Paulie Wally Doodle and the boys were whooping it up one day at the Mean Macaque Saloon, when suddenly P.W. felt a jones coming on. He let out a shrill whistle and his parrot gang was airborne, soaring above the leafy terrain of India’s Madhya Pradesh state on a direct route to the local poppy farms. Mick Jagger may not be able to get much satisfaction but these winged opium addicts have it all figured out, sometimes making 40 visits a day to get their fix.
“One poppy flower gives around 20 to 25 grams of opium,” claims a local grower who would prefer to remain nameless. “But a large group of parrots feed on these plants around 30 to 40 times a day. This affects the produce. These addicted parrots are wreaking havoc.”
According to NDTV, parrot raids have become a daily menace in the poppy fields and farmers claim to be sustaining significant crop losses thanks to P.W. and his outlaw band. Some birds tear into the unripe poppy pods where opium-rich milk resides while others use their beaks and claws to snip off the plants at their stalks and fly away with entire intact pods. The Daily Mail reported that many of the birds have trained themselves not to squawk when descending on the fields, swooping in and out like silent ninjas. “Why wake up the posse?” smiles Paulie Wally Doodle.
The Indian government is fast at work establishing parrot rehabilitation centers across the country but so far there are few takers. “Why quit?” asks Doodle. “It’s not like we’ll lose our jobs and wind up in cages. The job scene has been terrible ever since the demise of the pirate industry.” The parrot boss claims that several of his accomplices were respected members of society in their previous lives and had initial misgivings about their descent into outlawry. “But that’s all over now, of course” he avers. “That opium has a way of soothing the pain.”
Trouble In Paradise
If those Indians think they’ve got trouble, they should take a gander at The Sunshine State, where ferocious hippogators crash through the feeble fences of roadside zoos and motivate through the neighborhoods, biting the limbs off wheelchair-bound retirees and swallowing yappy squee-dogs whole. It’s a nightmare. But worst of all are the Giant African Snails, which emigrated here after watching a few unseemly episodes of Miami Vice. Oh pish, you say, what harm could a poor little snail accomplish? Okay, how much time do you have?
First of all, they look like something out of T. Rex Meets The Alien, scary enough to terrify grizzled old scorpion-fighters. Second, they carry around rat lungworm parasites, which can burrow into humans and cause wretched headaches, vomiting and, if you get real lucky, the heartbreak of meningitis.
While spreading its joy, the Giant Snail gobbles up everything in sight, including peanuts, beans, peas, cucumbers, melons and over 480 other plants. If it runs out of the good stuff, it will settle for tree bark, house paint, stucco and Fiat 500s.
Not to mention, they’re impossible to get rid of. The snails have no natural predators, they live for up to 9 years and produce exponentially, up to 1200 more snails per year. Recently, however, those clever Miamians rustled up a batch of snail-sniffing dogs and captured 156,000 of the critters, an encouraging harvest. As often happens in these matters, however, the snail dogs formed a labor union and are driving a hard bargain about renegotiating their contracts. Noone is optimistic.
Then, as everybody knows, we have Burmese Pythons, which showed up out of the blue during the 80s. There are anywhere from 30,000 to 300,000 of the things slithering around the Everglades, killing off most of the mammal populations around them. They’re like enormous Hoover vacuum cleaners, sucking up everything in the neighborhood with frightening effectiveness. Where pythons have been living the longest, the raccoon population has dropped 99.3%, the opossum numbers fell 98.9% and the bobcats are down 97.5%. They’re everywhere, like Chicken Man, and there’s no way to stop them short of nuking the Everglades, which some spoilsports refuse to do.
We’ve also got wild boar, which reside in every county in the state of Florida. These hogs are virtual disease farms, known to spread cholera, brucellosis, tuberculosis, salmonella, anthrax, ticks, lice, flukes, worms and a partridge in a prune tree, which makes it special fun when you find one rooting around in your vegetable garden. Don’t chase him away with your broom, though. If he’s one of the ill-tempered minority, he’ll keep jabbing with those tusks until you stop moving. Keep a python in your backpack, that should do it.
 |
| "Penguin's gone again, Pa!" |
We’re Leaving On a Jet Plane….
