Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
Hello!
How wonderful to be able to write to you once again.
There have been a few things that have got in the way of writing over the last few weeks.
Firstly, the website has been attacked! As regular readers would be aware, this is not the first time. Indeed, these previous attacks have meant that the website was never penetrated.
Continue reading “Deepest apologies for quiet from me: website attacks and Covid combined”Leopards once roamed through Africa and Asia and even up into parts of Europe. Now their range is diminished and many of the subspecies are either endangered or critically so.
The Persian Leopard (also referred to as the Anatolian leopard and the Cascina Leopard)  Iranian Plateau and surrounding areas encompassing Turkey, the Caucasus (Armenia Azerbaijan and other parts of southern Russia), Iran, Israel, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan.
Today it is thought that the population only consists of 1000 adults, though their population is highly fragmented. One of its strongholds is the Iraqi Kurdistan forests, unfortunately as much as half of these forests has been lost to illegal deforestation.
Unfortunately if the Persian Leopard cannot hang on here there is little hope elsewhere. Numbers have roughly halved (as habitat has similarly halved).
Tigers once numbered 100,000 in India. My great great grandfather spent time in India, and I grew up hearing my great grandmother talking about the time that she went with her father on her pet elephant (as you do) to find a tiger that had been maimed during a failed hunt. This was essential, as a maimed tiger (or indeed lion leopard or jaguar) is of great danger to those living nearby. A maimed tiger cannot hunt as it normally would, and humans are far easier prey.
These days the situation is very different. Currently there is a little over 3000 tigers living in the wilds of India, a number that has doubled in a surprisingly short period of time.
Continue reading “Tigers are still moving between reserves, we must make it easier”There are still a large number of people with vested interests, who are arguing that climate change science is not settled and we need to wait a bit more.
How long should we wait?
Guy Callendar released a paper in 1938 – considered revolutionary at the time, which linked fossil fuel burning to the warming of the earths atmosphere. Indeed in 1896 Svante Arrhenius a Swedish scientist first predicted that increasing carbon emissions could significantly increase surface temperatures.
In other words it is now 126 years since a scientist predicted that global warming would be likely if we continued to release carbon emissions, and a paper was released 84 years ago confirming that Scvante Arrhenius prediction was correct.
So why are we still arguing about it? Does the free market truly allow profit to be prioritised over a scientific fact that was proposed more than a century ago, and confirmed nearly a century ago? Had the world dealt with carbon emissions back then we would be looking at a very different situation.
Cheetahs live at low densities and therefore need large areas for a viable population long-term.
Leprosy has been identified by an international team of scientists in two countries in west africa – Ivory coast and Guinea-Bissau.
Leprosy has never been documented in wild Chimpanzees and the strain in each country was different (suggesting that the two causes are different.
Seemingly, one of the hardest things about studying leprosy is that it will not grow in lab conditions. It must either be harvested from animals or on occasion the feet of mice. As a result most studies are done on people with the disease. The Ivory coast strain has a history in Ethiopia and medieval Europe so there is some research still to be done. It has not yet been identified if it was transmitted from local villages or if it was brought to this part of Africa by tourists.
So we have recently bought an electric car!
For any regular readers, you would have seen my article from a few days ago. When people are writing articles comparing the emissions from generating electricity to the tailpipe emissions of the combustion engine – any one with a brain is asking why? Given you are not comparing like for like. We estimate that our carbon emissions reductions from replacing our car may reach 10 tonnes a year. Each fill up of our petrol car meant about 40kg of petrol, which took 110kg of emissions to dig it out of the ground and transport it (often around the world).
So from an environmental position, yes it certainly makes sense.
But what about from a financial position?
Continue reading “We have bought a used electric car: does it make financial sense? Why should you consider doing the same.”Today the Sumatran rhino is critically endangered. It is thought that not more than 80 exist in the wilds of Sumatra. Not particularly closely related to the Javan rhino, the Sumatran rhino once had a much larger range extending from foothills of the Eastern Himalayas in Bhutan and eastern India, through Myanmar, Thailand, possibly to Vietnam and China, and south through the Malay Peninsula. Indeed the Sumatran rhino is thought to have lost its last remaining mainland member as recently as 2015.
As a result, a breeding centre has been set up on Sumatra to create a captive population with which to boost the wild population.
Unfortunately, they have not done well. This calf is just the third born since the foundation of the centre – the centre was set up in 1996. There have only been another 3 calves born elsewhere in captivity.
As with other Sumatran wildlife, the Sumatran rhino has suffered the dual threats of loss of habitat and the fragmentation of what is left.
This should not be news to people, but because of the rubbish that is spread by many with vested interests in the current situation, it needs to be dealt with again.
So the argument is that because electric cars battery does not last forever, but every part of the combustion engine car does, the electric car is going to make more waste.
Continue reading “Fossil fuel cars make ‘hundreds of times’ more waste than electric cars – according to a Guardian article, despite what most media tries to claim”The USA has rather embarrassed itself. A large minority of the country has kept stating things that were obviously foolish. In particular, Donald Trump has spent the 4 years of his administration undermining all of the science and therefore the gradual move towards acceptance of the the facts that most of the rest of the world has already accepted.
In particular, while the Republican party has in the past advanced science, they have completely abandoned this position. Climate change needs universal support for dealing with it if we are to succeed.
Given all this, it is not a surprise that so many people in the USA actually believe it.
Continue reading “Only Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have a higher proportion of climate change denial than the USA”