Little-Bee-Eater-Chris-Krog
National Geographic has picked twenty-five wild birds for a photograph essay. The birds from around the world are simply gorgeous. Sometimes we have to remember that all wildlife are not large animals. Here are some of my favorites.
Crested-Barbet-Dan-Anne-Marks
Black-winged-Stilt
Red-legged-Crake-West-Borneo-Indonesia-Frans-Jephi
Malaysian-Plover-West-Borneo-Indonesia-Frans-Jephi
Red-ruffed-Fruitcrow-Adam-Riley
White-cheeked-Barbet-Gururaj-Moorching
In one of the most exciting developments in years for African travel, the Zambezi Queen has started luxury 'river safari' trips down the Chobe River. Located between Namibia and Botswana, the boat enables you to see wildlife while floating down the river with shore excursions.
The Chobe River area is home to the one of the largest populations of elephants in the world. Estimates put the number at near 100,000.
You can chose between a two or three night cruise.
How many of you know that there are Burrowing Owls that live underground instead of in trees? I sure and hell didn't know! Mail Online reports on the efforts of photographer Mac Stone to capture them on film. The evasive birds are hard to photograph since they are on the look out for coyotes and any sudden movement.
It took Stone six months and over twenty attempts to achieve the photographs below. The Owls are a 'threaten species". The site wrote of the Burrowing Owls:
Burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) live underground in burrows that have been dug out by other small mammals such as ground squirrels and prairie dogs.
They are one of the smallest owls in North America and are covered in brown spotted feathers and have long legs.
They eat small mammals such as moles and mice during late spring and early summer. Later they switch to insects, especially grasshoppers and beetles. Burrowing owls are also known to eat birds, amphibians and reptiles.
While population estimates are not well known but trend data suggests significant declines across their range. Most recent official estimates place them at less than 10,000 breeding pairs.
They are are active during the day unlike other owls, especially in the spring when they gather food for their large broods, and they prefer open areas with low ground cover.
Burrowing owls have chuckling or chattering call, and they also bob their heads to express excitement or distress.
The first meeting of the Global Ocean Commission took place in Cape Town, South Africa last week. Sri Mulyani Indrawati reported on the World Bank Blog that this conference dramatically pointed out how endangered the Oceans have become in this day and age. Yes, there is still plenty of water but the water is warming, fish are disappearing, food becomes more scare and jobs are vanishing.
Already 90% of the big fish in the oceans and 50% of the coral reefs are gone.
You must watch the video below. It is just a couple of minutes but has critical information.
This is an excerpt from his very scary report from the conference. In just two paragraphs he captures the urgency of the crisis with our oceans.
Here it is in a nutshell: One billion people in developing countries depend on fish as their primary source of protein, and 350 million jobs are linked to the health of the oceans. Yet 57% of ocean fisheries are fully exploited. Another 30% are over-exploited, depleted or recovering. An increasing share of important marine habitats like coral reefs, mangroves and sea grass beds are being destroyed or degraded. You can learn about the impact in this video.
The problems of the ocean are both global and local. They will affect all of us and very soon, regardless of where we live. They are mainly man-made, caused by over-fishing, habitat loss, pollution, and climate change-related acidification and warming. There is no shortage of treaties and international commitments to address these challenges. However the genesis of the law of the sea, the nature of many treaties and the sheer expanse of the ocean makes it difficult to enforce good behavior. On the contrary, nations are in a race for ocean resources, often ignoring the impact.
In South Africa there is a man named Kevin Richardson who is known in local circles as 'The Lion Whisperer' or 'The Lion King'. Owning a reserve in South Africa, he has developed a special relationship with over 38 lions on his land. While not as vicious as lions totally in the wild, the lions do roam free on the large reserve.
National Geographic has done a special on this man. If you want shorter versions you can go to AmericaBlog and see clips.
Asia is home to a number of species of primates. Conde Nast Traveler has a special issue about "A Grand Tour of Asia". My favorite part was the section on their site about primates on that continent. The monkeys of Asia are just adorable and I want to adopt every single one of them. Check them out but be prepared to be smitten. Enjoy!
Click here to see descriptions and see more photographs.....
The slaughter of elephants and rhinos in Africa continues abated. News has come out of Chad and Cameroon that on March 14 and March 15 near 90 elephants were killed for their tusks. Among those brutally slaughtered were thirty females pregnant females! This continues the trend of a massacre of African wildlife.
Just the previous week in Cameroon and the Central African Republic a total of 43 elephants were killed.
This follows in February the killing of nearly two dozen rhino in one week in South Africa.
International emergency measures must be taken or we will lose these precious animals. We have lost 33% of the population of elephants in Africa in just thirty years and it is escalating by the day!
The most endangered Giraffe species is the mammoth Rothschild. They grow to be 18 feet tall and there are only several hundred left in the entire world. It was joyous news in Greenwich, Connecticut when a new born Rothschild was born to "Petal!" who has been pregnant for over 14 months.
The surviving members of this giraffe species live in Uganda and Kenya. There is an active program to save them and last year there were fifty births in the wild.
You will love this unbelievably adorable video of Petal's new child standing up for the first time!
