Foundation (ICF), located in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The people there can send you information on all kinds of cranes from all over the world.

Whooping cranes are magnificent: They stand over five feet tall, and are covered in satiny white feathers, highlighted with striking black wing tips and mustaches and a beautiful crimson cap. There probably never were more than a few thousand whooping cranes, and they hovered near extinction for over 50 years. The problem was that they flew huge distances right down the middle of the North American continent. Many were shot as they flew from the northern prairies to the coastal marshes of the Gulf of Mexico. People kept moving into their nesting grounds, draining the prairies to create farms. The last whooping crane in Minnesota was seen in 1889. After 1907, no more nests were found anywhere in the United States, although about 35 birds were left, with the whereabouts of their nests a big mystery. Finally, in 1954, the nesting place was found in Canada's Northwest Territories. The numbers of whooping cranes remained very low. But thirty years ago, the U.S. government started a special program to raise cranes in captivity. Whoopers usually lay two eggs, and raise one bird. By "robbing" one egg from each nest, researchers were able to build up a flock in captivity without affecting the wild population. By 1990, the total population was up to 210 birds. Now there are about 250 in three wild flocks and three captive flocks.

Question:Bald Eagles & DDT

Mary's Answer:

Dear Asita: Full grown adult bald eagles have one other enemy besides chemicals (like DDT) and a few humans -- they are sometimes electrocuted by power lines.

Eagles almost became extinct for several reasons:

1. Logging that removed nest trees, or disturbed nests so that parents fled.
2. Bounties were paid to Alaskans for killing eagles until 1952. Now that the eagle is protected there, its numbers exceed 30,000!
3. Pesticides (insect poisons) got into the bodies of fish that ate poisoned insects. Then eagles ate the fish with the insect poison. The poison then inside eagle bodies caused them to lay eggs with bad shells, so that chicks died before they hatched. The poison problem was so awful that by 1968, fewer than 3,000 birds were left in all of the United States. (There still were plenty in Canada).

How did the eagle make a big comeback? Bounties were cancelled. DDT, the most harmful pesticide, was banned. And then, the Fish and Wildlife Service of the U.S. began a program to introduce freshly hatched birds to empty habitats. The eagle chicks were temporarily fed and cared for by humans, who stayed hidden so that the birds would start to fly and find their own food, and not become dependant on humans. More than a thousand chicks were released into the wild this way. When they grew up, these birds set up nests of their own. By 1991, scientists counted more than 6,000 resident birds south of Canada.

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c/o Wildlife Trust
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