Episode 268: Rediscovered Animals!

My little cat Gracie got lost but she's home! Let's learn about some other rediscovered animals this week! A very happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have the best birthday ever! Further listening: The Casual Birder Podcast (where you can hear me talk about birding in Belize!) Further reading: Bornean Rajah Scops Owl Rediscovered After 125 Years Shock find brings extinct mouse back from the dead Rediscovery of the 'extinct' Pinatubo volcano mouse Gracie, home at last! She's so SKINNY after a whole week being lost but she's eating lots now: The Bornean Rajah scops owl (photo from article linked above): The djoongari is the same as the supposedly extinct Gould's mouse (photo from article linked above): The Pinatubo volcano mouse: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. While I was researching animals discovered in 2021, I came across some rediscoveries. I thought that would make a fun episode, so here are three animals that were thought to be extinct but were found again! A couple of quick things before we get started, though. First, happy birthday to Seamus! I hope you have a brilliant birthday and that it involves family, friends, or at least your favorite kind of cake, but hopefully all three. Next, a few weeks ago I appeared on the Casual Birder Podcast talking in depth about my trip to Belize and some of the birds I saw there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a great podcast that I really recommend if you’re interested in birding at all, and the host has such a lovely calming voice I also recommend it if you just like to have a pleasant voice in the background while you do other stuff. Finally, thanks for the well wishes from last week, when I let our emergency episode run. I’m actually fine, but my little cat Gracie got frightened while I was bringing her into the house from a vet visit, and she ran away. That was on Friday, March 11 and I spent all night looking for her, but then we had a late-season snowstorm come through and dump six inches of snow on my town, which made me even more frantic. At dawn on Saturday I put on my boots and heavy coat and spent all day searching for Gracie, and on Sunday I was still searching for her. I didn’t have time to work on a new episode. In fact, I searched every day as much as possible all week long, until I was certain she was gone forever. I couldn’t bring myself to work on this episode because rediscovered animals just seemed like a cruel joke when my little cat was gone. I was almost done with a different episode when on Saturday night, March 19, 2022, eight full days after Gracie had disappeared, I got a phone call. Someone had seen a little gray cat under their shed, over half a mile from my house! I rushed over and THERE WAS GRACIE! I found her! She is home! So I’ve been researching rediscovered animals with Gracie purring in my lap, in between her going to her bowl to eat. She’s lost a lot of weight but other than that she seems healthy, and she’s very happy to be home. The person who found Gracie first noticed her around their birdfeeder, so we’ll start with a rediscovered bird. There are two subspecies of Rajah scops owl that are only found on two islands in southeast Asia,