In Denmark, archaeologists have found a series of ancient fences arranged in concentric rings, closing off a huge area about the size of two large sports fields, the New Historian reports.
The fences were found this past September and enclose an area of more than 21,500 square yards. There are five rows of fences, one inside the other, which date back to the Neolithic period, which ended around 2,000 B.C. The rings were made from poles about six and a half feet in length.
Most mysterious, though, is the way in which they were arranged. The openings in each ring of fence were offset from each other—from the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to see the interior of the fenced in area, or walk straight through. The openings were big enough, though, that the archaeologists who found the fence don’t think the fences were necessarily meant as a defensive measure. Rather, they’re more like a maze.
Nothing has yet been found in the interior area, though, that suggests what the purpose of the space was. It may have been used for a ritual purposes, but “to put it simply, we just don’t know,” archaeologist Pernille Rohde Sloth said.
Rhea Eisenmann of Boston, Massachusetts, probably has more sweaters than you do. At last count, she had 110 of them, including a bright turquoise pullover with an orange-bordered hood, a felt jumper, and a chunky-knit facsimile of a New England Patriots jersey. She models them almost daily on her Instagram, and has been featured sporting them everywhere from Buzzfeed to Fox News.
Rhea is not a cold-intolerant Beacon Hill socialite—she is a two-year-old lovebird who happens to be bald. Rhea has Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease, a condition that attacks bird follicles and causes total feather loss. Her human companion, Isabella Eisenmann, has been raising awareness about the disease through a suite of popular social media profiles, called Rhea the Naked Birdie, filled with nude bird glamour shots.
Last August, the owner of Sock Buddies—a company that makes protective garments for birds who pick out their feathers—sent Rhea a white turtleneck. After Rhea wore it for a photoshoot, "many people started sending me messages about wanting to make her sweaters," Eisenmann says. So she posted Rhea's measurements, and the formerly Naked Birdie now gets about a sweater a day.
Eisenmann was, and is, floored by people's generosity. But perhaps she shouldn't have been. Across the world, contemporary humans have at least one thing in common—we can't stop knitting sweaters for animals in need.
You can tell a lot about a society by what its animals are wearing. Although it's not clear exactly when people began clothing their furry companions, odds are good that the first instances were utilitarian: there's evidence that Mesopotamian soldiers forged armor for their horses as far back as 2600 B.C., a trend that eventually spread to Greece and Rome.
In Victorian times—as animals went from useful tools to beloved family members—socialites enjoyed dressing up their cats and dogs as ladies and gentlemen. And in the hedonistic 1960s, American media prankster Alan Abel got a lot of traction out of the "Society for Indecency to Naked Animals," a satirical movement that aimed to put clothes on every wild beast "in the name of morality."
The modern world features an unprecedented number of well-dressed beasts. Designer labels now put out dog clothes. Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Halloween costumes for pets of all sizes, from mice to pigs. A racehorse wearing a three-piece tweed suit and cap made it into GQ, and just this past Friday, two Snuggie-clad goats were found comfortably gallivanting around Idaho. But when future humans look back in time to take our measure, odds seem good they'll settle on the animal in the hand-knitted sweater.
For starters, relevant examples abound. Let's begin with the case of the tiny jumpered penguins. In the late 1990s, a series of oil spills off of Australia's Phillip Island threatened local animals, including the island's large population of little penguins. Oil is very bad for penguins—it clumps their feathers together, exposing their skin to the cold, and when they try to preen it off with their beaks, it makes them sick.
When rehabilitation teams set out to combat the spill, "[they] found they needed a way to stop penguins preening oil from their feathers while they waited to be washed," says Lauren Jones, an officer at Phillip Island's Penguin Foundation. They found knitted jumpers did the trick, and they began soliciting them from local volunteers, through a program they called Knits for Nature.
For years, the Penguin Foundation stockpiled sweaters—"we received a few parcels of jumpers a week," says Jones. When oil spills occurred, they dipped into the reserves; the rest of the time, the penguins went as God intended. But then, in 2014, a local newspaper profiled Merle Davenport, a long-term volunteer knitter for the Foundation, and the story quickly gained traction worldwide. "A well-meaning journalist took it upon themselves to put out an online call for more jumpers… from that point on we received thousands of jumpers per week," from every continent, she says. "It was truly incredible."
Knits for Nature quickly had enough sweaters. By the time the next wave of media attention came around, in 2015, the Pengin Foundation had a PR strategy in place, directing people to other organizations in need of knitted items. Today, if you go to their website, you'll find a loud disclaimer: "The Knits for Nature program is closed," it says, in bold italics. "Please note that we do not require any further penguin jumpers at this time." (If people would like to help the Penguin Foundation, Jones emphasizes, the best thing to do is donate.)
The Penguin Foundation is far from the only group to have unwittingly set off an avalanche of tiny animal clothes. On January 7, 2015, after a rash of bushfires injured dozens of koalas in South Australia, the International Fund for Animal Welfare put out a call for cotton mittens to help the animals' paws heal. Within two days, they were set for the entire season. One woman from the UK recently quit her job in order to make more jackets and hats for rescue greyhounds. Crafters are perennially knitting sweaters for retired battery hens, even when the need is not immediate.
Even when direct contributions aren't possible, knit-clad rescue animals get an outsized amount of attention. This past winter, the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center, in northern India, dressed their pachyderms in giant sweaters to get them through a cold snap. Rather than outsourcing their knitting to concerned fans, Wildlife SOS taught women from the local Kalandar community to make them, as part of an empowerment initiative.
For a few weeks, you couldn't surf the internet without running into a picture of an elephant traipsing around in a patterned sweater. "The story definitely garnered a large response [from] supporters and donors," wrote the organization's co-founder, Kartick Satyanaryan, in an email.
All of this is extremely understandable. "In this day and age, when so many terrible things are happening, people find comfort in doing things for others," says Eisenmann. Jones agrees: "There is something very rewarding about sitting down and creating, with your own hands, something that will help another." And animals in sweaters have a self-evident appeal: they're cute, they're ungainly, and—when they're wild—a snuggly outfit makes them seem suddenly accessible, as though they've chosen to be part of our world. And unlike dressing up your dog, clothing a cold bird doesn't bring down the wrath of the RSPCA, or PETA.
