Critters of The Canyon

I suppose the earliest record of critters found in the Grand Canyon is a pile of poop.  Mmhmm.  Poop.  Seems there's a cave there that is chock full of giant ground-sloth dung "deposited" there during the Ice Age.  One park ranger back in 1920 thought that was pretty cool, so he brought a pile home and tried to display it on the top of his wife's piano.  Is it any surprise that she said, "No!"

Currently the Grand Canyon boasts a family of albino bighorn sheep, jackrabbits that run up to 40 miles per hour, Gila monsters (big AND poisonous)... but the most poisonous critter is the red ant.  Now, granted, one bite won't kill you, but get a swarm of 'em, and you won't be feelin' so fine.

The tarantulas may be the scariest, but they are the least dangerous.  Not so, the pink rattlesnake!  However, in 1929, a brave park ranger, finding the first one he'd ever seen, grabbed the lil' feller behind the head (the only safe place to pick one up), and hiked up out of the canyon to his car.  Not finding anything to put it in, he simply held his arm out the window and drove home with his prize.  (Since automatic transmissions weren't around until the 1950's, that was probably a pretty crazy trip!)

There are bats.  Caves = bats, eh?  The smallest bat in the canyon is the western pipi-strelle.  They may be small, but they are no slouches when it comes to having babies: the pipistrelle is one of the few bats that give birth to twins.  Bats are the only mammals that are capable of true flight, too.  Bats to whales.  Mammals cover a wide spectrum, huh?

Of, course I've already told you about the condors that have been reintroduced to the canyon.  Today's condors can be found nesting in the same caves their ancestors used 12,000 years ago during the Ice Age!  That's cool on several levels!  (They know that fact because they carbon-dated a condor skull they found there.)  That may be the ONLY cool thing about condors, however!  They eat only rotting dead things, have bald heads because the dead goo doesn't stick to bald as bad as it does to feathers, and they pee on their own legs as a way to cool off in the summertime.  Eewww!

You know what?  I think we should go back to Virginia where everything isn't so ... western!