Woman Enjoys Fostering Animals

For Rachel Cure of Yankton, caring for animals is all about providing shelter to pets in need.

Cure has been fostering animals for five years — with a roll that includes three dogs and more than 40 cats.

"When I started, the shelter was still on Burleigh. There was not a lot of room, and they could not take in dogs unless someone was willing to foster them," Cure said. "I fostered three different dogs. I now only foster cats and kittens. They usually are special needs, ringworm or newborns or very unhappy living in a kennel. I like caring for them and giving them a chance for a good life. I even adopted one of the adults I fostered."

Cure accounts the first animal she fostered: a dog named Josie.

"Josie loved to walk and would jump straight up in the air," Cure recalled. "She was a very good traveler also. I went to Gillette, Wyoming, for several days and took Lily and Josie with me. The home where we stayed also had a dog and a cat, and I think other family members also brought their dogs. Josie fit right in and played like she had known everyone for years."

Cure has been very devoted to sheltering animals, said Kerry Hacecky, director of Heartland Humane Society (HHS).

"Rachel's dedication to serving not only Heartland but the community is amazing. She has the kind of heart, patience, helpfulness, and happiness that is rare and we value her commitment to the animals in the shelter," Hacecky said. "We are always short volunteers for fostering, especially when we discuss needs of caring for the sick or injured. Rachel is one a few willing to take on animals with illnesses and nurse them back to health. Without her, we would definitely struggle a little more.

"When you sign up to foster, you decide your availability, and we work around your interest and ability."

Fostering animals from Heartland can be for weeks or months or it could be only for a weekend or just three or four days to help the animal transition into care. And HHS will provide all the necessary items for a person to foster an animal.

"You simply need to have the time to love and care for them and the ability to pick them up and bring them back to the shelter," Hacecky said.

Fostering at HHS is a simple process," she said. "Stop by the shelter, call or send a message from our website to begin the process. You would fill out an application that provides HHS with some general information on your home. From there, we have you read a short document about the rules of foster care. You would have a hands-on, one-on-one meeting with staff members for orientation showing basic handling skills. After that, you'll be placed on a foster list where you'll receive a weekly email about animals that could use a short break from the shelter. If you're interested, you email or call. Noble, our volunteer coordinator will coordinate with you to pick up the animal. Melissa, the customer service supervisor, also sends text messages when we have an emergency need."

Cure is glad she did.

"Fostering animals gives me a lot of satisfaction knowing that I am helping them adjust to a home with multiple animals and helping them heal, either physically or even emotionally. There are so many needy animals out there I just want to help where I can," she said.

Cure was asked if she had a favorite animal that she fostered.

"I don't know that I have a favorite," she said. "They all have their own personalities. But if I had to pick a favorite, I would say it would be Truck. He was a very young kitten who hitched a ride to town in the engine compartment of a pickup. He had burns on his paws and nose from the engine heat. He spent a few days with me and made himself right at home."

HHS needs foster homes for the following categories:

• Animal under eight weeks. (They aren't allowed in the shelter due to their lack of immune system.)

• Animals with non-contagious health needs, such as ringworm cats, broken bones, or animals needing surgery

• Adoptable — these are eight weeks old to normal healthy adults. These are the most common form of fostering. One can decide to foster short-term or long-term until the animal gets adopted.

• Elderly animals (this is rare) that need hospice care rather than adoption.

HHS once relied on fostering for all dogs up until two years ago when the shelter opened 19 dog adoption kennels. Hacecky said the foster network seemed to fizzle out when that happened, and folks hay have thought the shelter didn't need foster homes, but that is not true.

"Many animals don't prosper in a shelter network, and our hope and goal is to have enough foster homes to keep these animals happy until they can get adopted," Hacecky said.

Musician plays for animals at local shelter

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — As a musician in Nashville, Michael Smith has played in front of plenty of tough crowds over the years. But the guitarist for a popular cover band has recently discovered his toughest audience is at the Williamson County Animal Center.

Smith, started playing here a few months ago. He typically comes on Monday nights after everyone has gone home for the day. Usually it's just him, his guitar and a room full of cats or dogs.

"The dogs are tougher customers, you have to win them over. They may be man's best friend but they're pretty picky," he says sitting with his guitar inside the shelter.

An animal lover himself, Michael has cats at home and doesn't have the space to adopt anymore. When he recently learned the shelter was dealing with overcrowding issues, he decided to volunteer his time to come in and play.

