Let’s take a trip back in time to Norfolk, England, to witness a scene of bygone rusticity: An English farmer, dressed in a tweed coat, tie and vest, topped off with a jaunty pageboy cap, herds his flock through the streets. It’s a welcome break from the average day in 1931, and mothers follow behind pushing kids in prams; a little girl clutches her hands in excitement. The livestock gobbles and wobbles.
The farmer is driving a herd of turkeys through town.
When we think back on livestock migrations, we typically think of cattle, maybe sheep. The image of a rugged herdsman driving a clucking, head-bobbing, beady-eyed gaggle of birds across open plains and down dirt roads is harder to imagine, yet this practice used to be common all over the world. In the 17th century, before the introduction of trucks and refrigerated railway cars, a turkey drive was the only way to get poultry from farm to market. Such drives were no trivial matter, either: Birds by the thousands were sometimes driven hundreds of miles over several days; fox and other predators would thin the herd along the way. In some parts of the world, such drives lasted into the 1930s.
The turkey trip from farms in rural Norfolk county to the livestock market in London, over 100 miles away, was a regular one. In her book The Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk, author Naomi Riches writes that around “one hundred and fifty thousand turkeys were driven annually from Norfolk and Suffolk down the Ipswich Road to London.” Once they arrived, the turkeys were sold at market to stores and individual buyers.
In his 1724 travelogue A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe (most famous for authoring Robinson Crusoe) recorded that turkeys and geese were driven to London from August to October, when the roads grew “too stiff and deep or their broad feet and short leggs [sic] to march in.” (To protect their feet, some lucky turkeys wore leather booties. Less lucky ones had their feet dipped in tar.)
Even at this time, there were a few farmers trying to engineer their way out of onerous treks. Some birds were conveyed in special carts with “four stories or stages, to put the creatures in one above another, by which invention one cart will carry a great number,” according to Defoe. Despite this mobile poultry condominium, most turkeys—who walk more than they fly— in the world were still herded the old-fashioned way.
In the United States, it was not unusual to see a clucking herd of turkeys driven through the streets and backcountry, but this doesn’t mean the task was simple. In his book The Turkey: An American Story food historian Andrew F. Smith describes the frequent trips turkeys took between Lancaster and Philadelphia, occasionally trampling themselves to death on the 70-mile journey. Turkey drives could include “shooers” who herded the turkeys, children who scattered feed in the path to guide the birds, and covered wagons filled with grain to feed them.
In some cases the journeys were epic. One drive took birds from Ohio to Missouri, another from Iowa to Denver. The nature of turkeys also presented unique challenges: dusk prompted the birds to seek higher ground and roost, effectively ending the day's march.
"Wherever they are when the sun sets, that’s where they perch for the night," Peter Gilbert, chair of the Vermont Humanities Council told Vermont Public Radio. "And their collective weight shatters trees; occasionally birds end up perching on a farmer’s shed or barn and the building collapses. In fact, in one town, they roosted on top of the school building and the school collapsed.”
Sometimes the turkeys would mistake the shade cast by a covered bridge for nighttime and react accordingly, requiring their drivers to roust them from the structure.
Despite such calamities, turkeys were strangely suited to the trip. “The bird’s amiability, vigorous constitution, and long, strong legs made these drives possible,” writes Karen Davies in More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Wild turkeys, whose blood ran in the veins of domesticated varieties, were known to run at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour, and could climb mountainsides, cross streams, and fly over lakes and rivers up to a mile wide.
As more efficient transportation options and better roads arrived, turkey drives waned, although some persisted into the 1930s. Their rarity in the early 20th century made them a tourist draw in places like Cuero, Texas, where they were common until 1917. “Growers around Cuero drove their turkeys in flocks of five to ten thousand up to thirty miles, from their farms to turkey-processing plants in town,” writes Smith in The Turkey: An American Story.
Crowds descended on the town to witness the novelty. Around the same time, a dance craze called the “turkey trot” was sweeping the nation. The shrewd townsfolk of Cuero decided to capitalize on the trend, hosting a drive just for tourists. They called it the “Turkey Trot” and drew a crowd of 30,000. The event inspired imitators, and a version of the Turkey Trot, called Turkeyfest, still takes place today, sans turkey drive. Now it’s common for humans to do the running in “turkey trot” races around the country.
Hardly fodder for rustic reminiscing or high frontier fantasy, the legacy of turkey drives has been largely forgotten, although they get the occasional cultural nod. There was the 1991 play put on by the Trinity County, California, theater troupe Dell’Arte, “The Truly Remarkable Turkey Drive of 1912” (based on a true story). Parents who want to share the wonder of turkey drives with their kids can pick up a copy of Kathleen Karr’s The Great Turkey Walk, a fictional account of a drive from Missouri to Denver. But most folks will tuck into this season’s bird with little appreciation for how far these creatures once walked, just to end up on a platter.
St. Peter's Church in Sudbery, England—a small town northeast of London—was once a way station on a pilgrimage. Less than 20 miles north, about a day's walk, is Bury St. Edmund, where pilgrims would visit St. Edmund's shrine. On the way there, they might have stopped over at this church for a night's rest—and left something behind.
Recently, when graffiti experts examined the church, they found an overlooked bit of graffiti on one of the stone walls. Someone, most likely a pilgrim, had left a peacock behind, reports the East Anglian Daily Times.
It's faint enough that Roger Green, part of the Friends of St. Peters, told the paper, that, "I have passed it so many times since 1973 when I became involved with the church but I have never noticed it before."
In Christian symbolism, the peacock represents immortality, or eternal life. It's associated more with early Christianity than present day Christian art, but as far as graffiti in churches goes, it's actually pretty appropriate.
When the Al G. Barnes circus came to Clovis, New Mexico, in 1921, the Clovis News highlighted one performer whose reputation preceded her. “Woman has achieved many startling things in recent years. She has invaded legislative halls and courts and other hallowed precincts that have always been regarded as the sole property of masculinity,” the reporter wrote. “But Miss Mabel Stark… has done more than this. Not only has she achieved that which no other woman has ever done before her, but her feat has never been accomplished by man either.”
The feat? Taming a full-grown tiger.
“Mabel Stark used to be a trained nurse,” the New York Times reported in 1922. “That was a long time ago, and she had a nervous breakdown… So she took to training tigers. It is much simpler and easier, thinks Miss Stark.” In actuality, Mabel Stark’s life history was spotty, with vague allusions to a life before circuses and little concrete knowledge of her age. But once in the ring, her confidence and experience made it clear that she was not to be underestimated.