Every couple of days there is a new story of senseless, bloody slaughter of wildlife. In one week, over a dozen rhino were killed for their horns in South Africa alone. Now a report in the New York Times that in just nine years 60% of the forest elephants of Central Africa have been killed because of poachers. There are more tigers in captivity in the United States than in the entire wild. Over 100 MILLION sharks have been killed in one year so people can have soup.
You have to wonder if the President's daughters will ever get to see an entire elephant herd in the wild. Rhinos, Lions and Tigers could all wiped out in the wild in a dozen years (2025).
Four nations are at the heart of the survival of the world's land bound wildlife. Indonesia is critical to a number of species and rainforests that are disappearing at a rapid rate. China, Thailand and Vietnam are the main reasons we are losing the elephants and rhino. As long as people in those nations are allowed to pay top dollar for the Ivory and Rhino horn, the poachers will continue their slaughter.
The ability to save the world's wildlife goes far beyond the means and power of environmental organizations and foundations. The wildlife environmental community has done heroic work in attempting to stem the killing but poachers are using now the most sophisticated weapons.
Now it is time for our President and other world leaders to create the political will, laws and support systems to save species on the verge of extinction. New treaties are urgently needed and the countries of Southeast Asia must be brought in a serious way to the table. Whales were saved through this type of effort and so can other species.
This requires our President to:
-create a wildlife czar to manage a singular effort in the government
-mobilize other world leaders
-get China, Vietnam and Thailand to stop the trade
-mobilize the Departments of State, Interior and Defense to provide valuable resources and planning to save earth's wildlife.
-provide aid and staff to those nations who neither have the resources, staff and sophisticated equipment to stop poachers.
-work with nations in moving animals to more favorable locations and breeding programs.
-create incentives for indigenous people to support the wildlife instead of poaching.
-bring violators of international law before the International Court in the Hague.
-make available radar, helicopters, weapons and drones to take on the poachers.
Time is running out. Soon we will pass the point where the ability to save the elephant, rhino and tiger can be saved from extinction.
What have you done to help?
Imagine taking the luxury train across the Russian countryside heading across Siberia. Then suddenly beside the train appear a herd of massive Woolly Mammoth's are grazing! What a sight it would be to behold. Such an event is not totally out of the realm of possibility.
In fact, it might be possible through DNA to bring back not only the Woolly Mammoth but also the Tasmanian Tiger (below) or the Moa. Science could make it possible to recreate these magnificent creatures or at least a version close to them. The question is should they bring them back.
Why not?
National Geographic recently has an article that examines the chances of bringing back a number of extinct animals. The odds are tough but the research could go a long way to saving animals that could disappear in the next years.
Besides wouldn't it be amazing to see a herd of Woolly Mammoth's running along side the that train? The magazine reports on the technology:
National Geographic News asked Hendrik Poinar, a molecular evolutionary geneticist and biological anthropologist at the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, if we might soon see the gigantic land mammals roaming the steppe again. Poinar will speak about the emerging technology at the TEDx Conference on DeExtinction in Washington this month.
"People were painting pictures of woolly mammoths in caves in France 35,000 years ago, so we have this amazing history with them," Poinar said.
Poinar's team isolates DNA and proteins from fossils and preserved remains, and then uses sophisticated sequencing and analysis tools to answer questions about species extinctions, evolution, and even the spread of infectious diseases. Poinar has tested relatively well-preserved samples from mammoth carcasses uncovered in the Yukon and Siberia. The mammoth remains had been entombed in the permafrost (permanently frozen ground), so degradation of their DNA had been slowed over time, Poinar explained.
In 2006, Poinar's lab began to map large sections of the mammoth's genome, aided by new high-input DNA sequencers, which can quickly analyze millions of fragments. This is important, because even the most well-preserved mammoth specimens have DNA strands that have fallen apart into countless smaller sequences, since the complex molecule is highly susceptible to decay (Poinar said DNA starts breaking down as soon as a living thing dies.)
"You'll never really create an exact genome because when you have short fragments there are no good ways to know how many repeats of sequences there are," said Poinar. But scientists can compare the fragments to each other to find overlapping areas, and then piece together much of the strand. Then, they can map those regions against the DNA of the closest living relative of the mammoth—the Asian elephant.
"We can in theory use that information to modify existing chromosomes with what we imagine to be mammoth substitutions," said Poinar. The result would be an elephant-mammoth hybrid, and such a creature could theoretically be implanted into the womb of a mother elephant. Get the formula right, and the offspring might be "a mammoth in the eye of the beholder," said Poinar.
Poinar asked why scientists would want to do that in the first place. "Is it because we have this ability, to push the boundaries of what's possible for the sake of innovation?" he asked.
Poinar added, "Would it give conservation movements something new to generate excitement, or does it generate apathy, so people ask 'why do we need to care about saving them in the wild if we can bring them back?'"
Poinar said he thought parts of Siberia could support reborn populations of mammoths, and that they would likely be able to survive, even in a warming climate, because they had existed across such a wide range.
"That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do," Poinar added. "As much as the kid in me would love to see these fantastic species plundering across the north, it's hard to see a reason why we should unless we think this technology could give us tools for conservation." He explained that the real win would be adapting such techniques to bolster the numbers of current endangered species, such as mountain gorilla
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