The gentle strumming of his guitar reverberates through the halls here. Some of the cats can often be seen struggling to keep their eyes open as the music gently seems to coax them into a deep sleep.

"It's the sonic waves, when it hits them they can feel it, they can actually feel it. And what's the one thing we have in common with everyone throughout the entire world? Music," the 49-year-old says.

Michael will typically post videos of himself playing on his band's Facebook page , the Williams County Animal Center also does them same and those in charge say it's help get dogs and cats here adopted.

"Any positive exposure for our animals is good exposure," says Penny Adams, Community Outreach Assistant for the center.

"And it helps these animals when they go to their new homes, we have some animals who have never heard music before."

Computers successfully trained to identify animals in photos

A computer model developed at the University of Wyoming by UW researchers and others has demonstrated remarkable accuracy and efficiency in identifying images of wild animals from camera-trap photographs in North America.

The artificial-intelligence breakthrough, detailed in a paper published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, is described as a significant advancement in the study and conservation of wildlife. The computer model is now available in a software package for Program R, a widely used programming language and free software environment for statistical computing.

"The ability to rapidly identify millions of images from camera traps can fundamentally change the way ecologists design and implement wildlife studies," says the paper, whose lead authors are recent UW Department of Zoology and Physiology Ph.D. graduate Michael Tabak and Ryan Miller, both of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Epidemiology and Animal Health in Fort Collins, Colo.

The study builds on UW research published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in which a computer model analyzed 3.2 million images captured by camera traps in Africa by a citizen science project called Snapshot Serengeti. The artificial-intelligence technique called deep learning categorized animal images at a 96.6 percent accuracy rate, the same as teams of human volunteers achieved, at a much more rapid pace than did the people.

In the latest study, the researchers trained a deep neural network on Mount Moran, UW's high-performance computer cluster, to classify wildlife species using 3.37 million camera-trap images of 27 species of animals obtained from five states across the United States. The model then was tested on nearly 375,000 animal images at a rate of about 2,000 images per minute on a laptop computer, achieving 97.6 percent accuracy -- likely the highest accuracy to date in using machine learning for wildlife image classification.

The computer model also was tested on an independent subset of 5,900 images of moose, cattle, elk and wild pigs from Canada, producing an accuracy rate of 81.8 percent. And it was 94 percent successful in removing "empty" images (without any animals) from a set of photographs from Tanzania.

The researchers have made their model freely available in a software package in Program R. The package, "Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification in R (MLWIC)," allows other users to classify their images containing the 27 species in the dataset, but it also allows users to train their own machine learning models using images from new datasets.

The lead author of the PNAS article, recent UW computer science Ph.D. graduate Mohammad Sadegh (Arash) Norouzzadeh, is one of multiple contributors to the new paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Other participating researchers from UW are Department of Computer Science Associate Professor Jeff Clune and postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Mandeville of the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.

Other organizations represented in the research group are the USDA's National Wildlife Research Center, Arizona State University, California's Tejon Ranch Conservancy, the University of Georgia, the University of Florida, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Montana.

Bears and other wild animals are in your yard to stay

Recently, a friend of mine was traveling on Route 10 between Delhi and Stamford. Suddenly, a large black bear came out into the road with an ear of corn hanging out of its mouth. My friend asked me later about the number of bears in the area.

Black bears have moved north from the Catskills over the past few years. And why not? There is an increased amount of suitable habitat that allows them to live in our backyards. Let's face it - animals have the ability to adapt.

Fifty to seventy-five years ago there were far more farms than there are today. Every available field was mowed and tilled to provide food for cows and crops for market. Heck, from West Oneonta to Morris there were once 17 or 18 working farms. Today there are only a couple. The small family farm has long disappeared.

I live on our old farm. It has been in my family for 148 years. Our barn was built to hold Jersey cattle that were smaller than the large, milk-producing Holsteins of today. At the peak we could only milk 34 cows, but my ancestors made a good living for the times, even providing butter for several mom-and-pop stores in Oneonta.

Like our farm the pastures have grown up to brush lots and trees and many of the fields have gone out of production, thus creating habitat for animals.

For some reason there was a sudden influx of bears in the area a few years ago. They were looking in windows in Morris, wandering the roads and streets and checking out backyards. Bears were becoming a nuisance. They tore down bird feeders and destroyed farmers' crops.

