An influx of short-eared owls along England's east coast has sparked interest among bird-watchers across the UK eager to see the visitors.

In recent weeks, large numbers of the owls have been spotted at places such as the banks of the Humber estuary.

Wildlife guide Margaret Boyd, from East Yorkshire, said "so many more than normal" had been spotted in the area.

A "shortage of food" in regions like Scandinavia was thought have left the owls looking further afield, she said.

According to the RSPB, short-eared owls were "of European conservation concern" as their numbers were in moderate decline.

A three-month-old child is dead in Alabama after being attacked by a wolf hybrid kept as a pet by the baby's family, officials said Friday.

The Shelby County Sheriff's Office was summoned to residence in Chelsea, Alabama just before 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, the office said in a news release. The call reported an animal attack involving an infant. Deputies, firefighters and animal control officers responded to the scene.

CBS News affiliate WIAT reported that emergency personnel were able to get the three-month-old baby away from the animal and transport the child to Grandview Medical Center, an area hospital.

A RARE fish believed believed to be a precursor of earthquakes has been found washed up on a beach.

Spotting a deep-sea oarfish species is a signal for an impending quake, according to Japanese folklore.

The elongated fish was spotted on the shores of Los Coquitos beach in Pepillo Salcedo, Dominican Republic on Monday.

The oarfish died shortly after.

The sea serpent was eerily located near the Septentrional-Oriente strike-slip Fault Zone, responsible for the 1842 Cap-Haïtien earthquake and tsunami in neighbouring Haiti, which killed approximately 5,300.

Chris Theobald has had many close encounters with wildlife around the world.

But the nature guide's latest interaction on Tasmania's east coast has left him devastated.

He along with two of his colleagues had travelled by boat to Bryans Beach, not far from the popular tourist destination of Wineglass Bay.

It was there they came across more than two dozen pilot whales lying in the shallows on Wednesday morning.

All of them were dead.

"It was pretty heart-wrenching," Mr Theobald said.

A study of the dietary habits and hunting strategies of early humans in the Middle Paleolithic.

In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (SHEP) at the University of Tübingen show that early humans of the Middle Paleolithic had a more varied diet than previously assumed. The analysis of a site in the Zagros Mountains in Iran reveals that around 81,000 to 45,000 years ago, the local hominins hunted ungulates as well as tortoises and carnivores. Birds may also have been on the menu.

As early as the Upper Paleolithic, the earliest period of the Paleolithic, the ancestors of modern humans effectively hunted small and large mammals. "According to various studies, the hominins of the subsequent Middle Paleolithic - the period between 300,000 and 45,000 years ago - fed primarily on ungulates. However, there is increasing evidence that, at least occasionally, tortoises, birds, hares, fish, and carnivorous mammals were also on the menu of Neanderthals and their relatives," explains Mario Mata-González, first author of the new study and a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen, and he continues, "Reconstructing the dietary habits of early hominins is one of the main objectives of archeozoological studies, which shed light on the way our ancestors adapted to and interacted with different environments."

Together with other SHEP researchers, Mata-González has carried out the first comprehensive and systematic dietary analysis at a Late Pleistocene site in the southern Zagros Mountains with an age around 81,000 to 45,000 years. "Not only are the Zagros Mountains the largest mountain range in Iran, but they are also considered a key geographical region for the study of human evolution in Southwest Asia during the Middle Paleolithic, in particular due to their heterogeneous topography and great environmental diversity," he adds.

Canadian bacon

Dr. Ryan Brook, lead on the University of Saskatchewan's Canadian Wild Pig Research Project, told Field and Stream earlier this year, "The U.S. has a 400-plus year history with invasive wild pigs, but we didn't have any here until the early 1980s."

"There was a big push to diversify agriculture with species like wild [boars] and ostriches. Wild boars were brought in from Europe to be raised on farms across Canada," said Brook.

The swinish imports from Eurasia, kept both on meat farms and in hunting preserves, were crossbred with domestic pigs, resulting in "super pigs." These monstrosities were not only larger, but hardier and capable of surviving in cold climates.

In a shocking incident, wild jumbos trampled to death four persons including two minor children, at Lalo Basti near Barmanthi under Bokajan police station in Karbi Anglong district on Thursday.

The deceased have been identified as Rebecca Kerketa (28), Kanya Tiria (50) and two kids.

All of them are from the same family. The incident took place in the Bormanthi village under East Forest range, Bokajan at around 3 pm on Thursday.

The family was returning home from their Citronella field when they met the herd of two elephants on their way. The herd charged them and trampled them immediately.

Police are investigating a case of culpable homicide after pit bulls attacked a 47-year-old man in Lutzville.

Johannes Lewis, affectionately known as "Bam", had a mental disability. His family said the brutal attack had left them in shock.

Lewis's brother-in-law, Gert Flink, said: "He always woke up early and took a walk around the house. On Sunday he woke up early and walked around the outside of the house as is his habit.

"Before they bit another two men, the one guy ran through the neighbour's backyard and into our property.

What we think happened is that the man tried to escape the dogs (but) when he came around the back of the yard they caught up and they attacked Bam in front of the door before he could get inside the house.

The Raytown Police Department is investigating after a teen was killed following an apparent dog attack.

Raytown police responded to a house in the area of E. 77th Street and Elm Avenue just before 3:40 p.m. on Nov. 14 regarding an unresponsive person.

When officers arrived on scene they located the 15-year-old boy suffering from several severe injuries. The victim was taken to an area hospital where he succumbed to his injuries on Nov. 17.

The allegory is one in which a scorpion depends on the frog for its passage across a flooded river, by hitching a lift on the frog's back. The frog distrusts the scorpion; but reluctantly agrees. During the crossing the scorpion fatally stings the frog swimming the river, under the scorpion. They both die.

It is a tale from antiquity intended to illustrate the nature of tragedy. A Greek tragedy is one in which the crisis at the heart of any 'tragedy' does not arise by sheer mischance. The Greek sense is that tragedy is where something happens because it has to happen; because of the nature of the participants; because the actors involved make it happen. And they have no choice but to make it happen, because that is their nature.

It is a story that was deployed by a former senior Israeli diplomat, well versed in U.S. politics. His telling of the frog fable has Israel's leaders desperately fending off responsibility for the 7 October débacle, with a cabinet furiously trying to turn the crisis (psychologically) from culpable disaster - to present the Israeli public instead with an image of epic opportunity.

The chimaera being presented is one that by reaching back to earliest Zionist ideology, Israel can turn the catastrophe in Gaza - as Finance Minister Smotrich has long argued - into a solution that once and for all 'unilaterally resolves the inherent contradiction between Jewish and Palestinian aspirations - by ending the illusion that any kind of compromise, reconciliation or partition is possible.

This is the potential scorpion sting: the Israeli cabinet betting all on a hugely risky strategy - a new Nakba - that could draw Israel into major conflict, but in so doing also sink what remains of western prestige.

Of course, as the former Israeli diplomat underlines, this ploy is essentially constructed around Netanyahu's personal ambition - he manoeuvres to alleviate criticism and to stay in power as long as he can. More importantly, he hopes this will enable him to spread the blame, shedding all and any responsibility and accountability from himself. [Better still], "it can place Gaza in an historic and epic context as an event that might render the PM as a formative wartime leader of grandeur and glory".

Far-fetched? Not necessarily.