But there may be something more to it than that. A battery hen is naked because she's spent her life in a tiny cage, laying eggs. A burned koala is suffering the consequences of human-caused climate change. Many naked birds—though not those, like Rhea, with Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease—lose feathers due to stress. Even a besweatered chihuahua is chilly because he's been moved from his natural habitat, the Central American desert, to a cold New England suburb.
Knitting a sweater for one of these creatures—or an oily penguin, or a cold elephant—can be seen as a fuzzy way of saying "sorry." That it plays great on Instagram is just a bonus.
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Sometime around 1977, John Moore of Truro, Massachusetts came back from a long beach drive and parked his beloved white Jeep Wagoneer in the garage.
This past Friday—February 24th, 2017—the Jeep finally came out again. As an excavator yanked it from under the sand, it emerged in crumpled pieces, its once-white exterior coated with rust.
As the property's current owner, John Musnuff, explained to the Cape Cod Times, Moore stopped taking his Wagoneer out after he began having trouble with the fuel line. Soon enough, nature took over. Sand began blowing into and over the car, and a whole dune eventually collapsed on top of the shed. For decades, "the Jeep sat entombed in the garage," the Times writes.
But this year, the town decided to let the sand have its way. On Friday, workers hired by the Conservation Commission dragged out the mangled body of the Wagoneer, to make space for the dune to continue to move across the beach. Musnuff popped off the car's hubcaps, for memory's sake, and watched as it was trucked off to spend the rest of its life, presumably, in a more appropriate landfill.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On Ricker Mountain in Vermont's Little River State Park you'll find an abandoned farming community. The mountain is covered with stone walls, cellar holes, the remnants of a sawmill, and a cemetery.
The community was established in 1816 by Joseph Ricker. The community didn't pick up until the railroad came through the area, but once it did some 50 families settled in Ricker's basin. They thrived for a little while, building a school house, trading post, and several sawmills, but soil issues proved unsurmountable. By the end of the 1800s most families had picked up and left.
The timber industry continued in Ricker Basin, but they, too eventually closed. A disastrous flood in 1934 sealed the fate of the few families still residing on the mountain. The waters forced many residents onto their roofs, and nearly 50 people drowned. When a dam was built the next year, some of the now deserted Ricker community was submerged.
The remains of the community are few, but worth exploring. The foundations of houses and stone walls still stand. Only one full house is still standing, Almeron Goodell's farmhouse, which is in good enough shape to this day that hikers are allowed entry. It is, however, quickly dilapidating, and its rotting wood is covered in graffiti.
There are lots of artifacts to be found among the leaves, such as glass bottles and farming tools dating back to the area's first settlement. There is a tradition amongst hikers of arraying the items along the tops of cellar holes or propped up against trees near the trail for the benefit of others to come.
At last night's Oscars, three unexpected words sent spectators into a state of bewilderment. No, not "La La Land"—"animatronic horse puppet."
Over an hour before the Best Picture announcement was bungled, presenters Leslie Mann and John Cho made reference to a robotic horse created by Creature Effects, Inc. The makers of this all-synthetic, animatronic creature scored an Sci-Tech Oscar at a ceremony held on February 11, with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences praising them for providing "increased actor safety, close integration with live action, and improved realism for filmmakers."
So, what does an Oscar-winning animatronic horse look like? Thankfully, Creature Effects has a YouTube channel. Let's take a look.
The horse, developed by Mark Rappaport, Scott Oshita, Jeff Cruts, and Todd Minobe, was originally created for the 2003 horseracing film Seabiscuit. In the video above you can see its lifelike eye movements and chewing.
Test footage from the "Luck" horse model shows how convincing the puppet is in race mode. It's only when the camera pulls back to reveal a metal frame that you realize the creature has been created by humans.
A flipping test from behind the scenes of the movie 300 reveals how the artificial horse integrates with actual equines.
And finally, in the video above, shot on location during the filming of True Grit, you can see an eye-patched Jeff Bridges enthusiastically waving dual pistols while sitting astride a moving fake-horse rig. Now that's Oscar-worthy.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
For refined, upper-class ladies in 16th-century Europe, getting a tan, especially on your face, was not a good look.
The implication of such coloring was that one must work outside, and thus, quite possibly be poor (cue gasps and swooning faints). So to make sure they didn’t get burned, some 16th-century ladies wore face masks called visards (or vizards) that covered their delicate visages. Unfortunately, the masks also made it so they couldn’t speak. And, look as if they belonged to an evil cult.
The visard was a very simple mask that nonetheless made quite an impression. Only a handful of surviving visards have ever been found. Luckily, the most intact specimen, the “Daventry Mask,” gives a clear picture of a visard’s construction. Found tucked away in the wall of a 16th-century stone building near the town of Daventry in Northamptonshire, the mask consists of an outer layer of black velvet, followed by layers of pressed paper, with a lining of silk on the inside. The oval face covering extends out to accommodate the nose, and there are small holes for eyeholes and an opening for the mouth.
Along with the mask, a small glass bead was discovered that would have been attached to a string behind the visard’s mouth hole. This bead (sometimes a button) was how the visard was kept on the face. As opposed to unseemly head straps, a lady sporting a visard would hold the bead between her teeth to keep the mask in place. If she wanted to talk, she'd have to remove the mask. This had the side effect of essentially silencing the wearer. In the Elizabethan era, when visards were at their pinnacle of popularity, this silence was generally viewed as adding mystery to a lady’s character.
One of the earliest references to such masks comes from a 1575 text called Description of England in Shakespeare’s Youth. The author describes the wearing of masks coming to England from a trend that started in France. For a time after the trend caught on, the visard was a high fashion item among the rich and socially active. In fact, one of the only other surviving examples of a visard is an accessory for a doll, rather than a full-size mask. The visard had apparently become so popular that even children’s toys were incorporating them. But the inherent creepiness of a blank, black face mask was apparently not lost on everyone.
In 1583, the Christian polemicist Phillip Stubbes released a pamphlet called The Anatomy of Abuses. Among various other screeds (one chapter is titled “On the evils and punishment of whoredom”), Stubbes describes what he sees as the horrors of the visard, writing:
When they use to ride abrod they have invisories, or visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, hee would think hee met a monster or a devil, for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them.
