Mike, The Headless Rooster

In 1945, in the little town of Fruita, Colorado, Mike the rooster had his head chopped off. Mike didn’t seem to notice.

The young rooster was meant to be his owners’ dinner on September 10, 1945. His owner, Lloyd Wilson, chopped Mike’s head off and the rooster began staggering around, but refused to lay down and die. Instead, he continued to walk around and behave like a normal chicken, pecking for food and trying to preen his feathers, which was not easy to do since he had no mouth. When he tried to crow, he made a gurgling sound.

When Olsen found the rooster sleeping the next morning, he decided to try to keep the five and a half-month old chicken alive for as long as possible. He used an eyedropper to feed grain and water to the rooster. A week later, Olsen took Mike to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He, and researchers at the university, all wanted to know how the rooster had managed to survive being beheaded. They discovered that Mike’s brain stem was largely intact and that the axe blade had missed the jugular vein. A clot had prevented the chicken from bleeding to death.

Mike not only survived the experience, but thrived, going from 2-1/2 pounds to a hefty 8 pounds. He became a celebrity and set out on a national tour, visiting New York, Atlantic City, Los Angeles and San Diego. People gladly paid 25 cents each to see the headless chicken. He was featured in Time and Life magazines, and earned a Guinness World Record that is not likely to be broken. He even became the subject of a PBS documentary. He had his own manager and was ensured for $10,000.

In March 1947, 18 months after he was supposed to have become dinner, Mike began choking on a kernel of corn in an Arizona motel room. Olsen could not find his eyedropper to clear Mike’s throat and the chicken choked to death in the middle of the night. He continued to tour, however, until 1949.

The town of Fruita has not forgotten Mike, the Headless Chicken. The town hosts a festival in his honor and he has his own website.

The Tragedy of Tasmania

 Tasmania was first discovered by in 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman, a Dutch explorer, who called it Van Diemen’s Land. At the time, the island supported some 5,000 to 10,000 hunter-gatherers. They used wood, bone and stone along with bark, grass, seaweed and sinew to make tools and containers, but apparently did not possess boomerangs or nets.

Then the British, led by Lt. John Bowen of the British Royal Navy, established the first settlement at Risdon Cove. The white settlers kidnapped native children as laborers, and took women as “consorts.” They simply killed the men. Martial law was declared in 1828 and soldiers shot any Aborigine unlucky enough to be found in a settled area.

Even that brutal “solution” to the Aborigine problem proved inadequate, and in 1830, the last Tasmanians were gathered up and forcibly transported to nearby Flinders Island. Conditions on Flinders Island were so terrible that most of the transported Aborigines could not survive, and very few infants were able to live more than a few months after birth. By 1833, due to war, persecution, intermarriage, and decimation by infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans, the number of purebred Tasmanian aborigines had dwindled to a mere three hundred.

One Aborigine man, William Lanne, managed to survive until 1869. But he was not to find peace even in death. He was duly buried, but his body was repeatedly dug up and mutilated by scientists. His head, feet and hands were removed for “study.” His ears and nose were removed from the decapitated head. A doctor removed Lanne’s skin and made a tobacco pouch out of it.  

With William Lanne’s death, only one purebred Tasmanian survived. Truganini, a woman, died in 1876.  She had been horrified by the Europeans’ treatment of Lanne’s body, and begged to be buried at sea. Her wish was not to be granted, however, although she was properly buried, at least for a short time. But her skeleton was later dug up and put on display in the Tasmanian Museum. It was only in 1976, a hundred years after her death, that Truganini was granted her final wish. Her bones were cremated and she was buried at sea. 

Is it any wonder that native peoples in Hawaii, the Americas, and the islands of Tasmania and Australia, among others, are suspicious of the intentions of anthropologists and archaeologists? 

For more information about the history of Tasmania, visit this site

Namibia’s Mysterious Fairy Circles

The Namib Rand Nature Reserve, located in southwest Namibia, is home to literally thousands of mysterious spots known as fairy circles.

The circles take the form of round clearings in the red, sandy soil surrounded by tall rings of grass. The smallest rings are about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter, and the largest can reach nearly 40 feet (12 meters) across. They seem to spring up at nearly full size, although some appear to grow a little after they emerge. Eventually, however, they all vanish back into the desert landscape as plants move back into the bare ground, leaving slightly indented areas behind.

No one knows how or why they form, but a new study by biologist Walter Tschinkel of Florida State University has shed some light on how long they last. It seems that the small ones last around 24 years while the big ones can remain for as long as 75 years. Tschinkel estimates that most probably exist for around 30 to 60 years.

Tschinkel has ruled out a few theories about why the circles form. He originally thought they might have marked nests of harvester termites, but no nests were found. The soil inside the circles is not toxic, and there are no obvious differences in soil quality in soil samples from inside and outside the circles.

Unlike more traditional fairy rings which form in areas with high moisture and generally caused by fungi, Namibia’s circles form only on sandy soil, but not on dunes or alluvial fans which are formed by water.

