Month: August 2022

Posted on

The long-tailed macaque was declared to be endangered in march this year, is anything safe

The long-tailed macaque is naturally found throughout southeast Asia. Often seen as pests, these generalists are highly intelligent and can survive on almost any food. As a result they have been considered commodities and therefore have been slaughtered for the bushmeat trade and captured as pets throughout many of the places where they are found.

While still seemingly numerous where they are found, the long-tailed macaque is now an endangered species. Is anything safe?

Even rapidly breeding primates are not going to be able to cope with this sort of pressure for long.

It is perhaps the pet trade that is the greatest danger. As with many other complicated pets long-tailed macaques are hard to look after in captivity and often develop behaviours that are difficult to handle. As a result the demand for their capture continues.

Perhaps of greater concern (for humanity, at least) is the fact that illnesses leak between macaques and humans surprisingly easily. Therefore having large numbers of these animals in captivity, in bad conditions, may well be breeding the next epidemic.

It is clear that the place for long-tailed macaques is in the wild in remaining rainforests, not as pets in wealthy people’s homes.

Can this species be saved? If it can’t there seems little chance for us to save many others, nevertheless as with many other species we must rapidly stop over exploiting this animal before it is gone forever.

Posted on

As oil and gas reserves in Europe dwindle, will we destroy Africa?

Most of the historical oil and gas has been used by North America and Europe.

As a result, Europe and America have to take a large amount of blame for the current carbon dioxide crisis that is pushing global warming. While it is true that the majority of the world’s pollution will increasingly moved towards Asia, almost all of the historical emissions come from just these two continents. Having depleted many of the largest Isle and gas reserves around Europe, many European countries are not pushing into Africa. Africa is incredibly rich in oil and gas, and quite reasonably politicians in these countries argue ‘why shouldn’t we extract them and help our country grow’.

It has been shown many times, it is impossible to extract fossil fuels without destroying the land above. Are we going to destroy the lungs of the planet, and we ask them to save us from ourselves
Continue reading “As oil and gas reserves in Europe dwindle, will we destroy Africa?”
Posted on

Protecting the natural world is important for the people who live near it as well as the animals

Around the globe,first world countries have been accused of demanding that emerging economies put aside large areas of land. This is in order (it is thought) to look after wildlife – for the benefit of wealthy tourists, with no regard to the population that lives nearby.

Yet, not only is this not true, it is often the basis that destructive industries use to fight against reserves of any kind.

“How dare you try to protect the lion, Tiger, chimpanzee, orangutan over the local people” is a idea regularly thrown about by vested interests. Yet, in actual fact these same businesses often totally destroy the locals way of life.

Consider the many thousands of villages in Sumatra which 50 years ago would have been deep in the rainforest – surrounded by thousands of miles of rainforest full of everything they could ever need. There are now many villages hemmed in my palm oil plantation – not only usually on stolen land, but often with owners who prosecute villagers for trespass even though it is in their own land.

This is similar in the Congo basin and the Amazon basin, as well as habitats as diverse as mountainous, forested, oceans and deserts to name just a few.

This is the purpose of our “in the shadow of mankind” listings. Our aim is to allow people the world over to profit in a way that doesn’t destroy wilderness that is left, but beings in a bit of money for the local population.

Please help spread the word.

Posted on

I am back – plans for the future

Hello anyone who is reading this. I am back!

This websites existence came about after a frustrating experience trying to book wild travel.

Like it or hate it, the human race have not yet found a more effective way of funding conservation, than through tourism. Now this does have a black mark against it, as it usually requires flying, and the huge carbon cost of this activity.

There is much being done in this area, and in a few decades it is likely to be greatly reduced. Perhaps the most exciting, is the EasyJet electric plane is aimed to enter use in 2030. Anyway, it is important to continue to go to these places – we are likely to loose them far quicker if locals have no reason to protect them (or indeed need the space to grow food that they no longer have the money to buy).

This year my family visited the Kruger national park in South Africa. This is one of the largest well protected Savannah ecosystems that remain in the world. We had a wonderful time, seeing a variety of animals (some of which we did not see in 3 months while training as wildlife guides).

I am likely to talk about some of these encounters over the next few years, however suffice to say we saw the big 5 and the ecotourism big 7.

This site aims to be a quick and simple way for places who wish to sell wilderness experiences to list them. Whether you work in a wilderness (Wild Places), near one or merely share your vicinity with wildlife (in the shadow of mankind) or nocturnal animals use your land (hide) we want to help you benefit financially from the presence of wildlife.

We have page builders for these areas, so you can start building your page whenever you want.

We are also hoping to create our community- this will allow users to communicate and join our mission, as well as financially helping us secure the longterm viability of this project.

I will speak to you all soon

Tim Welby

Posted on

Soliga tribe has been allowed to live inside tiger in a reserved area – and the tiger population doubles!