Despite their unsettling and silencing influence, visards are believed to have remained in vogue until at least the 17th century before fading into historical obscurity. Similar masks can be seen in paintings as late the 18th century. Today's fashion trends will no doubt look strange or creepy in a few centuries, but even in that far future, visards will still be high on the list of history's most terrifying fashion moments.
Friday night in Calgary, Theresa and Richard Couch had just sat down to take in a hockey game, when, a few minutes later, Theresa told the CBC, they "heard an explosion."
"Then my husband went into the hallway," she added, "and there was ice all over the rug and debris, and all the way down the stairs into the basement and a big, huge hole in the ceiling."
The Couches home had been hit by a falling piece of ice, but not just any falling piece: one which originated from a Bombardier Q400, a small jet operated by WestJet, a Canadian airline. The jet, the airline said, was approaching Calgary after flying in from Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
No one was hurt in the incident, but an investigation is now underway. Meanwhile, the airline said, they told the Couches that they would be paying for the damage.
Still, Theresa Couch said they remained a little spooked. They've lived in the same home for over four decades, though, in the past couple of years, airplanes flying overhead have become a much more consistent presence.
In the past decades, the number of wildfires in the U.S. has spiraled upwards, as has the cost of fighting them: In recent years, by the end of the fire season, the Forest Service has usually exhausted its budget. According to a new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one factor contributing to the increasing impact of wildfire is how often humans ignite them.
The team of researchers found that, from 1992 to 2012, people were responsible for starting 84 percent of wildfires and that, in most of the U.S., it's more common from humans to start wildfires than for lightning to ignite them, as they report in the new paper.
The researchers looked at 1.5 million government records of wildfires that state or federal agencies had to extinguish or manage—wildfires that posed a threat of some sort. Of the 1.5 million fires in their dataset, lightning was responsible for more than 245,000 wildfires; humans were responsible for more than 1,272,000.
The maps above shows where human-ignited fires dominate (the dots in orange and red). The only place in the country where lightning is the main cause of wildfires, the researchers found, is in mountainous parts of the west, where few people live.
Human-ignited fires, the researchers also found, are adding months to the fire season. Whereas lightning-ignited fires happen mostly in the summer months, when fuel is dry and lightning more common, wildfires started by humans are more common in the spring months in the east and in the fall months in the west.
This map shows the season in which lightning is most likely to cause fires. For most places in the country, these fires are most common in the summer:
For comparison, here's a map showing the season in which humans most likely to cause fires. In the east, human-ignited fires are most common in March, April, and May; the majority of those are started when people burn small piles of debris, like leaves or trash. In parts of the south and the west, human-ignited fires are more common in September, October, and November than in other seasons. (The single day on which people cause the greatest number of wildfires? July 4th.)
"We know globally that climate change is extending the fire season by a couple of weeks," says Jennifer Balch, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Colorado and the paper's lead author. "The fact that people are extending it by months is striking."
The dataset used for this research was compiled by a Forest Service researcher who made it publicly available. Balch and her colleagues stumbled upon it and noticed that, because the data included the cause of the fires, they could look at the spatial and temporal distribution of wildfires started by humans vs. wildfires started by lightning.
Many of the wildfires in the dataset—most of the fire started by debris-burning, for example—are relatively small, but still pose a risk. But people are also playing a role in starting the big wildfires that have run up firefighting expenses and threatened large swaths of land: the most expensive fire in 2016, Balch points out, began after a campfire wasn't properly extinguished.
The solution, though, may be to better manage the fires human do set—more prescribed burns and control burns, the type of fires that can burn up fuel without endangering either ecosystems or the human settlements. "Given that we're already starting wildfires, we should be starting more of the right kind," Balch says.
On Friday, at the Tappan Zee Manor Nursing Home in Central Nyack, New York—about 25 miles north of Manhattan—two hand grenades were found, perched in the top shelf of a refrigerator door, where one might ordinarily stash a can of Coke or maybe the ketchup.
Clarkstown (N.Y.) police did not say who made the discovery, or where the grenades came from, except to state that they appeared to be World War II-era devices, and were found in a fridge owned by a 91-year-old man.
The building was soon evacuated after the discovery while a county bomb squad came and took the grenades away for analysis and disposal. Whether the grenades, one of which was a training grenade, were live is one thing officers are trying to find out.
It's also still unclear who they belonged to; the refrigerator's owner, was "out for treatment," when the grenades were found, the police said.
Please don't keep grenades, live or otherwise, in your fridge.
Like some community-minded version of Pixar’s Up, the city of St. Louis has picked up a resident's historic home and moved it across town, almost like it was built for travel.
As St. Louis Public Radio is reporting, the move was made to accommodate the construction of a new National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency facility which will be built on the house’s former site (and surrounding 100 acres.) The other homes and businesses that also sat on the acreage were vacated last year, but the historic building that once sat at 2530 North Market Street was the only one yet to be moved.
The house is home to Charlesetta Taylor, who first moved in when she was just 10, in 1945. Her and her family have lived in the home ever since. After initially protesting the building of the NGIA facility, Taylor was able to work out a solution with the city.
To transport the three-story, 367-ton home, a private company called Expert House Movers lifted the building onto some wheels, and drove it at a leisurely pace to its new address.
Taylor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the city, "did not have enough money to buy all the memories and the wonderful things that money can’t buy.”
After some financial calculation, the city came to agree, in a way. The move is set to cost St. Louis around $500,000, or about what they might have paid had the matter wound up in court, a city official told St. Louis Public Radio.
The move, the official said, ultimately was a "win-win."
These days, climate scientists are looking hard at Arctic maps. As winter sea ice shrinks and cracks appear, they try to understand the reasons for these changes, and determine what we should expect in the future. Centuries ago, though, when people tried to map the Arctic, they weren't too concerned with what was happening to it—they just wanted to know what the heck was up there. And, if they didn't know, they pretty much made it up. Such was the case with the first known map of the Arctic: the Septentrionalium Terrarum, which is filled with magnetic stones, strange whirlpools, and other colorful guesses.
The map's creator, the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator, is best known for the "Mercator projection," the now-famed method of taking the curved lines of the Earth and transforming them into straight ones that can be used on a flat map. The Mercator projection was invented for sailors, who, thanks to its design, could use it to plot a straight-line course from their point of origin to their destination. In 1569, Mercator came out with a map of the world based on this principal, which stretched from East to West and promised, in his words, "no trace… of any of those errors which must necessarily be encountered on the ordinary charts of shipmasters."
