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from India Insight:
Mike Pandey hits bureaucratic hurdle for film on tigers
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Reuters)
For more than 30 years, Mike Pandey has been a man with a mission. In its special issue on Heroes of the Environment in 2009, Time magazine credited the maker of wildlife documentaries with efforts to protect "everything from whale sharks to elephants, vultures to medicinal plants."
In 1994, Pandey became the first Asian film-maker to win the Wildscreen Panda Award, better known as the Green Oscar, for his film on the capture of wild elephants. He also won the award twice in the next decade.
In April this year, Pandey was honoured at an event to mark 100 years of Indian cinema. His latest film, a docudrama on India’s dwindling tiger numbers, has a Bollywood connection - and features Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham.
from Photographers Blog:
The tiger, the pig and the cage
Sumatra Island, Indonesia
By Beawiharta
Over a three-week period in February, I covered two very different animal-related assignments in Indonesia – the slaughtering of snakes in West Java and the preservation of the endangered tiger in Sumatra.
In West Java, Wakira along with his 10 workers kill hundreds of snakes each day for their skin at his slaughterhouse in Cirebon. While in Sumatra, real estate tycoon Tomy Winata saves and releases tigers into the wild at his Tambling Wildlife Nature Conservation. I didn't enjoy the snake slaughterhouse assignment because snakes are dangerous and disgusting, but I really liked visiting the tigers in Tambling.
from Photographers Blog:
Paradise city in grizzly bear country
"Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Take me home. Oh, won't you please take me home."
Apparently those few lyrics from the Guns 'N Roses 1987 hit song Paradise City are the only parts of the song I know and also the only song I know the lyrics to. I can't even recite the Star Spangled Banner. But singing in a false seagull strangling soprano while hiking and camping in grizzly bear country was my way of not creeping up on a bear and surprising it and thus becoming bear food.
from Tales from the Trail:
Panda diplomacy: the remix
The latest chapter in the long story of panda diplomacy was written at Washington's National Zoo, where the Chinese government agreed to lengthen the "loan" of popular panda pair Mei Xiang and Tian Tian for another five years. Actually, the loan is conditioned on whether they produce a new heir or heiress to the cuteness of panda-dom in the next two years; one or both could be exchanged for more fecund substitutes.
They have a good track record: Washington native Tai Shan, born in 2005, headed back to China last year.
from PopTech:
A ‘frozen mouth’ finds a voice in the jungle
As a child, Alan Rabinowitz had a severe stutter. So severe that he doesn't remember speaking his first sentence until he was 19 years old. He tried everything to get rid of what he called his "frozen mouth," including shock therapy at one point. Although he struggled to communicate with humans, Alan felt a poignant connection with big, wild cats.
His stutter, he says, turned out to be his greatest blessing: "Stutters can do a couple things right. One of them is to speak to animals." And so Alan has spent his life dedicated to preserving and protecting these big cats who provided him comfort and a sense of belonging as child.
from Environment Forum:
Tiger among fluffy toys shows extreme smuggling tricks
The drugged tiger cub (left) hidden among cuddly toys in a bag at Bangkok airport ranks as one of the most bizarre smuggling tricks.
Imagine the shock of X-raying the bag -- as airport workers checking luggage did -- and finding a live tiger among the fluffy tiger toys. Maybe it moved, or they spotted the outline of its skeleton among the other toys?
from Environment Forum:
Crustaceans rule!
Ever wondered what kinds of wildlife dominate the world's seas and oceans? Now there's an answer, at least in terms of the number of species in different categories. It's not fish. It's not mammals. It's crustaceans!
A mammoth Census of Marine Life has revealed that nearly one-fifth, or 19 percent, of all the marine species known to humans are crustaceans -- crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, barnacles and others far too numerous to mention here. The census didn't count the actual numbers of animals beneath the waves -- that would have been impossible -- but it did count up the number of species in 25 marine areas. The aim is to set down a biodiversity baseline for future use.
from Environment Forum:
BP, oil and seabirds — Baltic Sea ducks had worse luck
BP's vast and spreading oil disaster is killing ever more birds and other wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico -- but one of the worst spills for birds was a harmless-sounding 5 tonnes of oil in the Baltic Sea in 1976.
That spill from a ship killed more than 60,000 long-tailed ducks wintering in the area after they fatally mistook the slick for an attractive patch of calm water, according to Arne Jernelov, of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, writing in today's edition of the journal Nature.
from Environment Forum:
Walruses in Louisiana? Eyebrow-raising details of BP’s spill response plan
Louisiana walruses? Seals swimming along the Gulf Coast?
These creatures normally live in the Arctic Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico, but they're listed as "sensitive biological resources" that could be affected by an oil spill in the area in a document filed by BP last June with the U.S. Minerals Management Service. More than a month after BP's Deepwater Horizon rig blew out and sank on April 20, the British oil giant's regional spill response plan drew some severe criticism from the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
One problem with BP's nearly 600-page spill response plan? "It was utterly useless in the event of a spill," Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director, said by telephone. His group, which acts as a kind of safe haven for government whistle-blowers, detailed what it called "outright inanities" in BP's filing and the government's approval of it.
from Africa News blog:
In search of the rarest elephants
Dawn was breaking and wisps of mist rising through the dense trees as wildlife expert and author Gareth Patterson and I set off into the forest, in search of one of the last remaining elephants of South Africa’s Knysna forests.
The Knysna forest, an expanse of 121,000 hectares of forest managed by South African National Parks, is home to the last remnants of the once abundant herds of Cape Bush elephants that inhabited the Southern Cape.