Ten years after training her first group of three tigers in 1912, Stark had increased her group to 16, orchestrating them all into an elaborate pyramid in which the last tiger jumped over her head. Some newspapers reported that she would appear in the ring with up to 20 tigers at a time.
Stark’s approach to training tigers was decidedly different from the aggressive, “masculine” method of antagonizing the animals and punishing them with brute force. Instead, Stark used verbal commands and a wooden pole in the ring to “tame” the beasts, further displaying her inventive approach to animal training and her uncanny ability to connect with her costars.
Stark may have been one of the more famous trainers of her day, but she wasn’t the only woman performing with wild animals under the Big Top. In The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top, Janet M. Davis points to this period as one dedicated to the idea of the “New Woman” in performance culture. In the first 30 years of the 20th century, the novelty of women circus performers was crucial for selling their talents to audiences.
Against the backdrop of first-wave suffragette movements and loosening sexual constrictions for white, middle-class women, circus women were seen as exotic, vibrant, and emblematic of a new direction for women inside and out of the tent.
Stark entered the circus world in the midst of these developments. In her autobiography, Hold That Tiger, she recounted that Al Sands, the manager of the Al G. Barnes circus, told Stark that her petite stature and blonde hair would be an excellent contrast with large jungle cats in the ring. This was a visual tactic employed for women like Annie Oakley and May Wirth, whose traditionally feminine appearance acted as a foil to their masculine activities. One of Stark’s most successful acts was wrestling with a single tiger, which also fed into the marketing gimmick of the small girl and the big cat as unlikely companions. In the wrestling act, a fully grown tiger would grab Stark by her head and they would rotate and fall to the ground together until one of them “won” the fight.
The media helped promote Stark’s “small girl, big cat” gimmick by covering the many accidents and injuries she sustained while working with her beloved animals. The reports often focused on Stark and other “circus girls” who were mauled or killed by the big cats they trained. “The smell of blood from the leopard cage set the lions wild and they attacked Miss Stark,” the Herald reported in 1917. “She escaped from the cage with slight injuries,” but her fellow circus girl Martha Florene was badly mauled.
Reporters also burnished the circus girls’ reputation for novelty by telling stories of their eccentric behavior outside the ring. In L.A. area newspapers, reporters regularly covered Stark’s antics, including her sojourn in downtown L.A. with her six-month-old pet tiger, Rajah, on a leash. “Tigers only love people who have stronger wills than theirs,” she was quoted as saying in a 1916 Los Angeles Herald article. It was this confluence of danger and excitement that made Stark and her peers so exciting to watch.
In 1925, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which had also hired Stark to perform, removed all jungle cats from its acts, leaving Stark to work with horses instead. “I find the horses more difficult to manage than the tigers,” she told the Times, in a piece that called her “the world’s most famous woman animal trainer.” After stints in Europe and a catastrophic injury in 1928 which left her walking with a cane for weeks, Stark returned to the U.S. and worked in film and television, including a job with Mae West on I’m No Angel, which the latter wrote and starred in as a circus performer.
In the 1940s, Stark moved on from circuses to more stationary gigs at Goebel’s Wild Animal Farm in Thousand Oaks, California (later called Jungleland). In 1952, the Times reported that she was a “star” at Thousand Oaks, on the way to her 40th year in the business. She worked with wild cats into her sixties, until she was fired from the Jungleland complex, where she worked until 1968. The Los Angeles Times reported her death on April 22, 1968, an event that some scholars attribute to an overdose.
Mabel Stark, along with many other women who made their living in circus work in the first half of the 20th century, were symbols of possibility for the New Woman, especially when it came to work and autonomy. Stark didn’t just train tigers to jump into a pyramid; she trained public to have different expectations about women’s abilities in entertainment. That’s another feat no man could ever do.
By the time she started pitching Thanksgiving to America, Sarah Josepha Hale knew her power. She was edging towards 60, and for a decade she had been the editress (her preferred term) of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the most widely read publications in the United States. Women followed her lead in matters of dress, food, and home—anything that required good taste—and she could convince men, too, to do what she wanted.
In 1847, what she wanted was to create a new national holiday—the American Thanksgiving Day. In her quest to accomplish this, she sent detailed petitions to five presidents and devoted numerous column inches to the idea in her magazine. More than any other individual, Hale was responsible for the creation of Thanksgiving as we know it, a country-wide day of rest and feasting at the end of November.
But the Thanksgiving Day Hale imagined would have been largely unrecognizable to Americans today: her Day of Thanksgiving was conceived as a Christian holiday, focused on prayer rather than food. And, by the end of her 15-year campaign, she thought it should be celebrated not just in the U.S. but across the world.
Hale didn’t invent American Thanksgiving from whole cloth. It had long been a tradition in New England to set aside a day in the late fall to give thanks—she called it a“good old puritan custom” in her first pro-Thanksgiving column. But in much of the country (at that point, 29 states, almost all west of the Mississippi) it was unknown. Here is Hale's first pitch for the holiday, written in 1847:
“OUR HOLIDAYS.—We have but two that we can call entirely national. The New Year is a holiday to all the world, and Christmas to all Christians—but the “Fourth of July” and “Thanksgiving Day” can only be enjoyed by Americans. The annual observance of Thanksgiving Day was, to be sure, mostly confined to the New England States, till within a few years. We are glad to see that this good old puritan custom is becoming popular through the Union...Would that the next Thanksgiving might be observed in all the states on the same day. Then, though the members of the same family might be too far separated to meet around one festival board, they would have the gratification of knowing that all were enjoying the blessing of the day...
The “Lady’s Book” then suggests that, from this year, 1847, henceforth and forever, as long as the Union endures, the last Thursday in November be the DAY set apart by every state for its annual Thanksgiving. Will not the whole press of the country advocate this suggestion?”
Hale's proposal had a decidedly nationalist tinge. In 1847, the United States was still fighting the Mexican-American War, and Mexico had yet to cede the territory that would become California and the American southwest. America and Britain had only settled their dispute over territory in the Pacific northwest the year before. But Hale was already imagining a holiday that would stretch “from the St. Johns to the Rio Grande, from the Atlantic to the Pacific border.” America was growing, and Hale was imagining a holiday that would help join these disparate lands under one national identity.
Year after year, Godey’s Lady’s Book published the same plea, sometimes recycling the same exact sentences. Within a few years, the campaign was seeing some success; by 1851, 29 out of now 31 states (Wisconsin and California had recently joined the U.S.) celebrated a day of Thanksgiving—although not necessarily all on the same day. This achievement did not satisfy Hale, though. She insisted that everyone should celebrate on the exact same day, the last Thursday in November, so that “the telegraph of human happiness would move every heart to gladness simultaneously.”