In order to make his map useful for navigation, though, Mercator had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas—specifically, he had to stretch out the top and bottom parts of his map, making the lands and seas in the far North and South appear disproportionately larger than those nearer the equator. (This is also why so many people think Africa is the same size as Greenland, when it is really about 14 times bigger—the Mercator projection is still very common in schools.)
Under the terms of this Mercator math, the North Pole would appear so large as to be almost infinite. So instead of including it in the overall projection, Mercator decided to set a small, top-down view of the Arctic in the bottom left corner of his world map. Geographical historians consider this to be the first true map of the Arctic. Over the subsequent decades, as new information came to light, Mercator and his protégés enlarged and updated this original map—the draft above is an attempt from 1606, updated by his successor, Jodocus Hondius—but those original bones remained in place.
By the 1500s, not very many people had ventured up to the Arctic—no explorer would set foot on the Pole itself until 1909. This didn't stop Mercator, who dug into some dicey sources to suss out what he should include. The most influential, called Inventio Fortunata (translation: "Fortunate Discoveries") was a 14th-century travelogue written by an unknown source; in Mercator's words, it traced the travels of "an English minor friar of Oxford" who traveled to Norway and then "pushed on further by magical arts." This mysterious book gave Mercator the centerpiece of his map: a massive rock located exactly at the pole, which he labels Rupus Nigra et Altissima, or "Black, Very High Cliff."
The presence of this formation was widely accepted at the time. Most people thought it was magnetic, which provided an easy explanation for why compasses point north. But Mercator was not quite convinced by this argument, and included a different rock, which he labels "Magnetic Pole," in the top left corner of the map, just north of the Strait of Anián.
Mercator draws the Arctic in four large chunks separated by channels of flowing water, which meet in the middle in a giant whirlpool. He got this idea from two 16th-century explorers, Martin Frobisher and James Davis, who each made it as far as what is now Northern Canada. Both documented their experiences with vicious currents, which, they wrote, pulled giant icebergs along like they were nothing. "Without cease, it is carried northward, there being absorbed into the bowels of the Earth," Mercator wrote on his original map.
Each piece of the Arctic also has particular qualities. According to Mercator's labels, the one in the lower right is supposedly home to "pygmies, whose length is four feet"—likely another reference to the Inventio Fortunata, which described groups of small-statured people living in the polar regions. (It's possible that the author of the Inventio was referring to the indigenous inhabitants of Lapland.) The one next door, on the bottom left, is apparently "the best and most salubrious" of all the chunks, although no evidence is given to support this—or to explain why the pygmies wouldn't want to live there, instead.
After Mercator died in 1594, explorers continued to gain new knowledge of the Arctic, and cartographers revised their view of both Poles. By 1636, up-to-date maps of the region lacked Mercator's four regions, along with the Rupus Nigra and the central whirlpool. Instead, they showed one large piece of land, surrounded by smaller islands and, often, adorned with the ship's routes that enabled this geographical knowledge in the first place. As we peer at modern Arctic maps, wondering what changes are ahead, it's fascinating to think back to Mercator's original version, mysterious and broken from the beginning.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
In a quiet corner of Hamburg's Hafencity, an industrial area along the River Elbe, there is a tiny restaurant made from dark red Oldenburg brick, with “Oberhafen-Kantine” unevenly spread across its pointy-arched windows. Nearly a hundred years of storm floods have washed out the soil beneath the historic lunch spot, resulting in a jaunty dip forward that only adds to its humble charm.
The Oberhafen-Kantine–roughly translated, “upper port canteen,” started serving lunch to dockworkers in the 1920s. At the time, drinking was proving to be a considerable problem among the workers. So, inspired by similar establishment in Great Britain, in 1925 Hermann Sparr opened Oberhafen-Kantine as a Kaffeeklappe–a coffee shop or diner–where locals could have a meal and a cup of coffee, but avoid the temptation of alcohol.
The Oberhafen-Kantine was built next to the 1906 Oberhafenbrücke, a narrow two-tiered railroad and pedestrian bridge. When it proved too small for the city's growing rail traffic, it was replaced with the current, wider version that zips right over the top of the restaurant’s first floor.
Luckily neither the proximity of the bridge nor the rumble of the trains put them out of business, and the Oberhafen-kantine stayed in the Sparr family until the death of Hermann’s daughter Anita in 1997. The crooked little building’s luck then ran out, and once the business closed it was boarded up, deemed unsafe, fenced in, and abandoned.
It stayed in a dilapidated state until the year 2000, when it was declared a landmark. In 2002 it was bought by the owner of the activist cultural center Rote Flora , and a complete renovation was completed in 2005. Severe flooding struck again in 2007 and 2014, but both times the Oberhafen-Kantine, the very last of the old Kaffeeklappes, was restored.
Tucked away in the heart of Brussels is Maison de la Bellone, an arts center that represents the city's past and present in both form and function.
The venue was built in the late 17th century—around 1697—by sculptor and architect Jean Cosyn, who is best known for designing Brussels’ Grand Place.
La Bellone (as it’s often referred to) was named after Bellona, the Ancient Roman goddess of war, whose figure towers over the main door. The facade is also decorated with motifs celebrating the 1697 Battle of Zenta, an important Austrian victory over the Turkish Empire.
The house was acquired by Nicolas Bally and his wife Gertrude de Smeth immediately after its construction, though not much is known about the couple, nor how they used the estate. The building was acquired by the city in 1913, and has undergone several restorations in the nearly 100 years since, including the 1995 addition of its distinctive glass roof by architect Olivier Noterman.
Today, a hall and a covered passageway open up to a courtyard where the curved glass roof protects the house in addition to creating a space for events ranging from exhibitions to meetings to musical performances. La Bellone also serves as a cultural center, information center, and arts library.
Metal detecting—let’s face it—can be kind of boring. Often, you can go searching and find nothing; more often, when you do find something, it’s trash.
Two British men, Mark Hambleton and Joe Kania, first tried metal detecting about 20 years ago, but, as The Guardian reports, the two friends “became so bored that they gave up the hobby.” Instead, they turned to the slightly more scintillating hobby of fishing.
