Red alert for red squirrels

Numbers of the Red Squirrel, once Britain's pride, started to dwindle when its more aggressive cousin, the American Grey Squirrel, was introduced in the country. With protection, the Red Squirrel clawed back. But recently, the squirrels have gone missing and scientists fear that a virus - squirrelpox - has wiped the animals out. What is even more alarming is that with winter approaching, many more squirrels may not make it. Ironically, grey squirrels carry the virus but are not affected by it.

The Guardian has more

Technorati Tags: squirrel, grey squirrel, red squirrel, virus, squirrelpox

The untruth about birds

Everything you didn't want to know about birds but probably asked about too often. "These mysterious beautiful creatures that came to our planet suddenly in 1962 are still an enigma today" via BirdChick

Encounter - The Giant Sequoia stands tall, er... large

Though not the tallest tree in the world, the Giant Sequoia is certainly the largest. Now, that has a lot of people confused. Tallest, largest... what's the diff? The Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) wins over the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in terms of total volume - a factor of height and weight. Coast Redwoods are taller and win in terms of elevation but they are narrower and lighter than the Sequoias. In 2001, at the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park, I was introduced to these big-hipped grand dames of Kingdom Plantae. They are colossal - one can drive a small car through a tree's trunk at ground level. If the tree allows you to, that is. There are a trees in this grove that have been around for centuries. Along with trees in other parts of the Sierra Nevada, they are some of the last Giant Sequoias left on the planet. You have to bend over backwards and crane your neck to the sky to get a decent picture. I watched a few Japanese tourists actually accomplish that feat. They kneeled, arched back and clicked. Ah-sos all around. These pictures were taken by me and since I'm not Japanese, I wasn't able to catch the entire tree in one frame.

Nature to get rights in Ecuador?

Imagine if forest, rivers and air enjoyed rights just as we do.

Next week, Ecuador will vote to give nature her rights. If passed, the law could be the first ever reversal of anthropocentric frameworks in Momma Nature's favour.

Let's wait and see.

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Tarzan swings, Tarzan falls...

If you went to a boys' school like I did, you know the rest of that verse. For the uninitiated, let's just say that it ends with a reference to the destruction, by shattering, of a part of the male anatomy that rhymes with the first line. Uncle Grey, a Danish agency, has produced a campaign for the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). This one is based on the theme of deforestation. The caption says: “15 km2 of rain forest disappears every minute.” Image copyright: Uncle Grey

Melville and the whale

The BBC has a meditative article around whales, and a literary great to whose work the whale was central. Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Herman Melville pondered the future of the whale in a chapter titled Does The Whale's Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish? Melville, a seafarer, wrote his epochal Moby Dick about a great white whale. Melville, the article says, "seemed to envision our threatened world of rising temperatures and rising seas. But he also thought that the whale would survive the punitive cull of his age." Excerpts:

"We account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. "In Noah's flood he despised Noah's ark; and if ever the world is to be flooded again, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies."

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Penguins in Patagonia - via GeoBeats

If you are not entirely new to penguins and their mysterious ways, you'd know that not all of them prefer to live in snow and ice. The fantastic GeoBeats online video community has a feature on penguins in Patagonia. What surprises me is how these birds nest so casually despite heavy tourist disturbance. Take a look:

Birds and jailbirds - saving grace?

William Blake wrote: A Robin Redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. Prisons may be a good place for conservation education to begin. And prisoners may turn out to be the most sincere conservationists. But the general public - many of whom are better off incarcerated - had better let prisoners be. The Observer has carried a very heartwarming report on two prisons in the UK - Spring Hill and Bullingdon - where prisoners have kept themselves busy fashioning nest boxes from scrap wood for the Royal Society for Protection of Birds. For conservation, where any number of volunteers is never enough, this is a vital shot in the arm Heartwarming? A lot of people don't think so. While prison authorities feel that doing good work enhances prisoners' feelings of self-worth and enable them to think of a life beyond crime, many people (obviously those who live outside prisons) want them to live the hard life and suffer for it. A sense of well being, they argue, is anathema to the idea of imprisoning wrongdoers. It's a throwback to the old argument over imprisonment itself. Time is high for activists - both human rights and animal rights - to agree on something. But the more obvious question is: Where are they when you need them?