Over the last ten years, the Namib Rand Nature Reserve has found a novel way to raise funds with these fairy rings.  They sell sponsorships to the circles, whose GPS coordinates are recorded while each sponsored circle is marked with a ceramic plaque.

It is not likely that the mystery of these fairy circles will be solved any time soon. They are located more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) from the nearest village in an arid grassland populated by leopards, ostriches, springbock and other animals. With no money to fund studies, it is not likely that researchers will be willing to spend a great deal of time investigating this phenomenon.
 
If you’re interested in seeing photographs of these mysterious fairy rings, go here

One Way to Settle a Dispute

The Aborigines of Australia have a unique method for settling land disputes. And if the evidence of ancient aboriginal bones dated at up to 11,000 years old indicate that this tradition goes back a long, long way.

It seems that when a property dispute arose between two Aborigines, the opponents resorted to heavy wooden clubs in order to settle the quarrel. The men face each other and take turns swinging their clubs at one another’s head, with the other man attempting to parry the blow. The disagreement is considered settled when one of the men is so seriously injured that he cannot continue.

The opponents are usually young adults who are seeking land on which to build homes for themselves and their families. It is interesting that almost half of all Aboriginal skulls found in southern Australia show evidence of deep head wounds, usually on the front or on the left side of the skull. These are often accompanied by healed forearm fractures which may represent attempts to parry blows.

This behavior reminds me of the actions of sheep, goats, and other animals who routinely fight for mates or territory by charging at one another in an attempt to physically overwhelm or overcome their rivals. Perhaps, in some ways, humans aren’t so different from other animals after all.

The Ghosts Who Kept Working

I heard this story a few years ago from an eyewitness.  My experiences with ghosts have always been pretty standard.  They wander through rooms (and walls), usually not doing anything in particular.  But these ghosts made themselves useful. 

Read the whole story here

South America’s Animal Shaped Mounds

 Perhaps the most famous effigy mound in the Americas is the gigantic Serpent Mound in Ohio. And it was long thought that these curious structures, constructed by the Adena people, were unique to North America. But a series of mounds has been discovered in several coastal valleys in Peru, and there is evidence that they may be as much as 4,000 years old. And some of them are enormous.

One of the mounds depicts an orca. Another, located in the Chillon Valley, appears to be a condor.  Nearby is a figure that looks like a cross between a cougar and a cayman or alligator. Both seem to be deliberately oriented.  The condor points toward the most extreme orientation of the Milky Way while the cougar-cayman points to where the sun rises on the morning of the June solstice. Two other birdlike figures in the Casma Valley also point toward the June solstice.

The discoverer of the mounds, anthropologist Robert Benfer, formerly of the University of Missouri, found the mounds by studying satellite photographs. He has so far explored only five valleys located along the Peruvian coast. In addition to the large figures, he has found many smaller mounds. He plans to return to the valleys to gather material for radiocarbon dating in order to establish more accurate dates for the sites. He is also eager to explore other valleys along the Peruvian coast in the hope of finding even more effigies.

Here is another interesting fact about these South American mounds. The famous Serpent Mound in Ohio is believed to have been built somewhere between 1000 BC and 1000 AD. If Benfer is right about the age of the Peruvian effigies and they are around 4,000 years old, then they are much older than their North American counterparts. Were these structures built by two different peoples with the same ideas, or was there communication between the two continents? And why would there have been such a lapse in time between the construction of the South American mounds and those built in North America? Hopefully, we’ll find out more sometime in the near future.

There is a photo of the orca mound here

Mysterious Apes in the Republic of Congo

What looks like a chimpanzee, eats like a chimpanzee, seldom climbs trees and makes nests on the ground like a gorilla? The answer is, nobody is quite sure.

Part of the problem in identifying these peculiar animals is that some of their behaviors appear to be more like those of gorillas, which currently do not seem to inhabit the region.

Skulls brought to Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren in 1908 were re-examined in 1970 and anthropologist Colin Groves determined that they were identical to the skulls of western gorillas. A much more recent skull recovered by wildlife photographer and conservationist Karl Ammann had the pronounced forehead ridge characteristic of gorillas while the rest of the skull bore a remarkable resemblance to those of chimpanzees.

Adding to the confusion is the animals’ diet. Unlike gorillas, which generally dine on various types of leaves, analysis fecal material shows that the mystery apes eat a diet rich in fruit.

Efforts are underway to determine whether these animals, known as Bondo mystery apes, are giant chimpanzees, some type of chimpanzee-gorilla hybrid, or an as-yet unidentified new subspecies of great ape. They are reclusive, like gorillas, and no live animals have been captured. Ammann is in the process of habituating a group of these ground-nesting chimps by offering them sugar cane.

The world of the great apes still holds mysteries. Are these animals chimpanzees who have somehow incorporated gorilla-like behaviors into their culture, or are they some completely new type of animal that developed its own unique adaptations to its environment? Karl Ammann is devoting his efforts toward finding answers. It will be interesting to see what he finds out.

For more information visit