But Hambleton’s father, himself a fan of metal detecting, pushed them to pick up their old hobby again. One of the places the two friends searched was a field in Staffordshire that they had searched 20 years earlier, during their first metal-detecting foray.
Once again, they started getting bored. But right when they were thinking of heading home, Kania found something. It was gold.
The pair had discovered four pieces of gold jewelry that date back to the iron age. The “torcs” are curves of ornamented gold, three meant to go around a person’s neck, one sized for a wrist. “Hambleton nervously kept the gold by his bed overnight until they could report the find,” The Guardian says.
By law, finds like this one must be reported the British government; the two men will receive a reward, which they will split with the landowner who owns the field where they were found. Archaeologists descended on the field to look for other artifacts but so far none have been found—just the four gold pieces that had been hiding in the field for ages.
Sometimes, when one truck ruins your day, another comes to your rescue. Seattle commuters were reminded of this yesterday morning, when a giant tanker caused a massive traffic jam, and a quick-thinking taco truck made the whole mess just a little better.
According to the Seattle Times, it all started Monday morning at 10 a.m., when a massive tanker full of propane overturned on Interstate 5, jamming the freeway in both directions. As commuters frantically tried to escape, the surrounding streets got blocked up, too, causing a massive gridlock. All in all, the highway was closed for about eight hours, the Times reports.
One vehicle caught up in the crush was a food truck from Tacos El Tajin. The self-declared "Best Mexican Food Truck in Seattle," Tacos El Tajin serves tortas, burritos, gorditas and a lot of other treats that make, say, hours-long imprisonment in one's own car slightly more bearable. With this in mind, around noon, employees decided to fire up the taco truck and start selling lunch.
Rachael and Mike McQuade, who were en route to the doctor when they got stuck, enjoyed two steak and two chicken tacos while missing their appointment. In a cell phone video shared by K5 News, Rachael creeps between rows of stalled cars, bemoaning how close she is to the choke point: "I can see the police cars," she groans. Then she swings around to look the other way, her voice brightening: "And I can smell tacos."
"We are ready to serve food, anywhere," Thomas Lopez, the owner of El Tajin, said later. Who needs propane when you've got this kind of fuel?
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
During the First World War, a menagerie of animals became honorary soldiers in the American army. Whether for the sake of comfort, combat, or ceremonial pride, different World War I U.S. military regiments adopted animals into their ranks—from several species of canine to the more unusual raccoon and baby alligator.
Recent photos digitized by the National Archives reveal the range of animal mascots employed during World War I and the relationships soldiers had with these creatures.
The battlefields of World War I were torn up and destroyed by new machine-based warfare. Tanks, airplanes, machine guns, and mustard gas transformed the trenches of the Western Front into a wasteland. Amid these trying conditions, animals were a source of consolation and familiarity.
“The very presence of animals was a key link with ordinary pre-war life for the soldiers of 1914 to 1918,” wrote Tim Cook in Canada’s History.
Dogs, cats, foxes, and even lion cubs provided soldiers comfort and kinship as pets and boosted morale as mascots.
But they weren't just there to be friendly and encouraging—they performed military duties, too. Units of both the Allies and Central Powers used tens of thousands of homing pigeons to relay messages due to their agility and ability to fly high above trenches, including Cher Ami the pigeon that saved 194 soldiers with the message he delivered at the expense of his life. Dogs were intelligent sentries and rescuers. They helped lay telephone wires, while one Boston Bull Terrier, Sergeant Stubby, was even able to sniff out and alert soldiers of the presence of mustard gas. Some dogs trained to parachute behind enemy lines.
Unfortunately, these animal soldiers and mascots were also casualties of war. The German military brought down carrier pigeons with hawks and falcons, as well as machine gun fire. An estimated nearly eight million horses that moved supplies and soldiers died during the four years of World War I, according toThe Atlantic. Many were slaughtered to serve as food and, gruesomely, mattresses, wrote Steven Johnston in Political Research Quarterly.
The horrid deaths and living conditions appalled military officials from multiple nations, some of whom made strides to protect and improve the care for animals used in warfare. Canadian veterinary officer Major D.S. Tamblyn created a service dispatching veterinary sergeants on patrols to care for abandoned horses, wrote Cook.
“I deem this step necessary as a number of cases have been brought to my notice of animals being left to die on the roadside,” Tamblyn once wrote. “I trust this will eliminate such cruelty.”
In June 27, 1916, the American Red Star Animal Relief organization was founded by the American Humane Association as a kind of Red Cross for U.S. Army animals, according to The National Museum of American History. The organization sought to help the health of animals by recruiting veterinarians, blacksmiths, and stable hands, and published educational pamphlets that gave guidance on first aid for horses. Similarly, the British government recognized the value of messenger pigeons and created the British Defence of the Realm Act, which declared it a crime to kill, wound, molest, or not take adequate care of pigeons.
Military mascots were rewarded and memorialized for their service. Many mascots received official military personnel files like soldiers, giving them authenticity. Others, like Cher Ami the pigeon and tough canine Sergeant Stubby, have been stuffed and preserved as war heroes at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Devil's Kettle, in Grand Marais, Minnesota, contains two streams: one, the waterfall itself, and a second stream (above left) that disappears down a hole.
For years, people have been trying to figure out where the water from the second disappearing stream ends up. Ping-pong balls and various dyes have been added to the water in an attempt to find its exit, but, until recently, no one could come up with a conclusive answer to where it went.
But this month, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, a magazine put out by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, published what scientists now think is the answer: the water, they say, rather than ultimately ending up in nearby Lake Superior, as previously theorized, actually ends up further downstream in the Brule River.
Their evidence? Water-flow volume, measured before and after the waterfall, their theory being that if the water actually ended up in the lake, the water flow downstream from the waterfall should be demonstrably less.
But it turns out that it isn't, according to their tests. Before the waterfall, 123 cubic feet of water moves per second, whereas after, they found, 121 cubic feet of water was moving per second.
"In the world of stream gauging, those two numbers are essentially the same and are within the tolerances of the equipment," Jeff Green, a hydrologist with the Minnesota DNR told the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer.
The only thing to do now is confirm their theory once and for all, which they will try to do—as others have in the past—with a dye. This particular dye is visible at 10 parts per billion, they said, meaning that it has a better chance of showing up somewhere than, say, some ping-pong balls. That's because, as Calvin Alexander, another scientist working on the project, explains, "The plunge pool below the kettle is an unbelievably powerful system of recirculating currents, capable of disintegrating material and holding it under water until it resurfaces at some point downstream."