Encounter - The forest for the trees

There are times when a species introduces itself to you - sometimes ceremoniously, but often without fanfare. This is a seminal moment in the life of any naturalist or nature enthusiast. I remember one such feeling way back in 2001 - of being in the company of sage, wise elders - when I trekked in Muir Woods, about 14 miles north of San Francisco. Redwood trees - these are Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) - besides being dizzily tall (the tallest tree in the park is 258 feet high), are ancient. At an average age of 500-800 years, they are older than anyone we know by name, living or dead. An exhibit in the park displays the growth rings with historical events tagged against them. Even without the sea fog that blows in from the Pacific Ocean just a few miles yonder, the forest is dark, the canopy way up high, and the floor littered with mulch and deadwood. In parts of the park where old growth is thick, sunlight has not touched the ground for decades, possibly centuries. Moss girdles everything and the ground is slippery with algal slime. The bark is hollow and moist - it doesn't feel very strong. And there's this eerie sense of touching something that's lived for 500 years or more. Winter brings so much rain that to unwrap your layers here means to entertain a pneumonic chill. There are few birds in the park - the lack of insect life is the cause. Insects are repelled by the tannin secreted by the trees. Owls are said to live here, but I saw little more than Steller's Jays, Ravens and Wrens. My companions and I trekked in continuous rain all the way up to Mt. Tamalpais hoping all the while to encounter the mountain lions we had read so much about. No such luck. But we were here in the forest for the trees - my encounter with these lofty sentinels who had seen more time than any of us could imagine stayed with me for a long time to come. I returned from the forest with a strange inner peace. This is the first post of the Encounter series - first meetings with wildlife and other citizens of the natural world

Food crisis sets off killing spree in Guillemot colony

A shortage of fish is causing nesting guillemots to kill their neighbours' chicks. Scientists studying these hardy British birds in a colony in the Firth of Forth are anxious about an impending catastrophe.

Guillemots are highly social and huddle together in vast colonies to protect themselves against marauding gulls and jaegers that threaten their nests and chicks. However, depleting fish stocks in the North Sea are said to be the reason why the guillemots are turning on their neighbours' chicks when they are not looking. Usually, one parent stays behind at a nest when the other is out foraging. But food shortage has forced both parents to hunt, leaving the nest unattended.

How human!

More here

Technorati Tags: North Sea, Guillemot, fish shortage, catastrophe

Polar bear faux pas gets rubber dodo for Palin

Sarah Palin, whom we love to hate for at least two things - Republican and pro-hunting - has now been condemned by our loosely united fraternity of eco-enthusiasts as a 'global warming denier.' Cute. Arizona's Centre for Biological Diversity has awarded Palin the Rubber Dodo award for insisting that the polar bear population is in fact growing across the Arctic. Hmph. Is idiocy a reserved criterion for Republican runners? Vote her out without a thought, O citizens of the Land of the Free. WTF are you waiting for?

Worldwatch has a comprehensive analysis of Palin's environmental credentials Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin, ecology, environment, dodo

One hundred years of wildlife filmmaking

Via AB Apana's very engaging blog, I came across WildFilmHistory, a riveting website that chronicles one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking. The website hosts profiles of nearly a hundred wildlife filmmakers from the familiar to the obscure - Jacques Cousteau, Gerald Durrell, David Attenborough, George Schaller, Doug Allen, Jen and Des Bartlett, Lyndon Bird, Desmond Morris and Steve Irwin among many others. There are pages dedicated to over 185 films, along with short clips from each. Preview Jen and Des Bartlett's The Flight of the Snow Geese (1972), Joan and Alan Root's Two in the Bush (1978) and Gerald Durrell's Catch me a Colobus: The Beef Mine (1966). Excellent way to pass the time, and to learn so much about the history that fascinated enthusiasts like us during our growing-up years (truth is, the growing up never ends). Also, I couldn't help ruminating on the fact that a great many of these wildlife films were shot at a time when photographic and recording technologies were in their infancy but when wildlife was more plentiful. Today, when access to equipment is ubiquitous, we have to travel a long way to locate the wildlife. How ironic!

Life, now in an encyclopedia

The second newsletter from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is out. This fascinating and ambitious project compiles the work of several researchers in a very attractive and user-friendly format. A web of webs, it comprises several sites linked together in a daisy chain, sort of like life itself. Content partners include the Catalogue of Life Partnership, Tree of Life, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, IUCN, FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, BioLib, BioPix, etc. EOL's picture galleries are powered by Microsoft PhotoSynth and what's better is that it brings the best of Web 2.0 to the screen. You can contribute species pictures to the EOL Flickr group. EOL even invites users to become curators and donors. Everything is free as of now, and it will be wonderful if they can keep it that way.

Wildlife Direct - list of wildlife conservation blogs on Africa

Wildlife Direct links to a large number of excellent wildlife blogs from around Africa. The list also covers a blog about Orangutans in Malaysia, Snub-nosed Monkeys in Vietnam, Amazon Parrots and a blog on the wildlife of the Seychelles. An excellent resource.

More here

Technorati Tags: Wildlife Direct, conservation, blogs

On camera - Sumatran rhino in Borneo

For the second time (the video above is the first sighting), a Sumatran rhino in Borneo has shown itself on camera. This guy is one of about 25 or 50 individuals known to remain in the wild. A camera trap was successful in capturing the subject, thought to be a young female. The rainforests of Borneo are waging a last-ditch battle against loggers, palm oil farmers and poachers. Habitat encroachment is the greatest threat. WWF has more details Technorati Tags: sumatran rhino, camera trap, conservation

