Some slight updating re tortoises, + more further to earlier reports

[oursin]

As discovery baffles community, police examine potential link to 2021 find in same forest:

[P]olice have confirmed they are investigating whether there is a link between the deaths and the discovery of a giant tortoise in the same area – the National Trust-owned Ashclyst Forest – two years ago.
....
Andrew Highfield, the founder of the Tortoise Trust, who has studied tortoises for 40 years and was contacted by police for help, said it was a “strange and disturbing” case. After analysing images of the corpses for the Guardian, Highfield concluded the tortoises had been held in captivity for some time, possibly up to five years, in poor conditions.... “It does tend to point to someone who got these animals and found them very difficult, but what is really strange, generally speaking, even in the condition they’re in, which was not good, it’s surprising that nobody has been putting feelers out to say ‘hey we’ve got these lovely animals can anyone take them’ and find an institution or informed private individual with resources to rehabilitate them.” .... Highfield said some criminals trade exotic animals on the side of mainstream criminal activity such as drug dealing.

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A more robust species: some while ago I mentioned the Invasive Predatory Goldfish in the pond in the local park. I have now discovered that London's seagulls, not infrequently sighted on local playing field or circling over the pocket park, are in fact an invasive species and were not known except as occasional visitors blown in by the storm in the nineteenth century: When London Had No Sea Gulls:

The birds have adapted to city living, feeding off landfill, probing bins and still attracting morsels from the "charitable hands" of Royal Park visitors. The profligacy of the city supports their scavenger lifestyle better than the dwindling fish stocks of the sea. Natural England reckons that 75% of herring gulls now live permanently in towns and cities. Whereas once they were seen as near-miraculous, elegant birds, they are now more often regarded as a menace. A quick google will find endless press reports of aggressive behaviour and food theft.
....
The London sea gull has been on a remarkable journey these past 150 years, from almost non-existent, to newsworthy spectacle, to commonplace, to public menace, to mildly endangered. It's easy to curse at a gull when it's after your chips, but let's remember that their presence in London was once "astonishing". Let's hope it never is again.

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Things that go missing from museums: Pants, moustaches and bird livers among missing museum artefacts: Comments by museum staff:

"This does not mean these objects have been stolen or lost, it might mean for example that a catalogue entry has not been updated after a collection move. Items are regularly recovered as a result of this process," they said.
The museum said these could be "ghost entries" - the result of data transfer from more primitive databases; incorrect documentation or human error in the past. They have, however, re-discovered 560 items since 2008 through audits.
"We take the security of our collection very seriously, so over the last 20 years we've had just 23 instances of lost or missing items from a collection of 80 million, limited to small things like teeth, fish and frozen animal tissue. "We have robust security measures in place which we regularly review.
The group, which houses 425,000 objects across its venues and centres, has begun putting barcodes on artefacts to track their locations and keep them safe.
[I]t has "reviewed" security in light of thefts at the British Museum "as a precautionary measure".
A museum spokesman said the artefacts "date from many years or even decades ago, long before our current collections management systems were put in place" and "are also typically low-value, mass-produced items".

However, one museum did cop to having lost 'a 19th-Century cannon from the Royal Armouries collection... from a remote and off-site location.... thought to have been taken for its scrap value'.

***

A whole website on Maria Sibylla Merian.

Comments

[redbird]

The link to the article about sea gulls is broken.

[oursin]

Should be fixed now, thanks.

[themis1]

The sea gull phenomenon is not exclusive to London. We get them in Gloucester (blown up the Severn originally) and when I was in hospital mid-year 2023, there were three baby seagulls on the ledge outside my window, with periodic visits from Mum or Dad (I can't tell the sex of seagulls!!). The bit of the hospital I was in is a concrete tower block with grey ledges. I'm guessing they saw it as a cliff.

[oursin]

I suspect this is part of a wider phenomenon of urban wildlife, or at least various birds and animals realising that the pickings are way better around people than on the wild seashore or in the bosky woodlands, and that London is not the only city with metropolitan and suburban foxes*.

*Also of course NO HORRID YAHS ON HORSES.