Larger objects, in other words, are at risk of simply being destroyed, meaning that the Devil's Kettle, perhaps than more than previously thought, has been earning its moniker all this time.
Finding an anonymous text, if you don't know which one, exactly, you're looking for, can be difficult, if not impossible. When Emily Kopley, a scholar of British and American literature, was first researching anonymous texts, she would try searching in library catalogs for a variety of terms: "by anonymous"... "no author"... "by a lady."
But in the period she was researching, the early 20th century, signing a book "by a lady" was old-fashioned. Few people signed "by anonymous." Anonymous books wouldn't necessarily be catalogued as "no author," either—there's no agreed-upon system, among libraries, about how to list anonymous or pseudonymous books.
"It's really hard to find them," says Kopley. She had more success looking in scholarly databases, where she could turn up examples that others had written about, and in collections of book reviews. But those searches revealed anonymous texts that were already known, in some way. "The hardest thing is to find a completely unknown or unstudied author who was anonymous or pseudonymous," she says.
At one point in the history of literature, anonymous and pseudonymous texts were common, even dominant. But at the end of the 19th century, as the number of texts being published grew, the percentage and, most likely, the absolute number of anonymous texts being published began to shrink. By their nature, and because there was no agreed upon way to catalog such texts, they're difficult to surface in libraries and archives; as a group, they're hidden away in larger collections. They blend into the crowd.
As Researcher-in-Residence at Montreal's Concordia University Library, a newly created position meant to promote a culture of research, Kopley is searching for ways to resurface and expose anonymous texts. Part of her job is to work with librarians to develop ways to catalog and search for anonymous texts that could make them easier to find. If there were a way to find them and see them more clearly, she reasons, it would be possible to better understand how the use of anonymity has changed—why writers choose to remain anonymous.
There are many reasons authors choose to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym: to make a controversial political argument or a satirical jab; for women, especially in the past, to maintain their modesty or gain the advantages accorded to a man; to, paradoxically, gin up attention and sales by keeping their identity secret. Plus, when the world of English-language publishing was smaller, publishing anonymously didn't mean giving up acclaim.
"When anonymity and pseudonymity were so common... you have a lot of open secrets. People often know who the authors are," says Kopley.
In an earlier age of publishing, it was possible, too, to keep better track of every book that was published. Still, anonymous texts were always a bit slippery. The most comprehensive record of such books in English is the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, first conceived in the 1850s and published in 1882. The book was meant to be "a reference book gathering information about known authors of anonymous works," as Leah Orr, an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, writes in a recent article on the "dangers" of using the book. It turned out to be an enormous undertaking: its original editor and his successor both died before it was published.
To create the dictionary, its editors relied on information from librarians, bibliographers, and sympathetic researchers who sent in tips and references. But the task they had set themselves was so massive that it was impractical to verify the accuracy of every entry. As a result, the dictionary is an unreliable reference book. As Orr writes, "the evidence cited in the Dictionary is vague, mistaken, or simply not acceptable by the standards of twenty-first century scholarship."
Efforts to develop a cataloguing system for anonymous texts were also limited. In an article on anonymous texts, Kopley writes about the wonderfully named Henry Guppy, a British librarian who in 1901 published a pamphlet on "The Cataloguing of Anonymous Literature," which is, Kopley says, is the only effort she has found to systemize record-keeping for these texts. Guppy's suggestions were limited and wouldn't have made a general search for anonymous texts easier, but he made, at least, a stab at the problem.
Even Guppy's simple ideas were not adopted, though. "There is no agreed-upon way of cataloguing anonymous texts, and thus no way to search for them," says Kopley. "Every library has its own system."
Kopley first became interested in anonymous texts after reading the nostalgic laments of British writers in the 1920s and 1930s for "Anon," the unnamed author so many past works. At a time when authors were more often being treated as celebrities, writers such as Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and James Joyce saw virtue in an older way of making art, where authorship mattered less and communities participated more directly in the creation of poems and plays.
But without the ability to easily surface anonymous texts, it is difficult to understand how the use of anonymity has changed over time and why. Kopley's initial research suggests that anonymous authors in the 20th century had many of the same motives as those in the 19th century. Women may have felt it less necessary to choose anonymity over time, but there were still autobiographical accounts that dealt with controversial or charged experiences—homosexual relationships, passing as white, living in Nazi Germany—that relied on the protection anonymity provided.
"The big question is, why do I think finding these texts will be rewarding?" says Kopley. "There are many many neglected novels and other books from earlier eras. Why should an anonymous one or pseudonymous one be more interesting or rewarding? My hope is that there might be more of a narrative to tell about these books. Already there’s an intrigue. There’s a plot. Who is the author? Why are they concealing themselves?"
Because these texts are difficult to surface, they are also in danger of being forgotten, even though they might be kept safe for posterity in libraries. These authors may not have wanted attention called to themselves, but "they may have wanted their work to remain," says Kopley. "In fact, the grim truth is you can’t have one without the other. Their work is forgotten because they signed anonymously or pseudonymously."
If Kopley, along with the librarians she's collaborating with at Concordia, can find a way to rediscover such texts, they could also keep these hidden books from disappearing from memory entirely.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Courtroom drama may be one of our greatest televised resources.
Reality-based shows that take place in a courtroom—of the actual kind, the high concept kind, and the heavily plotted kind—have proven one of the easiest ways to draw a consistent audience since television entered American lives in the 1950s.
Judge Joseph A. Wapner, who died on Sunday at the age of 97, started the trend, and defined it perhaps better than anyone. The longtime People’s Court judge spent 12 years calling balls and strikes in a courtroom that few physically walked into but many were familiar with.
And despite the fact that most of the cases did not reach the level of, say, constitutional law, he saw his role as incredibly important in its own way.
“The disputes are not really small,” Wapner explained in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “The amount of money might be small, but you could sue for a million dollars—because a million dollars are involved—but the same principles of law are involved there as with a case involving 75 cents.”
“This man spent $6 to file the case, $14 to serve the papers—he’s spending $20 just to get his 75 cents back,” Wapner recalled of the case in 1986, which, like many People’s Court cases, was pulled from small claims courts in California’s legal system. “I ruled for the man with the beer.”