She’d thought it all through. She had picked the last Thursday in November as the ideal date because there weren’t many other distractions at that moment: farm labor was done for the season, the election cycle would be over, summer laborers would have returned home, and the “autumnal diseases” which haunted the South each year had passed.
As Thanksgiving celebrations gained in popularity, so did Hale's fervor. Short exhortations to celebrate the day turned into page-long editorials describing the great benefit of “a feast of gladness, rendering thanks to Almighty God for the blessings of the year" and a day that “would exemplify the joy of Christians."
In 1860, more than a decade after she first started promoting the idea, Hale declared victory. “We may now consider Thanksgiving a National Holiday,” she wrote. So many states had celebrated it so consistently on the same day, that Thanksgiving was no longer “a partial and vacillating commemoration of gratitude to our Heavenly Father, observed in one section or State” but a “great and sanctifying promoter of the national spirit.”
Despite her proclamation, Hale had still not achieved the ultimate endorsement: a proclamation from the President. Her ambitions for Thanksgiving had grown ever larger, though, and over the next couple of years she would advocate for a single day of Thanksgiving “throughout all Christendom.” She explicitly included Jewish people in that group and believed Thanksgiving would be popular in Europe, too.
In the 1860s, as the Civil War started, Hale focused on national unity, one of her strongest selling point. “Everything that contributes to bind us in one vast empire together, to quicken the sympathy that makes us feel from the icy North to the sunny South that we are on family, each member of a great and free Nation, not merely the unit of a remote locality, is worthy of being cherished,” she wrote.
It was only under these conditions that a president finally endorsed her idea. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelt in the heavens.” Among the things Americans should “fervently implore” from the Almighty? To “heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it…to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union."
On an overcast November day, Juan Chipon strolled into the chapel at the Cementerio General in La Paz, Bolivia, carrying the skull of his father. While this might sound like the beginning of a horror film, Juan was happy and smiling, and the skull was covered in floral wreaths in celebration. Behind Juan came others, also carrying elaborately decorated skulls.
A local woman named Mariela sauntered in carrying her uncle’s skull, a biker hat perched on his forehead and a glistening diamond embedded in one of his front teeth—“yes, it’s a real diamond!” she said, offended by the thought that it might be a fake. Behind her came Xahina, struggling with a large tray of four crania. And following them came thousands more, all part of what is the world’s most flamboyant exaltation of the link between the living and the dead, an annual ritual like no other in the world.
The skulls are known locally as ñatitas (roughly meaning “the little pug-nosed ones”), and this overcast morning was the beginning of their day. A massive public festival held every November 8, the Fiesta de las Ñatitas, gives thanks to the dead, as personified by their very skulls, for a year’s worth of friendship and service.
Here on the high plateau of the Andes death has never been a fatalistic concept; those who pass on have simply transcended to another phase of life, and can still function within the family or social group. Keeping a ñatita in one’s home is considered by many people to provide a great benefit, since the dead are thought to have the ability to offer services to those still living. The skull can provide security for the home, ensure domestic tranquility, aid students in their schoolwork, and provide sage advice.
A ñatita can be the skull of a relative, like Juan Chipon’s father, but they are just as frequently those of strangers, obtained from medical schools or old cemeteries, who reveal an identity to their new owner in a dream. Normally they are kept in household shrines, but for the Fiesta they return to the cemetery as a jubilant mass.
At the Cementario General, where the biggest festivity takes place, the event is a veritable postmortem fashion show. Many skulls wear glasses or hats, while others are styled in emulation of those who keep them. Some will be enshrined like relics or carried in like little princes—for the more than 10,000 people in attendance, the effort put into the presentation of one’s ñatita provides a visible sign of love and esteem.
By mid day, with the celebration in full swing, the cemetery grounds are literally awash in skulls. Devotees wander among them, providing tributes. Cigarettes placed between their jaws and coca leaves are common, but the most prominent are flower petals and crowns, as a reminder of the beautiful things of the natural world. Adding a touch of cacophony, strolling musicians offer deafeningly loud Bolivian dance music to edify the skulls.
The roots of the festival date to the Pre-Columbian world, and surviving records indicate celebrations conforming to the modern festival have been going on in Bolivia since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Beyond that, the history is murky, but that doesn’t trouble anyone assembled at the cemetery, because despite the presence of so many skulls, the focus is not on the past and definitely not on death.
“It’s about life, about the future, about gratitude and a bond,” explains Xahina, with her four skulls now set up in a makeshift altar in the cemetery grounds. “In your country, maybe the dead really do die,” she continues, “but here death isn’t so final. It’s not a contradiction because the dead are only as dead as you allow them to be. For those of us here, the dead are still very much a vital part of our lives.”
Like many a viking king, Olaf II of Norway, also known as Olaf Haraldsson, is thought to have died in battle. The year was 1030, and Olaf was leading an army to defend Christianity in the Battle of Stiklestad, the story goes, before being felled.
Or was he? No contemporary accounts of the battle exist, and the whole battle was later thought to have been simply made up; it's hard to make a saint without a little martyrdom.
Still, regardless of how he died, historians are pretty sure of one thing: where the king is buried. Today Olaf's remains are enshrined in Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, but, immediately after his death, they were first laid in the ground of that city.
That finding confirmed for many Olaf's spiritual prowess, and his body was subsequently moved nearby to St. Clement's Church, then on to other churches as the crowds grew, before finally settling in at Nidaros Cathedral, the northernmost still-standing medieval cathedral in the world.
Until recently, no one knew where that first wooden stave church—St. Clement's Church—was located, but on November 11, NIKU said that it had found it. Archaeologists even think they've discovered the altar where Olaf might have been buried inside the church, also located in Trondheim.
"This is a unique site in Norwegian history in terms of religion, culture and politics," said Anne Petersén, the excavation's director. "Much of the Norwegian national identity has been established on the cult of sainthood surrounding St. Olaf, and it was here it all began!"
Olaf wasn't canonized until 1164, or over 130 years after his death. Still, he's taken on perhaps more responsibility in death than in life. In addition to being the patron saint of Norway, Olaf is also the patron saint of carvers, kings, land, and... difficult marriage. That should keep anyone busy.
During World War II, food rationing was one way that American civilians remained engaged in the war effort. By conserving their food at home they left more for servicemen, who, being well-fed, could go on to defeat the Axis and win the war. Or so the thinking went.
