Lemurs, gators, a hero dog and homeless deer: Josh Shaffer’s recent critter columns

This month’s offerings from Josh Shaffer include a gallery of memorable animals:

• A Labrador rescued from an alligator’s jaws;
• Duke’s world-famous lemurs and the civil rights crusader who nurtured them;
• A Sanford shelter hosting 150 orphaned baby deer, not to mention the owls, raccoons and skunks.

Readers might also remember Daniel Moses, missing now for 15 years and the sister who won’t quit looking, along with a record-breaking paddler who raced down the Mississippi River end-to-end by himself.

Dig into the whole collection here:

• Peter Klopfer, a Duke zoologist and lifelong Quaker who co-founded the Duke Lemur Center, died this month at 95, leaving behind a legacy that stretched far beyond primates. After being beaten and jailed during a 1964 civil rights demonstration outside Chapel Hill’s segregated Watts Grill, he appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — a fight that ultimately obligated North Carolina to guarantee its citizens a speedy trial. He also helped found Carolina Friends School in 1962, one of the South’s first integrated schools, rather than send his children to whites-only classrooms.
• Strike, a Labrador retriever from Brunswick County, will lead Southport’s Fourth of July parade a year after a 10-foot alligator dragged him 30 feet underwater at the edge of a pond. His owner Bonner Herring dove in swinging a garden rake to rescue him, and after months of recovery — including a steel plate and screws in his leg — Strike is walking, hunting ducks and now serving as Southport’s first-ever Dog Marshal after winning a landslide popularity vote that raised more than $6,000 for the town’s Fourth of July Festival.
• Ilia Smirnov, a 42-year-old canoe outfitter from Harnett County, paddled the entire 2,350-mile Mississippi River alone in just 34 days, setting a world record now being verified by Guinness. Paddling 15 hours a day through 20 mph winds, 26 locks and dams, hundreds of barges and ferocious storms near New Orleans, Smirnov — who came to North Carolina from Russia as a teenager — completed the solo journey from Minnesota’s headwaters to Mile Zero on a diet rich in chia seeds and 5,000 calories a day.
• Holly’s Nest Animal Rescue, run by Byron and Kim Wortham on 12 acres outside Sanford, is the largest deer rehabilitation facility in North Carolina and takes in a yearly average of 150 fawns — most orphaned after their mothers are killed by cars. During peak deer season, the rescue receives five to eight new fawns daily for about a month, alongside beavers, a skunk and a one-legged duck named Pogo Stick. The Worthams named the rescue for their daughter Holly, who died in a car accident in 2004.
• Daniel Moses, a retired truck driver known around Northampton County as the “Barbecue Man,” disappeared in 2011 and his tin-roofed house was found burned halfway to the ground. Fifteen years later, his sister, award-winning author Shelia Moses, is still pushing for answers. In 2023, callers named a suspected killer to both Moses and Jackson police, but she says the Northampton County Sheriff’s Office did not follow up, and she is now asking the FBI to take over the investigation into her brother’s disappearance.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.

This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 1:47 PM.