Warner, who served as a judge in the state of California prior to his television career, was not the first member of his family to appear on a court show: His father, Max Wapner, was a lawyer on the original (dramatized) version of Divorce Court, which aired from 1957 to 1962. (Yes, the original version of that show used actual lawyers.)
But of course, Wapner wasn’t the only star of this show, nor has he been the only host.
For example, longtime People’s Court host Doug Llewelyn lasted about as long as Wapner did, though he’s largely disappeared from the TV airwaves—replaced by TMZ founder Harvey Levin, who still hosts the show despite running one of the internet’s most important websites. (Llewelyn, oddly enough, has also had some music video credits to his name. He was the announcer in Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, and also starred in a Weird Al video, arm-in-arm with a sumo wrestler.)
And Wapner’s longtime bailiff, Rusty Burrell, had a lot in common with his TV boss. Both had a longtime background in the California court system. Burrell was a bailiff on some high-profile cases, such as the trials of Charles Manson and Patty Hearst. Burrell often worked with Wapner—and also spent some time on Divorce Court.
Since Wapner’s departure, the show has since gone through a variety of hosts:
Judge Judy’s husband, Jerry Sheindlin, hosted the show after Koch—which we’re assuming made for a weird couple of years in the Sheindlin household.
Marilyn Milian, the current host of the show, has been on the air longer than Wapner has. She came up from the Florida court system, and had been appointed to her role by Janet Reno in the ‘90s. She may no longer be an actual judge, but she still has close ties to her former circuit—because, until earlier this year, her husband had her old job.
Of course, Judge Wapner set the form—not just for his show, but for every other one to come, scripted or not.
Wapner's version of The People's Court ended with its cancellation in 1993, or a year before the O.J. Simpson case, which was branded the Trial of the Century. And for a minute it looked like such gavel-to-gavel coverage of the court system might become a staple of American TV, but what has endured more powerfully instead is what Wapner started: television court shows, despite their lower stakes, perhaps in part because they were an early form of now-ubiquitous reality TV.
Why is that? A couple things: One, it’s a format everyone knows, and two, the shows are cheap to produce. Judge Joe Brown and Judge Alex can fill up a lot of airtime without requiring writers or paid actors. Even if their ratings suck, in other words, they still come out ahead.
And even big-name stars don’t push up the prices too much: It costs roughly $10 million to produce a season of Judge Judy, not factoring in the yearly salary of Judge Judy Sheindlin. Despite the judge’s massive salary, said to be $47 million per year, the show is a huge moneymaker for CBS Television, driving over $200 million in revenue yearly.
That potential for success is probably why “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville attempted to get a court show of his own in 2014. It didn’t go through, but there is a glorious pilot online.
But there may be one other factor behind the success of court-based shows, whether in reality or dramatic format: You’re guaranteed conflict and resolution, which makes it perfect television.
Just don’t expect what shows up on the screen to match real life, however.
How far off is it? This was a question the American Bar Association covered at its 2014 annual meeting. A few key points touched upon during a panel discussion:
In real life, there’s a lot less bending of the law than you think: University of Maryland law professor Taunya Lovell Banks suggests that ethics are a lot more important than many shows imply. “One of my biggest problems with a lot of the shows is that there are never any consequences when lawyers act in unethical ways,’’ Banks explained. “I find myself having to spend the first five minutes of my class—especially my first-year class—saying: ‘you cannot do this; if you do this you will lose your license.’”
Good drama doesn’t make good law: Richard Sweren, a onetime criminal defense lawyer and noted writer for the Law and Order franchise, noted that, even with his legal background, he ultimately has to focus less on the law, and more on the plot. “I had to put my legal education, and ethical … all that aside,” he explained. “What makes the best drama? That’s what counts.”
Legal dramas influence our perception of the courtroom: NYU Law School Senior Fellow Thane Rosenbaum, who moderated the panel, noted that the law often defines the way that we think of what happens in the justice system. It’s a little more complicated than that, however. “People want to believe that the law not only can provide moral outcomes but that it can discover the truth and that the truth is ultimately the most important thing,” Rosenbaum said.
Author Sarah Kozinn, in a 2015 book on the topic, suggested this problem of television courtrooms changing our perception of actual courtrooms was systemic.
“Like millions of Americans who have never set foot inside an actual courtroom, their first introductions to the legal process might well be through cultural representations of trials in plays, films, books, and television shows,” Kozinn wrote in Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Law. “So, it is probable that a program like Judge Judy could constitute a substantial part of someone’s knowledge of the legal process.”
In any case, the somewhat convoluted setup of the court show makes it easy to mock the form.
During the final season of the first run of Arrested Development, in an episode produced at a point when the show’s creators knew the series was about to get canned, there was a pretty epic meta-commentary on court shows.
It was one of the better gags in the series, and a great reminder that courtroom scenes in television shows aren’t actually like the real thing—no matter what Law and Order or Matlock might suggest.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Tourists sailing down the highways toward Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1955 would have been filled with gleeful anticipation. Numerous resorts and roadside offerings were on offer to sate their recreational lust: They could drop into the Arkansas Alligator Farm and mingle with the toothsome reptiles, ooh and awe at celebrity likenesses at the Josephine Tussaud Wax Museum, or delight in the animated miniatures of Tiny Town. Or they could go to the newly opened I.Q. Zoo and watch Casey the chicken play baseball, a duck play the drums, and a rabbit dunk a basketball, to name just a few oddities.
I.Q. Zoo was the brainchild of a psychologist couple, Marian and Keller Breland, who not too long before had been working alongside the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner to train pigeons to pilot the first “smart bombs” for the United States government.
Born in 1920 in Minnesota, Marian Kruse was whip-smart, with dark hair and a gentle smile. Her parents affectionately called her “Mouse,” a nickname that stuck for life. Young Marian loved Black Beauty and begged her dad to move to a farm.
“As a child, I was terrifically interested in animals,” Marian told an interviewer in 2012. “I was also, although I didn't know it at the time, interested in the humane treatment of animals.”
After graduating high school as valedictorian, Marian landed a spot in a University of Minnesota psychology class taught by Skinner, the influential psychologist who earned fame (and a long teaching post at Harvard) for his theories, notably “operant conditioning,” the idea that free will is an illusion and behavior is dictated by the negative and positive results it produces. Marian became a favorite student of his; she proofed Skinner’s writings, and even babysat his kids.