This propaganda film, produced for a beet cannery, instructs laborers on how to work faster by trimming beets the easy way. By doing this they would help win the war, the placards assert, before a shot of a gallantly waving American flag.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
As part of their excellent ongoing coverage of the #NoDAPL protests, the folks at Unicorn Riot received a copy of the FEMA crowd control manual being passed around to local cops. In the section of “crowd dynamics,” the manual identifies the seven “types” of protesters recognized by the FBI.
Or maybe, just maybe, you’re the eighth type, conspicuously absent from this list: the person with a legitimate grievance against authority demonstrating peacefully as per their constitutional right.
Rodeo legend Bill Pickett had a saying. "What's gonna happen, gonna happen," he'd mutter to himself before going face-to-face with a charging bull. Then, with thousands of people watching, he'd do something the crowd never expected to see.
In Pickett's signature move, he would launch himself from the back of his galloping horse, wrap his arms around a steer's neck, grab the animal's lip between his teeth, and then use the full weight of his small 5'7" frame to pull it to the ground. He called this wrangling technique "bull-dogging."
Pickett's unprecedented methodology and extraordinary personal history make him the perfect subject for the second episode of Horizon Line, which explores the lives of the adventurous – people who pushed the limits of the possible.
Born in 1870 to Thomas Jefferson Pickett, who had been a black slave, and Mary Gilbert, who was of black and Cherokee descent, Pickett was familiar with the harsh realities of the American frontier. However, his extreme tenacity, incredible talents, and gift for showmanship swiftly made him a rising star on the Wild West rodeo circuit and a defining figure in American cowboy lore.
Listen to the tale of Pickett's exploits here, and be sure to subscribe to Horizon Line in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts from. We would also love your feedback, so be sure to leave a comment and a rating!
When I first moved to New York City, I lived on 13th Street between Avenues A and B, a pleasant East Village block that had plenty of trees, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, and a latex boutique for rubber fetishists. Walking down the street, you’d never suspect that in 1995 police had used an armored vehicle and riot gear to overcome a barricade made by squatters and activists protesting evictions.
But New York’s history is riddled with popular uprisings and violent clashes. The map above, designed by Molly Roy and originally published in Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s new book, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, shows how walking through the city—especially lower Manhattan—means passing over past sites of political violence, where people took to the streets with their demands.
“However you classify riots, New York City has been good at them, or at least good at having them,” the critic Luc Sante writes in the essay accompanying the map.
As Sante writes, most of New York’s riots were about race, starting with the Negro Riot of 1712. In the 19th century, these riots were sometimes sparked by opponents of slavery—the Eagle Street Riot of 1801 began with an attempt to free slaves—and sometimes by supporters, as when anti-abolitionists attacked the Bowery Theater in 1834. These uprisings aren’t confined to the past, though: the most recent mark on the map is the Kimani Gray riots in 2013.
The Rocking Chairs Riot started during a heat wave, after the city sold an entrepreneur a permit to stock parks with rocking chairs and charge for their use, a ploy meant to discourage "less desirable" people from lingering in the parks.
The Straw Hat Riot of 1922 was mostly about straw hats, though. As all fashionable people knew, straw hats could be worn only until September 15. After that, young men would take great pleasure in knocking stray straw hats of any offending head. But in 1922, the whole tradition got out of control when “mobs of hundreds of boys and young men terrorized whole blocks,” the New York Times reported. They weren’t just snatching straw hats, but grinding them to bits.
One of the strange qualities of riots, though, is that they’re often geographically contained. Some of the riots noted on the map moved, and the dots denote their starting point. But New York is big. Most of these riots would have passed through without affecting most people’s lives. And inevitably, after each incident, the city returned to equilibrium.
The streets that were once full of tattered straw hats or barricaded with furniture became calm once again, and the riots a secret of the past. The city's busy streets rarely reveal the violence they’ve seen.
Towards the end of the 1600s, when the map was made, it would have been a prized possession. Seven feet by five feet, backed by canvas, it showed the whole world, with views of magnificent cities running along its sides. It would have been expensive and a symbol of power: whoever bought it was rich enough to own the world.
But time changes the value of once-prized possessions, and at some point someone rolled the map up and unceremoniously shoved it up a chimney—most likely to stop a cold draft.
Recently, the map showed up at the National Library of Scotland. It was in terrible condition. During its years in the chimney, it had been attacked by mice and bugs, and the paper had grown brittle and fragmented. The man who brought it to the museum, having found it during the renovation of a home in Aberdeen, showed up with a plastic bag of what looked like “a bundle of rags,” the museum says.
But with painstaking work, the museum’s conservators were able to unfold and restore the map. Saving it was no small task, though. “I’d never seen anything in such poor condition,” one conservator says in the video below. “Never have I worked on anything quite so bad as this,” says another.
The map went through many stages of cleaning—it was brushed, humidified, flattened, dry cleaned, and left to soak in hot water—and remounted on better backing. While parts of the map were lost, the conservators’ work revealed the beautiful details of this centuries-old map—the faces, cities, towns and ships that made up the world, as seen from Europe, more than 300 years ago.
Tanzania is a beautiful but complicated country. Beneath its parks and lakes lurk tens of thousands of active landmines. And like much of Africa, Tanzania is also struggling with a tuberculosis crisis; there were 60,000 new cases of TB last year.
Each of these problems alone is difficult. But what if there were a solution to both—something that could detect not only unexploded landmines but also new tuberculosis cases, and help stop both before they cause further damage?
Well, this magic device exists. And it’s a rat.
The amazing HeroRATs, a corps of specially trained mine- and TB-sniffing rats, were created by a Dutch NGO called the Anti-Personnel Landmines Removal Product, or APOPO. It was founded in 2000 by Bart Weetjens, a Belgian engineer, who was searching for a more affordable way to help Africans clear landmines. He knew that rats—specifically, African giant pouched rats—are intelligent, social creatures with a keen sense of smell, and reasoned that they could be trained to detect buried landmines, small arms, and leftover unexploded ordnance.
The first HeroRats went to work in Tanzania in 2003. By 2004, APOPO had a brigade of HeroRATs dedicated to diagnosing TB. Today, there are 111 HeroRATs deployed in Tanzania, with a further 23 in Angola and 16 in Mozambique.
Common in sub-Saharan Africa, African giant pouched rats are one of the world’s largest rodents: they measure almost three feet in length and weigh about four pounds. They live up to eight years and are resistant to tropical diseases. And as Weetjens intuited, they’re smart and trainable enough to be an amazing resource. Rats face plenty of human prejudice—they’re seen as disease-carrying vermin in the West and crop-destroying varmints in Africa—but APOPO’s trained rats are truly heroic.