Around much of the world, as the various European countries expanded their empires, one of the first things that Europeans did, was to create reserves to protect the wildlife, and required the local people to move out.

Many tribes have incredibly small footprints on the ground, ad look after their environment far better than many conservationists would succeed

In many of these places, the local tribes were forcefully thrown of their land, and begrudgingly given small areas often with little value compared to where they lived before.

Now there is a difficult issue: those people who are living their lives in the same way that they have lived for thousands of years, are often fantastic for the reserve. However, in many places these people will turn to harvesting the wildlife in a totally different way, leading to many local extinctions.

India has a range of tiger reserves across the country. Few of them have more than a few hundred tigers, and many just have a few, yet, if this could be replicated, the Indian tiger population might have the ability to double once again
Continue reading “Soliga tribe has been allowed to live inside tiger in a reserved area – and the tiger population doubles!”
Posted on

Back on the 10th I wrote about the Tiger recovery, here is more details about the Kazakhstan reintroduction: by 2026?

The Caspian tiger once lived in 12 countries, from the west in Turkey, to the east in central Asia. Seemingly, across this range, they did not have consistent populations but the tigers lived on the shores of lakes in the region, with 15-20 valleys being their strongholds.

The Kazakhstan delta is mostly ready for a return of the Tiger, with just the missing prey base needing addressing, this is well in hand

On the whole, the Caspian tiger lived in relative harmony with humans up until the Russian invasion. The Russians brought with them, the custom of keeping livestock, which brought the humans into direct competition with the tigers. As a result, Russia started paying a bounty for every tiger killed. This was incredibly successful, such that by the 1940 they were exterminated. The hunting was banned in the 1940s but too late to save these tigers.

After this, the tigers former home was taken over and converted into farmland, so the few that survived the hunting, soon lost what home was left.

In the 1990s as Russia fell, WWF started working to help the ecosystem recover. As a result in the late 2000s a satellite analysis was carried out on the area, and one area stood out – a delta of the Lli river in Kazakhstan. It was found that if the prey base was first helped to recover (animals such as boar and deer) then this area could easily support tigers.

Now, it is true that the Caspian tiger went extinct 70 years ago. However, recent genetic analysis has shown that the Caspian and Amur tigers are not distinct enough to be classed separately – they are essentially one subspecies, with a large range. It is true that Caspian tigers tend to have had shorter fur, but tigers are able to adjust in this way, so tigers that are moved to warmer climates will grow less fur and be able to thrive.

Given Kazakhstan being the most advanced of the countries in the area, with relatively high living standards, they should be able to carry out the plan. The delay until 2026 is to allow time for the prey base to build up to sensible levels.

Posted on

Apparently Democrat voters are not impressed with what Biden is doing for climate change

More than 80% of democratic voters believe that Biden has not done enough for climate change. Now it is certainly true that overall, just 15% of republicans think that Bidens plans are a good idea, while 79% of democrats approve of the direction.

What does this say? Well there are several things to bare in mind. Firstly, as Trump spent the last 4 years lying to his supporters, it is not surprising that they think that what Biden is doing is not necessary. What is perhaps more worrying, is the fact that this is roughly half the population in one of the most highly educated countries in the world – which does not believe in scientific facts, because they were lied to.

Unfortunately, Joe Manchin a democratic senator has been able to block much of the needed action. A new bill which he did support, has recently passed, which aims to cut emissions by 30% (against 1995 levels) by 2030 levels. If this happens then this is fantastic news.

Given a choice between Biden with his hands tied behind his back by Manchin, and Trump who did nothing but make it worse, any sensible person would choose Biden every time.

Posted on

Sweden is often held up as the way to do forestry, but is the bubble about to burst?

Most of Sweden is still covered in forest. I have visited the country, and have enjoyed exploring it. Never the less, an alarming study has shown that most of the forestry – about 97% relies on clear cutting ancient woodland, and then replanting it with monocultures of trees, not all of which are native.

Sweden so called environmental forestry may be nothing of the sort. Clear cutting old growth, and replacing it with non-native monocultures is not the same thing

Clearly Sweden must buck its ideas up, or change fast. I have commented on the low density of bears and wolves. In the past, this has been put down to the countries large number of hunters, but perhaps this is an early warning about what is happening to these forests.

Might this hit the IKEA brand? certainly if they wish to survive, they are going to have to change their behaviour dramatically.

Posted on

Polar bears appear to be surviving despite the lack of sea ice, should we take this as a positive sign?

A group of polar bears are surviving in south-east Greenland are surviving despite there not being sea ice for most of the year.

A new Polar bear population genetically isolated from other Polar bears has been identified in South East Greenland
Continue reading “Polar bears appear to be surviving despite the lack of sea ice, should we take this as a positive sign?”
See Animals Wild