"The spitting image of its mother!' crowed famed Herpetologist Raymond Lee Ditmars one day last week.
Dr. Ditmars' trip to Panama last summer had made New York's Bronx Zoo unique throughout the world in the possession of a live vampire bat, a tiny, loathsome, jut-jawed creature which lives on blood sucked from beasts and men (TIME, Oct. 2). Thriving on defibrinated blood obtained fresh daily from an abattoir, the captive has now presented its owners with the first vampire bat ever born in a zoo.*
"The thing is worth its weight in gold," cried Dr. Ditmars, excited over the prospect of adding to the scant store of information about this species' life and habits. "It has a wingspread of four inches, is about the size of a mouse and was active from the moment of birth. It crawls on its mother's back, feeds like a human baby and squeaks like a mouse."
Owl at Sea
Monstrous headseas washed roaring against the S. S. Manhattan off the Grand Banks, one evening last week. Overhead howled an 85-mi. nor'wester. Only three passengers were hardy enough to be aboveboard. One was Queena Mario, small, vivacious soprano of the Metropolitan Opera Company. Another was her pet marmoset, Vibrato. The third was a Mrs. Florence Garson of Staten Island, N. Y.
None of them saw or heard a bedraggled bundle of feathers whisk out of the lowering sky, plop softly on the Manhattan's sun deck. Soprano Mario, striding briskly, stumbled over it. Mrs. Garson hurried up, agreed that it looked like a mop. To Vibrato it looked like a warm hideaway. He hopped out of his mistress' muff, tried to bury himself in its folds. Only then did the two women discover that the "mop" was an exhausted owl.
They named the owl Manhattan, put it in Vibrato's cage for company. When the ship docked in New York last week both of them wanted to keep it. The ship's captain, called to arbitrate, tossed a shilling, sent the bird to Staten Island. Ornithologists identified the bird, which the ship's crew had called an "ice owl," as an American hawk owl, a dark, small-eyed, falcon-like creature slightly smaller than a crow, which breeds in the Arctic, sometimes winters as far south as the U. S., never goes to sea if it can help it.
Shark! Shark!
Pantophagous is the shark. Its stomach is the ocean's garbage can. Its digestive fluid, dropped on a man's hand, will take off the skin. In over 30 years of shark-hunting off Hawaii, the U. S., Africa, the West Indies, Australia, Captain William E. ("Sharky Bill") Young has learned not to be surprised at anything he finds when he rips open a shark's belly. He has discovered tin cans, horses' hoofs, a small pig, bottles, parts of other sharks. Once, in a shark caught off Big Pine Key, Fla., he found a man's arm, six pieces of human flesh and a square of cloth from a blue serge coat.