Thanks to HeroRAT teams, 270 square miles of Mozambique farmland are once again available to farmers dislocated since the 1980s. HeroRATS exposed 13,826 mines, 29,031 small arms and ammunitions, and 39,601 leftover unexploded munitions. Removing landmines not only saves lives but also and restores land for farming, development, and safe travel, including delivery of emergency aid.
The rats are many times more efficient at this job than humans. In 30 minutes a rat can do what it takes a human a day to do—if a human could do it at all. Metal detectors not only fail to discern between metal rubbish and active ordinance, but also have difficulty finding landmines now made predominantly out of plastic.
HeroRATs are also a better demining solution than dogs, who have long been the go-to animal for mine detection. Rats have a working life span equivalent to that of dogs, and work similar hours—from about 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., before it gets too hot—and in almost every other way the rats are superior.
For one, it costs much less to train, feed and house a rat, as well as send it into foreign countries. It costs about $40,000 to train a dog to locate landmines, but only about $4,000 to train a HeroRAT. Dogs bond with their trainers, who have to accompany them on their missions. Rats do not, so trainers do not have to accompany HeroRATS into the field.
Both human and dogs are at risk of being killed while working, but HeroRATs are not because they don’t weigh enough to trip the mines—no HeroRATs have been killed sniffing for mines so far, whereas human demining workers are killed at a rate of about one for every 5,000 mines removed. In addition to Tanzania, HeroRATs have removed mines in Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos.
And these heroic rats don’t stop there. They’re also more efficient than humans in examining samples of human sputum (coughed-up phlegm) for evidence of TB. A human technician can examine 100 sputum samples in a day; a HeroRAT can examine 100 sputum samples in 20 minutes. Tuberculosis is a serious problem in African countries—about 1,500 Africans die of TB every day—and in Mozambique, Tanzania’s neighbor, it’s officially a national emergency.
The TB-detecting HeroRATs have increased TB detection rates in Tanzania and Mozambique by 45 percent—which means dramatically fewer new cases of TB, as one untreated TB patient can infect a dozen people in a year, says Weetjens. APOPO has 50 trained TB-detecting HeroRats and a dedicated TB detection facility in Mozambique, where patients can get test results in 24 hours.
Training a HeroRat takes nine months. At four weeks, baby rats are taken from their mothers to socialize with human beings and to begin their training, associating the scent of TNT or TB with a food reward. When they hover over the appropriate scent, their trainer presses a clicker and gives the baby rat a treat of ground banana and food pellets. HeroRATS love banana.
After the rats learn to associate the scent of TNT with an edible reward, the next step in training shifts to targets buried in a big dirt-filled box, which also includes non-target items like empty cans. The HeroRATs learn to scratch over the scent of TNT under the dirt. For TB-diagnosing HeroRATs, the next step is a long box with a perforated metal floor and glass wall. Under each of the 10 perforations, there is a TB sputum sample. The HeroRats learn to pause for five seconds over a positive TB samples for a food reward.
Training for landmine removal requires a complicated series of steps. Demining HeroRATS advance from a big box of dirt to a practice outdoor field with deactivated landmines and decoys partially uncovered. After they successfully identify these, they move to another training field with slightly buried targets and decoys. Then on to another field with targets and decoys buried even deeper in the ground and another field where they are buried yet deeper again. After all this training, the demining HeroRATS must meet the extremely difficult International Mine Action Standards—8,600 square meters in 2 days with 100 percent accuracy and only two false positives.
HeroRATS are true heroes for saving land and lives, but they’re not resting on their laurels. Because of their acute sense of smell, Weetjens foresees their use in customs to sniff out contraband. The U.S. is currently using HeroRATS to combat illegal wildlife trafficking. In medicine, they could be used to detect common cancers and degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In disasters, HeroRATs could be used to find victims buried under rubble.
And one of those life-saving rats could be yours. At APOPO’s site, you can adopt a HeroRAT, name it, and follow your rat’s progress—or just send these hard-working heroes a banana.
When the documentary Blackfishwas released in 2013, it showed the shocking reality of what life is like for captive performing orcas. The animals, which can grow to over 20 feet long, lived in concrete enclosures that only allow for around 35 feet of dive depth. The unnatural stress of this confined life, which can lead to the animals acting out and have deadly consequences to the trainers, prompted many viewers to call on aquatic performance venues to change their treatment of the animals or eliminate their orca programs entirely.
But while aquatic entertainment giant SeaWorld has since halted its orca breeding program and vows to phase out its killer whale shows altogether, one question remains: where will all the current star orcas go to retire?
One non-profit organization thinks it has the answer. The Whale Sanctuary Project is a conservation effort aimed at establishing the world’s first sanctuary for orcas, beluga whales, and other large cetaceans. Provided they can find the right spot, they intend to create a safe, comfortable space where former performing whales can live out their twilight years with the proper care and room to roam. Were the issue not so intrinsically tragic, you could almost think of the sanctuary like an old folks home for vaudeville whales.
The Whale Sanctuary Project began in earnest in early 2016 as a result of conversations between a group of marine mammal scientists who’d had enough of the uncertain future faced by display whales. “Even if we wanted to phase out keeping orcas and some of these other cetaceans in concrete tanks, there’s nowhere for them to go, because they can’t simply be dumped in the ocean,” says Lori Marino, Executive Director and co-founder of the Project, who also appeared in Blackfish. “They don’t have the skills to survive. We got tired of complaining about this, so we decided, let’s just do it.”
As Marino explains, orcas, beluga whales, and bottlenose dolphins who have either been bred in captivity, or captured from the wild and trained to be performing animals face a number of challenges when released into the wild. You can’t just free Willy.
Since whales are such highly intelligent and social animals, many of their skills are learned from other members of their species, rather than through interaction with their environment. Everything from hunting for food to avoiding danger, and basic parenting are among the essential skills many orcas learn during their lengthy juvenile period. During a life in captivity, the animals risk having their skills atrophy or never even learning them in the first place. “I think that there’s a fallacy that animals are so instinctual that once you put them in their habitat, they’ll know exactly what to do,” says Marino.
Unfortunately, keeping orcas in concrete tanks until the end of their lives—which are shorter in captivity—isn’t an acceptable option either. For most aquatic performing animals, once they start a life in a captive environment, whether because they were born there or adopted from the wild, they are destined to die in that system. Sometimes, if a performing animal gets old or becomes less responsive, they will be sold off to a different attraction or facility, but they will never experience anything resembling a natural existence again.
