Monday, September 18, 2006

Wallabies and Crocodiles and Pandas, oh my!

Apparently, Britain has quite a few non-indigenous animals wandering around in the wild. Never mind that every inch of that island has been settled for hundreds of years; there's still wilderness.

Enough wilderness, in fact, to host (as counted in the last six years) "51 wallabies, 13 spiders including a tarantula and a Black Widow, 13 racoons, 10 crocodiles, seven wolves, three pandas, two scorpions and one penguin." Not to mention monkeys in Scotland and "5,931 big cats, 332 wild boars and 3,389 sharks in British waters." I'll assume they mean just the sharks are in the water.

I can understand wallabies hopping around. Spiders, racoons, and wolves no problem. But pandas?! Are they all together in one area? Are they doing any better than the wild pandas in China? What do they eat? I thought pandas only ate bamboo. Is there a forest of invasive bamboo somewhere in England?

The article sadly doesn't mention what types of big cats they have, but it does say the cats are mainly in southwestern England. The boars are mainly in the southeast. The wallabies are mainly in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. So those three, at least, sound like viable populations.

I wonder if the others will survive and/or thrive.

1 comment:

Alyssa said...

hmm, that is odd. Aren't pandas very selective about a mate anyway? They don't seem very likely to thrive outside of their natural environment.