Despite dining on the best of thrown marshmallows, most animals say “I’d rather not” when it comes to zoos. Can you blame them? What if you had to live in the South Bronx 24 hours a day, or even Cleveland? Penguin 337, a former resident of Tokyo’s Sea Life Park, jumped a rock twice his height, slipped through a gap in a seven-foot-tall fence and eluded pursuers for a merry 82 days despite being spotted more than 30 times. He waved at them from open seas, binge-eating wild fish, achieving cult-like status in hero-worshiping Japan. When threatened, he blended in with customers in a downtown Tokyo tuxedo-rental shop. Nothing lasts forever, of course, except the Trump administration, and 337 was ultimately spotted by a stoolie who saw him swimming in a river and turned him in to The Man. “It was fun while it lasted,” said the penguin. “I especially liked happy hour at the Karaoke Kan.”
What would you do if someone decided to take you to the slaughterhouse? Same with a Polish cow we’ll call Flight Risk. Tipped off by fellow bovines that the Deathmobile had arrived, F.R. bolted through a metal gate and escaped, swimming out to an island in the middle of a lake. When firefighters approached the island (it must have been a slow arson day), Flight Risk strode back in the water and swam to a peninsula 150 feet away. At this point, binding arbitration led to a happy solution and the cow’s owner agreed to let the animal live out its days in peace. F.R. related that he particularly liked happy hour at Pub Przejscie.
Meanwhile, back at Poland’s Bialowieza Forest, another cow escaped its pen and took up with a herd of gigantic bison, hoping not to stand out too much. She convinced the bison she belonged and the herd held off a crew of spineless repo men. “Have you ever argued with a giant bison?” one of the would-be retrievers asked, teary-eyed and disheveled. “It’s bad for the wardrobe.”
 |
| GOTCHA! |
Eagles Rout Drones, Win Championship Of Big Sky Conference
Daniel Parfitt of Sydney, Australia thought he’d found the perfect drone for a two-day mapping job in a remote patch of the Australian Outback. The sleek $80,000 machine had a wingspan of 7 feet and resembled a stealth bomber. He was off to the job with a hop in his step and a smile on his face. Until.
Swooping down from the heavens, Iggy the Eagle took offense. What fool had the unmitigated gall to slip and slide through Iggy’s skies without a permit? With that, the offended eagle used its razor-sharp talons to punch a hole in the carbon fiber and Kevlar fuselage of Mr Parfitt’s costly bauble, which lost control and plummeted to the ground. That whoosh you just heard was Dan AND his drone crashing to Earth. You lose $80,000 here, 80,000 there and after awhile it starts to add up.
“I had 15 minutes to go on the last flight of my final day and one of those wedge-tailed eagles just dive-bombed the drone and knocked it out of the sky,” mourned Dan, who believed his machine was too large for a bird to damage. “It ended up being a pile of splinters.”
Weighing up to nine pounds with a wingspan that can approach eight feet, the wedge-tailed eagle is Australia’s largest bird of prey. Once vilified for attacking sheep and targeted by bounty hunters, it is now legally protected, dominating the skies across much of the continent, as Dan’s drone found out. The highly territorial raptors have no interest in yielding their apex-predator status to the rapidly expanding army of drones flying around the bush and even have been known to harrass the occasional human in a hang glider. Think about that for a minute or two.
Birds worldwide have attacked drones but the wedge-tailed eagle seems particularly eager to engage in dogfights. Some operators try to con the birds by sending their drones into clever loops or steep climbs or just leaning on the throttle to outrun them. Good luck with all that. The eagles snicker as they bat another offender from the sky.
A long-term solution escapes the dronemen. Camouflage techniques, like putting fake eyes on the drones, hasn’t worked (and who was the genius who thought that one up?) and pilots are now considering arming their little machines with pepper spray or noise devices. James Rennie, who opened a drone-mapping and inspection business in Melbourne named UAV, estimates that 20% of drone flights in rural areas are attacked by the wedge-tails. “They are really kings of the air in Australia,” claims Todd Katzner, a biologist and eagle expert at the U.S. Geological Survey in Boise, Idaho. “There’s really nothing out there than can compete with them.”