In addition, since orcas in particular are such naturally social animals, a life in captivity has never agreed with them. “What the science shows is this: orcas and belugas do exceptionally poorly in the display industry. They just cannot make it,” says Marino. “The mortality rate is through the roof, they die at very young ages as well. By no means do any cetaceans thrive in these kinds of places. I always talk about it as a square peg in a round hole.”
There have been cases of orcas being reintroduced to the wild, most famously in the case of Keiko, the whale from Free Willy. But such reintroduction is not only astronomically costly—only select individuals who show the right skills would even be eligible. “99.9 percent of them die in concrete tanks,” says Marino.
To provide a more humane option for retiring whales, Marino and the Whale Sanctuary Project are working towards creating the world’s first whale preserve. While there are areas in our oceans that act as sanctuaries, such as the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, where all forms of whaling are outlawed, the Sanctuary Project aims to create a space where specific animals care receive individual attention and care as needed. All it takes is the right open waters and some nets. “Dolphins and whales have some kind of a thing where they don’t like to cross over nets,” says Marino. “They don’t jump over nets readily. You’d think you need some huge wall or something, but no.”
The Project would like to find an area of coastal ocean where they could run lengths of nets to portion off their sanctuary from the rest of the sea. Marino says that they would need at least around 65 acres of space that reaches a depth of at least 15 meters (49 feet), to portion off a space large enough to accommodate around five to eight animals at a time. An ideal space might be a bay or large cove where they could net off the mouth, or even a space between an island and the mainland where the nets could be anchored on either end.
But raw space is hardly the only environmental concern. “We have a whole list of criteria. Some of the items on it are pretty boring,” says Marino. “Things like the right salinity, and the right temperature range, water flow through, and stuff like that.” The sanctuary space also needs to be clear of boat traffic and commercial fishing spaces. They are currently scouting locations in Nova Scotia, Maine, British Columbia, and Washington state, hoping to have a shortlist by mid-2017.
While there is still a way to go before the planned sanctuary can start inviting its first residents in, Marino hopes that it can become a model for a permanent facility that other sanctuaries across the globe can take inspiration from. “What we really hope is that this becomes proof of concept. That it becomes a model that is copied and replicated elsewhere,” says Marino. “Because there are many many dolphins and whales who need this.” Should the supply of former performing animals ever dry up, the sanctuary could then focus on assisting injured and other at-risk cetaceans.
Marino admits that in a way, even a large sanctuary like they are planning, is not the ideal solution. “We’re giving them back as much as we can of what they need to thrive,” she says. “It’s not ideal. They should be out there in the wild living their lives. But we’re going to try and get as close as possible, and that’s about the best we can do at this point.”
SeaWorld and other performance aquariums around the world have yet to formally agree to use the sanctuary once it is open, Marino thinks that they can see the tide changing, and as their orca programs ramp down, the sanctuary will become a much more attractive prospect.In the meantime, the Sanctuary Project continues to move forward towards Marino’s final goal: going out of business. “If you’ve ever talked to anyone who’s built a sanctuary, what they hope for is to go out of business eventually. We hope for a day when we don’t need to put animals in sanctuaries because they’d just be living their lives out in their natural habitat.”
Corrections 11/29/2016: The article previously stated that Marino appeared in Blackfish on behalf of the Nonhuman Rights Project, which was incorrect. While she has worked with the organization, she appeared there as an independent scholar. / In the third paragraph, the Whale Sanctuary Project was previously referred to as a "research group," this has been amended to "non-profit organization." / A reference to the sanctuary's open space as a cage was amended to better reflect the intent of one of Marino's quotes.
On April 26th, 1986, flaws and rushed tests at Chernobyl Plant No. 4 led to the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. Now, thirty years later, the plant will finally be contained, covered by a massive concrete and steel dome designed to effectively quarantine the building for 100 years.
Just after the disaster, the Soviet Union had a slapdash cover built over the reactor, to limit further fallout damage. (The workers who put that together did so at great personal risk, and many of them died.) But over the decades, that structure has cracked and warped, leading to further leakage. This new structure, which is known as the New Safe Confinement, is the size of ten football fields, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and cost $1.6 billion, reports the BBC. According to its main sponsor, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, it’s strong enough to withstand a tornado, and has a corrosion-resistant ventilation system.
The NCS has been under construction since 2012. Working anywhere close to the plant is dangerous, so it was built about 1000 feet away. Over the past few weeks, it has been slowly edged over to its final resting place—according to Newser, it’s the largest man-made structure to ever be moved across land. The final positioning is set to happen tomorrow.
Beginning in early 2017, robotic cranes will begin dismantling the old, leaky cover, and faraway crews will suck up radioactive dust using remote-controlled vacuums. And those people who have refused to leave the Chernobyl exclusion zone will have an enormous new landmark to look at.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Each year, the Swedish city of Gävle celebrates the Christmas season by building a giant straw goat that pretty much begs to be lit on fire. We here at Atlas Obscura often enjoy placing friendly bets on when or if the goat will burn each year, but this year we won’t even get the chance, because the Gävle Goat has already burned, less than 24 hours after it was erected.
Since 1966, a giant goat has been built in Slottstorget square, an oversize version of the traditional Swedish yule goat, and in more years than not, it has been destroyed by vandals. The very first Gävle Goat was destroyed on New Year’s Eve in 1966, and ever since, burning the goat has taken on a mischievous sense of tradition. Usually the flammable goat is burned down, often by drunken arsonists, although even when the goat is set ablaze, the damage is usually contained to the goat itself, rarely getting out of hand.
The goat is traditionally constructed in late November or early December, and from that point on, it’s just a waiting game to see when vandals will strike. Various protections have been put in place and tried out over the years including adding a perimeter fence, covering the goat in coating of flame retardant, employing security cameras, and having the goat personally guarded by volunteers. But no matter how the city tries to preserve the goat, it usually manages to get set on fire.
In recent years, the goat survived through the entire season in 2014, then in 2015 the goat lasted until just after Christmas before it was burned down. This year, on the 50th anniversary of the Gävle Goat’s existence, it didn’t make it a day. This year’s goat was unveiled on Sunday, November 26th, and by Monday the 27th, it had burnt down. According to the Local, the perpetrators of the crime managed to evade detection from any of the cameras set up around the goat, getting up close to it while one of the guards was in the bathroom. The suspect(s) are still at large.
The Gävle Goat cost the city $249,900 to build, but went up in smoke in just minutes, as is the Gävle Goat’s way. There are no official plans to rebuild the goat this year, so we’ll all just have to wait until next year, and hope that our favorite Christmas goat lasts a little longer.
