Moggy Blog

How's this for a beautiful photograph of a Snow Leopard Ed?

Reported in the National Geographic news today, 29th June 2009, the discovery of ten Lynx kittens, including the young cat in the picture below, marks the first time newborn lynx have been documented in Colorado since 2006. This is very good and encouraging news for the biologists overseeing the restoration of this mountain feline in the region.

The tuft-eared cats with big, padded feet are native to Colorado, but were slowly eradicated up until the early 1970s by logging, trapping, poisoning, and development. They are listed as threatened on the U.S. endangered species list.

Biologists had found no kittens in 2007 and 2008, possibly partly because of a drop in the number of snowshoe hares, the cats' main food sources.

This year seven male and three female kittens have been found in five dens.

More than 200 lynx from Alaska and Canada have been released in Colorado since 1999. Biologists don't know how many lynx are currently in the state.

Link: http://www.thefamousgrouse.com/ls/en/

The Glenturret Distillery, near Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, is the oldest working Scotch-whisky distillery in England and the home of the world-renowned 'Famous Grouse' whisky. Barley stored in a distillery ready for whisky making is a big attraction for mice, and so for many years Glenturret has kept a cat on the premises. And the name of that cat was Towser.

Towser ~ "thinking ...is that a mouse down there? "

From 1963 the position of resident mouser was held for almost 24 years by the amazing Towser, a long-haired tortoiseshell female, who had a remarkable mouse-catching career which put her into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's best mouser.

Towser died in 1987, and her life and exploits are fondly commemorated by a bronze statue at the 'Famous Grouse Experience' visitor centre on the Glenturret site. Her pawprints are also used to decorate the label on the bottle of the Fairlie's light Highland Liqueur, another of the distillery's products.

Towser

The inscription on the statue reads:
Towser - 21 April 1963-30 March 1987
Towser, the famous cat who lived in the still house, Glenturret Distillery, for almost 24 years. She caught 28,899 mice in her lifetime. World mousing champion, Guinness Book of Records.

How was this very exact figure of mice caught arrived at? Surely no one had been keeping count for 24 years? It seems that the adjudicators for the record claim went to Crieff to observe the cat's effectiveness (in the catch) for a period of some days, and the total was extrapolated by a statistical technique from their observations. Even if the number might not be totally accurate, it's a pretty impressive performance and works out at an average of some three mice every day!

And who's got the job that Towser left today? That'll be 'Dylan', a ginger tomcat from Forfar, and 'Brooke', a black-and-white female from Cardyke. Being unable to choose between the two the owners decided to take them both on.

Last heard, Glenturret now has two worthy successors to the famous Towser!