Episode 268: Rediscovered Animals!
b"My little cat Gracie got lost but she's home! Let's learn about some other rediscovered animals this week!\\n\\nA very happy birthday to\\xa0Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever!\\n\\nFurther listening:\\n\\nThe Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!)\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nBornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years\\n\\nShock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead\\n\\nRediscovery of the 'extinct' Pinatubo volcano mouse\\n\\nGracie, home at last! She's so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she's eating lots now:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould's mouse (photo from article linked above):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe Pinatubo volcano mouse:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nWhile I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again!\\n\\nA couple of quick things before we get started, though.\\n\\nFirst, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three.\\n\\nNext, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I\\u2019ll put a link in the show notes. It\\u2019s a great podcast that I really recommend if you\\u2019re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff.\\n\\nFinally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I\\u2019m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn\\u2019t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn\\u2019t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home!\\n\\nSo I\\u2019ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She\\u2019s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she\\u2019s very happy to be home.\\n\\nThe person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we\\u2019ll start with a rediscovered bird.\\n\\nThere are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia, Borneo and Sumatra. The subspecies that lives in Sumatra is fairly common throughout the mountains on that island, where it lives in the lower branches of trees in higher elevations. It\\u2019s a tiny owl that only weighs about 4 ounces, or 100 grams. As the article I link to in the show notes points out, that\\u2019s about the weight of four AA batteries.\\n\\nThe subspecies that lives on Borneo, though, was always much rarer and had a much smaller range. In fact, no one had seen one since 1892 and researchers thought it was probably extinct. There\\u2019s another owl that lives in the mountains of Borneo, the mountain scops owl, that\\u2019s fairly common.\\n\\nIn May of 2016,"