A mother and son, both bedecked in flowing space-age capes, frolic along the beach. "What year is it now? I forgot," says the little boy. "Here, I'll show you," his mother responds. She writes "1999 AD" in the sand.
This short film, produced in 1967 by the Philco-Ford Corporation, a maker of battery-powered tech, imagines the distant future of the year 1999. Amid all the mid-century-modern set dressing, they actually got a lot of things right. In this "society of tomorrow," we can see precursors to personal computers, email, FaceTime, podcasts (complete with the 2x speed feature), online shopping, 3D imaging and more.
But, clearly, this isn't what 1999 was like. The computer technology is all very analog, not to mention the fact that the social aspects are woefully unprogressive. For example, Karen the "wife, mother, and part-time homemaker" spends her days shopping on her computer, after which the bill is sent to her husband's office computer.
It just goes to show how inept we are at imagining the future. We'll just have to wait and see what 2049 will be like.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A hoarse, yelping bark rang out from the wooded hillside. Then again. The unearthly calls, sounding somewhere between fox and cat, continued in a steady sequence, carrying through the forest’s mossy tree trunks and damp leaf litter, growing louder as they approached. Then, abruptly, the woods fell silent.
“I knew he must be close when the call stopped,” explains French wildlife photographer Laurent Geslin, recounting the moment in January 2011 when he first laid eyes on a wild Eurasian lynx. “I knew that he must have seen me.” Geslin, who has spent the past six years pursuing this elusive beast through Switzerland’s Jura Mountains, was confident that the cat, though shy, would be curious. All he had to do was keep quiet and watch.
“I checked every tree and every branch,” Geslin recalls. “And then I checked again.” He explains how a lynx's lightly marked grey-brown coat blends so perfectly into the dappled backdrop of rock, leaf and shadow that it can disappear in plain view. This time, however, his diligence paid off. One final binocular sweep in the fading light at last revealed those telltale cat contours, materializing from the abstract backdrop like an optical illusion. “He was about 25 meters away, sitting on his backside, looking very calmly at me.” Geslin’s voice still betrays the excitement. “It was a great sensation.”
Since then, Geslin has notched up about 30 precious sightings, ranging from distant glimpses to, on one memorable occasion, a mother leading her three cubs to feed within meters of his hide. This total might seem a modest return for six years of searching—six years of pursuing every clue, staking out every hideaway, and sitting in hides for 96 hours at a stretch. But few people anywhere have enjoyed such success.
Having spent years photographing big cats around the world, Geslin was amazed to find how little was known about the one living on his own doorstep. His book, Lynx: regards croisés (“different perspectives”), published in France in 2014, is the first full photographic study of this species in the wild, and testament to his extraordinary dedication and perseverance.
Just a few decades ago, such a project would have been impossible. The lynx had not been seen in Switzerland since 1904. Once common across much of Europe, it had also disappeared from France, Germany, and many other former strongholds. By 1940, the continent’s entire population had fallen to an estimated 700 animals, confined largely to the wildest reaches of Scandinavia. This sorry tale mirrored that of the lynx’s fellow large carnivores, the wolf, wolverine, and brown bear. All had declined dramatically in Europe, victims both of ruthless persecution— either for sport or because, as hunters of wild game and occasional livestock killers, they were viewed as competition—and the relentless destruction of their natural habitats.
In the 1970s, however, scientists began a pioneering project to reintroduce the lynx to Switzerland, focusing their efforts on the Alps and, a little farther north, the Jura Mountains. Some 30 animals from the Carpathians were, over time, introduced to the Jura, founding a population that has since grown to 130 and spread unassisted into neighboring France. It is these animals that Geslin has been studying, working closely with Swiss-based carnivore conservation group KORA.
The lynx reintroduction project forms part of a larger “rewilding” initiative, of which KORA is a leading proponent. By returning Europe’s native large mammals to the landscapes they once roamed, scientists hope to recreate something of the natural environment that carpeted Europe before humankind began felling forests. Predators, according to the basic laws of ecology, are essential to the healthy functioning of any natural habitat. Remove them and prey species soon proliferate, leaving the environment in much worse condition for everything else that depends on it. “In the nineteenth century the Jura forests were strongly over-exploited and all large mammals, including wild ungulates, became virtually extinct,” explains Urs Breitenmoser, KORA co-founder. Then in the 20th century, without predators around, wild ungulate populations—including red and roe deer and wild boar—rebounded. So much so that their numbers are unsustainable and regularly cause significant ecological damage. Many other regions around Europe are suffering similar effects from burgeoning deer population.
The classic example of how bringing back predators can turn things around is Yellowstone National Park—where, in the 1990s, wolves were reintroduced after 70 years of absence. Elk numbers have since fallen to sustainable levels, allowing overgrazed vegetation to recover, beavers to return, wetlands to develop and ground-nesting birds to thrive. Not all the complexities of this “trophic cascade” are fully understood, but ecologists generally agree that wolves have transformed Yellowstone’s ecology, restoring the park’s ecosystems in a way they had not dreamed possible.
But central Europe is not Yellowstone. How, one might reasonably ask, can we bring back large predatory mammals that long ago proved incompatible with people to a region that has only become more populous since the animals disappeared? If there was no room for these predators before, surely there is even less of it now.
The answer lies in the nature of the animal itself. The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is a formidable predator. Though not technically a big cat—it doesn’t sit alongside lions and tigers in the genus Panthera—males can nonetheless top 30 kg (65 lbs), almost twice the weight of the superficially similar Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis). This gives it considerable predatory punch, allowing it to subsist not—like other lynxes—on rabbits and hares, but on hoofed mammals such as roe deer. What’s more, this is an animal of almost preternatural stealth. Wherever it occurs, it nearly always remains well out of sight.
Reintroducing the lynx, therefore, is a very different proposition from bringing back wolves and bears—schemes that have met stiff opposition across Europe. Though large enough to have a significant influence on ecology, the cat will slip silently into the woods the moment it is released, never to be seen again, except by the most dedicated. It is thus what scientists call a “soft” predator, representing no perceived threat to the public and so prompting none of the fuss generated by the likes of wolves. “For most people,” explains Geslin. “This cat is like a ghost.”
But while the animal slips under the radar of most of its human neighbors, the foresters are beginning to notice a difference, with roe deer populations thinning out and forests showing signs of regeneration. It is not simply that lynx keep deer numbers down. After all, there are only so many deer a handful of lynxes can catch and eat. It is also that the herbivores’ behavior changes when a predator is around. They gather in smaller numbers and, ever alert to possible attack, become more mobile, less inclined to linger in feeding areas. Just the scent of a lynx’s territorial markings on a trailside tree trunk can be enough to keep them on the move. Park rangers, Geslin reports, wish more of the cats could be introduced. “They tell me that since we’ve had lynx they never have any problems.”