The best bird photographers are ethical

KolkataBirds has compiled a very interesting showcase of the best bird photographers in India. There is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that brushes aside all criticism or opinions one may have of this list and the methods employed to compile it. It's a bewildering list - some are unknowns, some are known schmoozers, and others merely photographers because they own some fancy equipment. But among this motley crowd are some real stars - Sudhir Shivaram, Kalyan Varma, Joanna van Gruisen - photographers whose work reveals more than posed portraits of the bird's appearance. Through their pictures they offer a revelation of rarity, of poorly known and little studied birds, as well as insight into their behaviour, habit and habitat. Dhritiman Mukherjee offers glimpses of two rarely sighted birds - the Blood Pheasant and the Himalayan Snowcock. Joanna van Gruisen's remarkable picture of a male Pheasant-tailed Jacana (the best picture of the collection) with an egg - probably not its own - in its mouth is a revelation of extraordinary and probably undocumented parental/ territorial behaviour. Kalyan Varma's wonderful picture of Wreathed Hornbills in flight offers little by way of detail but plenty in terms of behavioural insight. These are pictures worth a thousand words or more. Many of the others are just showing off their lifers. Today, photographers have better access to great equipment and many have the money and means to travel. This means that more and more shutterbugs interested in getting a great photograph and earning peer respect are travelling to forests, deserts, grasslands and other habitats on photographic safaris. What is the impact of their frequent visits on these fragile and sensitive habitats? Are their means ethical? Some of the most reputed photographers of our time were known to be absolutely callous to the plight of their photographic subjects - disturbing nesting sites, exposing nests and chicks and resorting to trickery with recorded bird calls and suchlike. With the best equipment, even a fashion photographer can photograph birds in the wild. But wildlife photographers are not merely artists and wildlife photography isn't art for art's sake. They are pilgrims in nature's great shrine, their methods are acts of prayer, and every photographic opportunity is a blessing. POSTSCRIPT: Gopi points out that Kalyan Varma's picture of the Wreathed Hornbill offers rare insight into the flocking behaviour of this species and that flocks can be quite large for a bird of this size. He also ponders the question if the increasing interest in bird photography is actually leading to increased conservation of birds - or is it just leading to more disturbed habitats.

A leopard, a village and a photographer's conscience

From a respectful distance, I have always admired Kalyan Varma for his gift - the talent to tell stories and unravel mysteries through his wildlife photographs. But his coverage, in March this year, of a leopard trapped in the village of Valparai is sheer testament to the fact that this young man is no mere shutterbug collecting photographic souvenirs in our forests and trading them for awards. He is what wildlife conservation needs with utmost urgency -- a wildlife photojournalist with a conscience. 


Not many people I know want to run into a leopard in the wild. So when one comes visiting a village, it is far from welcome. The leopard in this story was not above blame - it was responsible for the death of a young girl. It doesn't take much to anger a village and this killing provided ample tinder to fan a blazing hatred for the cat. A trap was set and the leopard was caught. The dramatis personae - villagers, forest officers, policemen and local press photographers - all played their part. The fallen hero, of course, was the leopard. What struck me about Kalyan's account was the irony of the 'shoot'. A veterinarian tries - first in vain - to bring the cat down, while all the while Kalyan clicks away feverishly, capturing through his trained eye the predicament of a wild animal that is down, but far from out.


In his journal, Kalyan writes: 'A tear rolled down its eye and the leopard slowly went down. I cocooned myself from the whole crowd as the cops were taking care of them and I could not see anything but the face of the leopard through the camera. I just broke down at this point and walked away.' 


Read all about it here 


Salut, Kalyan Varma. For boldly doing what no wildlife photographer has dared do before - for bringing out in detail the inexorable sadness of human-animal conflict.

Ok, ok, Okapi

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, stop whatever you are doing and bring your eyes here to ogle at the tallest legs in zebra stockings on the unglamorous ungulate that Cousin Giraffe nicknamed Shorty. Only relatively, of course. Enough bad puns. After long years, a wild Okapi has been recorded thanks to camera traps set by the Zoological Society of London in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The BBC reports...

Remembering Steve Irwin, ironically

With the death, by Sting Ray stinging, of Steve Irwin in 2006, couch potatoes lost a beloved star prankster. The natural world, to its immense relief, lost a bothersome pest. And naturalists, most of them wallflowers who shied away from television cameras, must have smiled smugly at the warming absence of the celebrated television personality known as the Crocodile Hunter, who was associated with all kinds of derring-do involving lizards, snakes, crocodiles and a variety of other wildlife that begged to be left alone. September 4 marked two years of the death of Steve Irwin. While tributes poured for this dubious wildlifer, the voice of reason amid all the reactionary mourning was that of Germaine Greer. Hers was a bloodthirsty, controversial little obit, but one full of razor-sharp observation and incisive commentary that was unwilling to let a dead man off the hook. And rightly so. For what we must really remember Irwin for are the things we cannot dare forget. Lest history go photocopy itself. Here's an excerpt:

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress. Every snake badgered by Irwin was at a huge disadvantage, with only a single possible reaction to its terrifying situation, which was to strike. Easy enough to avoid, if you know what's coming. Even my cat knew that much.

Read the whole piece here. It's worth bookmarking for life. So that we don't offer unwitting or involuntary patronage to Irwin and his teeming tribe of clones.