Marian was zipping to the health center for treatment from a lab rat bite when she collided with fellow psychology student Keller Breland. Within a year she would graduate summa cum laude and marry Keller. The Brelands were both trusted assistants and graduate students of Skinner’s when he recruited them in 1942 to work on a top-secret government assignment: Project Pelican.
Project Pelican didn’t involve pelicans, but pigeons, a bird Skinner was fond of using in his research. Skinner believed that by following the principles of operant conditioning he could teach them to pilot bombs on the World War II battlefield. The process began with three pigeons encased in the nose-cone of a bomb.
“They had been taught to peck at a target shown on a ground-glass screen in exchange for food,” wrote John N. Marr in his essay Marian Breland Bailey: The Mouse Who Reinforced. “If the bomb deviated from the target, the pigeon's’ pecks at the screen would transmit signals to correct the bomb's heading.”
In 1943, Skinner went to Washington to show off his deadly flock.
“They opened the pigeon chamber and saw three pigeons pecking away,” said Marian. “This caused them several minutes of disbelief, I'd say.”
The pigeons were never deployed. “A variety of reasons had been given,” wrote Marr. “but none related to the birds’ behavior.”
Despite the fate of Project Pelican, a light had been flipped on in the minds of Marian and Keller. If they could train a pigeon to guide a bomb, they reasoned, they could probably train other animals to do extraordinary things. And if they could do that, there was probably money to be made.
They started training animals at their home, and then on a small farm in Minnesota, applying ideas gathered from studying with Skinner. The common practice in animal training was to intimidate and dominate animals; dogs and other creatures were punished for not doing what their owners wanted through physical and verbal reprimands. The Kellers’ took a much gentler approach: they ignored behavior they didn’t want and rewarded behavior they did, typically with food.
This worked remarkably well. Eventually, they started training animals on behalf of General Mills, whose labs they had used when training their bomb birds. Enter the crowd-pleasing chicken: The Brelands trained hens to perform stunts that could be used to promote chicken feed all over the country. Breland chickens played pianos and “asked” for food by pushing a button. They trained a cow to “take quizzes” by pressing light-up “yes” and “no” targets, they trained a pig named Priscilla to knock over a stack of dishes. Word of their incredible success spread and they began training animals for television and film, including Buck the Bunny, a rabbit who starred in commercials for Coast Federal Savings, picking up coins in his mouth and dropping them into a bank.
In 1955, they opened I.Q. Zoo and travelers far and wide were introduced to the wonders of the Breland menagerie. “There is no punishment involved in the training at all,” read an ad for the zoo. “Once they are trained, they will not forget, and are happy and eager to perform.” Visitors, and the media, were enchanted.
“At a little farm near Hot Springs, Ark., I saw a chicken do arithmetic problems and a rooster knock out a tune on a piano. I played a pinball game against a turkey, and invariably lost. I watched a hamster imitate Tarzan on a trapeze, a rabbit play baseball and a dozen chickens swing baseball bats,” reported a Popular Mechanics writer in 1953.
As their success grew, so did the pool of animals they trained. They taught a reindeer to operate a printing press, they trained parrots to balance on soccer balls and rollerskate, goats to push baby carriages, and a cow to play the harmonica. They trained cats, raccoons, squirrels and even dolphins. Chickens remained a perennial favorite, they “did math”, walked on tightropes and played tic tac toe with visitors. Under the banner of their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), they also sold coin-operated displays that housed trained chickens, and these were scattered throughout the country.
Such a contraption in Manhattan’s Chinatown captivated New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, who wrote an ode to the chicken in 1999. “When I tell the chicken story,” he writes, “I always point out that nearly all the people I take down there have precisely the same response to the prospect of playing ticktacktoe with a chicken. After looking the situation over, they say, “The chicken gets to go first!””
Ten years after the opening of I.Q. Zoo, the Brelands had grown supremely confident in their unusual skills.
“I wouldn’t hesitate to sign a contract today to produce a thousand white rats to play tiddly winks,” Keller told the Associated Press in 1962. He would never have the opportunity to accept this challenge before his death, three years later in 1965.
Bereft, Marian also needed help running ABE and the I.Q. Zoo. Help manifested in the form of Bob Bailey, a man who had been training dolphins on behalf of the Navy.
As the Breland’s star was ascending, Bailey was working as a researcher at UCLA’s medical school. One day he spied an ad; the Navy needed a director to head up their new dolphin training program.
“How I ever got the job to this day I do not know,” said Bailey in a 2016 talk. “I had never trained a dolphin in my entire life!”
At a desert base in California, Bailey trained dolphins to detect mines and carry messages and equipment. Among the consultants he called in to help him with the task were the Brelands. And when he grew frustrated with the Navy’s obsession with learning how to communicate with dolphins, he accepted a job at ABE in 1965. After Keller died, Bob took on many of his responsibilities. And Marian and Bob continued to work on behalf of the government.
In addition to the I.Q. Zoo, Bailey told Smithsonian magazine, the team had a special set-up for training animals run covert missions.
“We had a 270-acre farm,” he said. “We built towns. Like a movie set, there’d be only fronts.”
Marian and Bob trained boobies to fly through mazes, pigeons to thwart ambushes, ravens to plant bugs, dogs to locate mines, and cats outfitted with recording equipment to surveil people.
The extent to which these animals were actually used is obscured behind government secrecy, but Bailey told Smithsonian that “We got the ravens into places. We got the cats into places.”
Marian and Bob married in 1976 and ran the I.Q. Zoo and ABE until 1990. Marian passed away in 2001; Bob continues to teach and consult on animal training. The Brelands’ and Bailey’s helped popularize the notion of training through positive reinforcement, not yelling and hitting. Among the other methods they brought to the mainstream was the use of the clicker, a much beloved tool for dog trainers today, including those who work in dog cognition labs.
In his love letter to the Chinatown chicken, Trillen described a 1999 rendezvous with Marian and Bob in California. Both “showed up in matching Hawaiian shirts, as if to underline their status as retired”. But they were nominally retired, because they had just arrived from teaching a class to guide-dog trainers in the methods of operant conditioning. And behind their vehicle they hauled a trailer full of their training tool of choice—chickens.