Iggy, himself, however, claims there’s nothing malicious in it. “Birds just wanna have fun,” he winks.
 |
| "Feets, don't fail me now!" |
When Animals Attack
Optimistic bowhunter Chase Dellwo was rummaging about, hunting for elk in the Montana wilderness, when---SURPRISE!---a 400-pound bear doffed his fedora and introduced himself. “….and you must be my dinner!” smiled the bear, who promptly took a bite out of his head and leg before tossing him in the air like a rag doll. Fortunately for him, Dellwo suddenly remembered a magazine article he had read and shoved his right arm down the animal’s throat. “Gag me with a spoon, but not a whole arm!” cried the bear, who stumbled off in confusion, leaving Chase to ponder the proclivities of Fate.
Todd Endris, a chronic surfer, was plying his trade off the coast of Monterey, California one fine day when a great white shark decided it was lunch time. The attack left the 24-year-old surfer’s leg and back mutilated and with some of the skin peeled right off his unfortunate bones. Then, the shark moved in for the Grand Finale. But what’s this? Endris heard the sound of bugles in the distance---was the cavalry on its way to save Todd’s ass? You damn betcha. A heroic pod of dolphins suddenly emerged and swam around the surfer for 40 minutes, annoying the impatient shark which headed off to Mel’s Diner instead.
Jim Hamm and his comely wife Nell, 70 and 66-years-old respectively, were moseying down a trail in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in California when what to their wondering eyes should appear but a hungry cougar, which jumped out on the path in front of them. Oh for crying out loud, worried Jim, who had carelessly forgotten to pack his spiffy Swiss Army Knife again. The animal latched onto his right arm and, as Hamm prepared to smack it with his free hand, knocked him over and bit off a piece of his scalp. “It was like somebody hit me with a baseball bat,” said Jim. “I was dazed but I could hear my wife yelling for me to fight.”
Nell, of course, was perplexed by the goings-on. “The cougar made a desperate, horrible sound like something I’ve never heard before.” The next minute, her husband’s head was inside the big cat’s mouth. Being a dutiful wife, Nell picked up a tree limb and whacked the beast, which looked at her with a surely-you-jest smile. Nonetheless, Nell kept belting him over and over again until the cougar sighed and left. You remember when the nuns told you, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?” Nell did.
American explorer Michael Fay was not new to Africa nor to pachyderms, having spent much time there in previous visits. Then one day in a national park in Gabon, he found himself in a classic female elephant crossfire, turning around just in time to grab the tusks of his attacker and hold on for dear life. “I tried to run,” said Fay, “but I tripped on some bushes in the sand and fell. By the time I got turned around, she was already over me and about halfway down the trajectory to sticking her tusks through my chest. She missed the first stab and her tusks were sticking in the sand four inches from my head. All I could do was hold on and be swung about.” Having made her point, the elephant finally backed off, leaving Fay with only a puncture wound to his right bicep and a strong desire for hard liquor.
Everybody likes otters, right? Well, except for 77-year-old Sue Spector, of course. Sue went kayaking in Florida on a peaceful Summer afternoon when all of a sudden she found herself face-to-face with a grouchy river otter. Spector was traveling down the serene Braden River with a large group but for some reason the otter chose her, climbing into her boat and jumping all over the confused senior citizen.
“I took my paddle and batted at him but he wouldn’t let me go,” Sue complained. “I just kept screaming and whaling away with the paddle until the kayak flipped and I fell into the water.” Spector’s husband continued swinging with his own paddle until the critter relented, leaving his wife chewed up and in need of stitches and rabies shots.
“I guess it could have been worse,” said Sue. “It could have been a damn alligator. Gators don’t run away from kayak paddles.” That’s right, Sue, they don’t. You have to offer them little chihuahuas.
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