The DEC has learned over the years that you just don't live trap nuisance bears and move them to a different area. They carry on the same tactics in their new area, creating problems. That left one solution – open a hunting season and let hunters control the problem. It works.

I had a neighbor call me one afternoon. "I've got a bear on my back porch."

Jokingly I responded, "Feed him jelly donuts. He's really fond of them."

The neighbor wasn't thrilled with my joke, so I told him to send him up to my house.

A farmer just outside of Poland had bears destroying acres of corn each night, so he put up signs reading "Bear Hunters Wanted." It was the only way to stop them. It helped.

There were rumors going around that the DEC was releasing the bears into our area. I heard stories that New Jersey was controlling its growing bear population by trapping them and releasing them in the Catskills at night. I heard the same thing about the coyotes and the mountain lions that sometimes roam our area.

The DEC doesn't have to release them. They have moved in on their own to fill a niche and have increased in numbers ever since. Coyotes were not brought in to reduce the deer population, and it was not funded by insurance companies to reduce the number of deer-car accidents.

In many areas where the population is encroaching on the animal's habitat, they learn to adapt to civilization. Just drive up West Street towards the colleges. There are more deer in the roads than pedestrians. People have e-mailed me, "They're eating all my plants and shrubs."

My response was to get the city let bow hunters harvest some of them. She didn't like that answer.

Let's face it. Wild animals are here to stay. Enjoy watching them and stock up on jelly donuts.

How some animals use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate

COME wintertime thousands of garden warblers, pied flycatchers, and bobolinks—all tiny songbirds—will cross the equator heading south for sunnier climes. It is an epic trip. For guidance they will rely on the position of the sun and stars, as well as smells and other landmarks. They may also use the Earth's magnetic field, thanks to a sense known as magnetoreception. Theories about it have long attracted quacks. Franz Anton Mesmer, a German doctor working in the late 1700s, argued that living things contain magnetic fluids, which, when out of balance, lead to disease. His idea of “animal magnetism” was debunked and similar ones viewed with scepticism. But magnetoreception has drawn more serious attention in the past half-century. A pioneering study in 1972 demonstrated that European robins respond to magnetic cues. The list of animals with a magnetic sense has since grown to include species in every vertebrate category, as well as certain insects and crustaceans. Some may use it simply to orient, such as blind mole rats. Others—salmon, spiny lobsters, thrush nightingales—may use it for migration and homing, alongside other sensory cues. How do they do it?

Think of the Earth's magnetic field as shaped by a bar magnet at the centre of the planet. From the southern hemisphere, magnetic field lines curve around the globe and re-enter the planet in the northern hemisphere. A few features of the field vary predictably across the surface of the Earth. Intensity is one variable—the Earth's magnetic field is weakest at the equator and strongest at the poles. Another is inclination. The angle between the field lines and the Earth changes with latitude, so an animal migrating northwards from the equator encounters steadily steeper inclination angles on its route.

Animals can potentially derive two types of information from the geomagnetic field: the direction in which they are facing, and where they sit relative to a goal. Directional information is the more basic, as polarity lets animals orient north or south as if using a compass. But this has limited utility over long distances. A strong ocean current can sweep turtles off track; winds can do the same for migratory birds. Determining latitude relative to an end point is more useful, and magnetic cues like intensity and inclination may help. Take loggerhead sea turtles (pictured). They swim from the coasts of Florida into the North Atlantic gyre, circling it for years before returning to their natal beaches to breed. Straying from the course can have deadly consequences. One study put hatchlings in test sites that simulated the magnetic fields at three points on the outer edge of the gyre. In all three cases, the turtles reoriented to stay within its confines. Another study, published in April, showed that turtles nesting on far-off beaches with similar magnetic properties (like two on either side of the Florida peninsula, at similar latitudes) had more in common genetically than with those nesting closer by. Turtles, it would seem, can get lost while searching for their natal beach. They may swim to one farther afield but more magnetically familiar and breed there.

Questions still abound. The evidence for a magnetic sense is mostly behavioural; researchers have yet to find receptors for it. Part of the problem is that the cells could be located anywhere inside an animal, since magnetic fields pass freely through tissue. (By contrast, cells that enable the other senses, like sight and smell, make contact with the external environment.) Two theories of magnetoreception dominate. One says animals have an intracellular compass. Another suggests that chemical reactions influenced by the geomagnetic field produce the sense. For researchers, this means more questions than answers.