--Chad Love

Are you in possession of a suspected Bigfoot turd? Maybe a giant fingerprint? Perhaps a clump of fur or some other bit of physical or forensic evidence from the time when that group of suspected Sasquatches broke into your cousin Earl's single-wide while he was gone, drank all his Natty Lite, ate everything in the fridge, tore up the place and then left a big, steaming parting gift on his coffee table before disappearing back into the woods?
 
If you (or your cousin Earl) do happen to have evidence of The Hairy One's existence, then Oxford University wants to talk to you...
 
From this story on Wired.co.uk:
Supposed yeti remains are being put under the microscope in a collaboration between Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum of Zoology. The Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project has been created to try and entice people and institutions with collections of cryptozoological material to submit it for analysis. Anyone with a sample of organic remains can submit details of where and when it was collected, among other data. 

--Chad Love

California is one step closer to banning hunting bears and bobcats with dogs after this bill passed the state senate yesterday. 

From this story on sfgate.com:
The state Senate voted Monday to ban the use of dogs to hunt bears and bobcats, a practice the bill's author compared with shooting animals in a zoo. State Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, introduced the legislation after a California fish and game commissioner posed for photos with a mountain lion he killed during a legal hound hunt in Idaho.

--Chad Love

Are too many deer in the woods hurting biodiversity? That's the thought-provoking argument set out in this New York Times op/ed piece, which argues there are so many deer in the United States today that they are literally eating critical migratory bird habitat into oblivion.

From this story in the New York Times:
"...But one of the biggest contributors to the decline in migratory bird populations has gone largely unnoticed: white-tailed deer. By 1900, deforestation and unregulated hunting had reduced deer populations in the Eastern United States to tiny remnant clusters surviving in remote sanctuaries. But subsequent protective laws and aggressive habitat management allowed deer to bounce back. To this day, wildlife managers slice intact forests into sunny woodlots that maximize the number of deer and the frequency of encounters between deer and hunters. Private landowners are encouraged by wildlife agencies to crisscross their forest acreage with tasty plantings of clover and wheat in support of what is now a burgeoning population of perhaps 50 million white-tailed deer — in some places as many as 75 deer per square mile. 

--Chad Love

Remember the story about the 18-year-old Colorado teen whose 31-pound striper shattered the state record?

In what is becoming a depressingly common theme this year, the record catch has been nullified because the boy apparently lied about where it was caught.

From this story on timescall.com:

A Longmont teen lied about where he caught a hefty striped bass last month, he admitted Wednesday night, so he can't claim the state record for the 31-pound, 8.4-ounce fish he landed. "It was a different lake, a different place," said 18-year-old Isaac Sprecher. He said it was "stupid and immature" for him to have originally contended that he'd caught the striper on April 20 at northwest Longmont's McIntosh Lake, when he'd actually reeled it in that afternoon from one of the ponds at Pella Crossing, a Boulder County Open Space area at North 75th Street south of Hygiene.