For the cat, however, problems remain. Livestock farmers are rather less welcoming than conservationists. It is true: lynxes can, and occasionally do, take sheep. However, studies have shown that the cats much prefer wild prey. As forest ambush predators, they are not adapted to hunting in the open. Only in Norway, where sheep roam forested areas unmanaged, have significant losses been recorded. Elsewhere, including in Switzerland, predation has had negligible impact. Further studies have shown that appropriate management measures—for example, grazing sheep away from forest edges—make a big difference. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is among the conservation organizations promoting new livestock management strategies in the Alps, including the use of specially trained guard dogs and protective fences, that help reduce conflicts between lynx and livestock herders.
Hunters, unfortunately, are harder to convince. They see the cats as competition, arguing that roe deer and chamois—a goat-like antelope native to mountainous areas of Europe—have become much harder to hunt now that lynxes keep them more wary. Breitenmoser points out that Swiss law protects not only lynx but also the right of hunters to harvest wildlife. “Unfortunately such situations regularly lead to conflicts,” he explains, “including illegal killings.” The female with cubs that Geslin observed and photographed fell victim to a hunter’s rifle just one month later. Another reintroduction program in the Vosges, just south of the Jura, has failed, with the last individuals killed by hunters. “No lynx population in Europe will survive,” warns Breitenmoser, “if hunters actively oppose it.”
Scientists also worry about the dangers of inbreeding. The reintroduced lynxes have not dispersed as far as was hoped. Penned in by roads and development, they have tended to stick to the areas into which they were first introduced. Given the very small number of lynxes from which today’s population is descended, this has raised the threat of inbreeding and a prospect of genetic problems for future populations. While things are better in the Jura than in some other reintroduced lynx populations, the problem will need to be addressed in the long term by increasing connectivity between isolated populations: “Links for the Lynx,” as WWF calls it.
Nonetheless, KORA deems the program a success. From those first 1970s releases, there are some 130 lynx in the Jura today. The effort has now been extended to other areas of the country and lynxes have expanded their range, naturally, into France. Recently, KORA has also relocated individual lynxes into both Austria and Italy, and a further relocation into Germany is in the pipeline. “Lynx have demonstrated that they can live well in a human-dominated environment, such as the Jura,” confirms Breitenmoser. “So the argument that they can no longer survive in our modern world has mostly disappeared.”
Meanwhile, lynx numbers elsewhere in Europe continue to rise. The overall population is now estimated at around 9,000, with the largest concentrations in Finland and the Carpathians. This population is made up of 11 key groups, spread across 23 countries. Only five of the groups are native—indicating the success of reintroduction efforts. The Lynx UK Trust now hopes to reintroduce the cat to Britain, where it was last seen in AD700, and where the environment is in serious need of a predator to control its rampant deer populations. Surveys indicate 91% public support for the idea, with trials proposed for 2017.
The lynx’s future depends upon cross-border cooperation. No single country in central Europe can support a viable population alone. A critical factor to date has been the EU Biodiversity Directive, which compels all member states to protect and restore populations of rare species. Only with this cooperation, Breitenmoser believes, can the scattered populations become better connected, allowing a flow of lynxes over a broad enough area, and reduce inbreeding. “We need the distribution to be broader,” he explains, “but the local abundance to be more limited.”
Meanwhile, the lynx’s enemies must still be won over. This will take education, overturning traditional antagonism towards predators, and convincing the public at large of how the cats benefit the environment for everybody, including hunters. It’s a long process and not something KORA and other conservation bodies can accomplish without political support.
Out in the forest, Geslin’s mission continues. Tramping the trails daily in search of tracks and kills, checking his camera traps and setting up his hides, he is learning ever more about this most private of cats. When KORA researchers take to the field—to monitor the lynxes, study their movements through radio telemetry or even capture one for a GPS collar or translocation elsewhere—he is always close by with his camera to record the action.
These are the memorable days—examining a sedated cat or photographing a relocated individual bounding away into its new home. Most of the time, however, things are not so easy. “Days become weeks and weeks become months,” Geslin says. “But then I hear a strange call or notice a slight movement and all the waiting vanishes.” The rewards make the long, lonely vigil worthwhile. “After all,” he confirms, “you just cannot beat a lynx.”
In Marshalltown, Iowa, a small city northeast of Des Moines, carpenters remodeling a church’s youth room recently found a surprise: an elaborate system of pulleys hidden in the walls.
Many years ago, it turned out, the church had two giant doors that could be raised or lowered to expand that sanctuary below. The church’s historian, Myriam Bryant, told local news channel WHO TV: “When I was going here the doors did go up and down in the sanctuary became double almost in size…We used them for extra people who came for our holidays and sometimes they’re was a very large funeral with many prominent people.”
At some point, though, new walls were built around the doors, and the whole system was forgotten. When the construction crew pulled out the walls in the attic youth room, they did not expect to find giant wheels, steel beams, and ropes connecting them.
From the youth room, it’s not possible to see the doors, but they’re still there—hidden in the walls of the church, on the floor below.
Last Tuesday, around 9 a.m., an apartment-dweller in Pretoria, South Africa went into the bathroom and found a surprise. An enormous cobra, several feet long and the width of a human forearm, was poking his hooded head out of the toilet.
OK, fine. The resident did what you do in such situations—called the snake catcher, Barry Greenshields, who arrived promptly. Greenshields, who has years of wrangling experience, was impressed by the snake. In a video posted on News24, he lifts it with snake prongs, whistling, "How long is this thing!" It rises endlessly out of the bowl, as if charmed.
But his best efforts couldn't dislodge it—it seemed to be clinging to something. The snake, now angry, disappeared into the toilet, and Greenshields went knocking around different apartment doors, trying to find his quarry.
No dice. When he left the building that day, he advised residents to keep their toilet lids closed. Later, he returned to put cameras in the pipes, to track it.
Now, a full week later, the terror-stricken residents are fed up. "People are talking about taking matters into their own hands now," one anonymous person told News24. Some have suggested pouring disinfectant or hot water into the toilets.
The snake has kept a low profile since its first appearance. Greenshields thinks it may have grown sluggish due to a lack of food, and may stay coiled down in a pipe somewhere until it gets hungry. Or maybe he just knew he wasn't wanted: "I hope he has left through the pipes," Greenshields says.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
