A herd of elephants left their home in March of 2020, and have been roaming free for the last 15 months. In that time they have travelled 500 km (300 miles) roughly the equivalent of the distance from the most eastern to most western point in the UK.
Dozens of cats have been seized by the US authorities from the zoo set up by the ‘tiger king’ in the Netflix series
Many wild species cannot be bought or sold for profit, as a result of their endangered status. These have been seized on the basis they are not being looked after properly, and include 46 tigers, 7 tigers, a jaguar and 15 lion tiger hybrids.
Continue reading “Dozens of cats have been seized by the US authorities from the zoo set up by the ‘tiger king’ in the Netflix series”Contradiction of wildlife tourism – do not kill the wild natural world while cutting your emissions
The world has an unfortunate problem. In many parts of the world we are successfully reducing our carbon footprint dramatically, through cleaning our electricity generation among other improvements.
Unfortunately, in our current setup, often the only way to pay for conserving the wild places on our planet is by visiting them, and for most people, this requires long-distance flights.
Something we must avoid in more wealthy countries is to simply halt all tourism to wild places. If in order to cut a few tons of carbon from our personal emissions, we remove the reason to conserve a large rainforest in Africa or Asia, can we really blame the locals when it gets cut down? In theory, money does indeed get sent to some of these countries to pay for offsetting our emissions. Unfortunately this rarely reaches people on the ground.
Continue reading “Contradiction of wildlife tourism – do not kill the wild natural world while cutting your emissions”Holiday absence
Hello!
I have been away with my family, and for the time being this is a one man show. I am hoping that as restrictions on travel list, it might become a bigger enterprise – with your support. We have some wildlife destinations already listed but hope to greatly expand this.
Our holiday was in Devon in the south west of the UK, close to the river otter.
This river is famous in the UK as back in 2008 a family of beavers appeared. They became quite a popular attraction.
Continue reading “Holiday absence”Whipsnade zoo shoots two Bears after they escape
Whipsnade zoo had three bears. A tree trunk blew over, allowing two of them to climb into the neighbouring enclosure that contained boar.
Is bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies too energy intensive to be used?
Elon Musk has just announced that Tesla will no longer allow buyers to pay in bitcoin. Why is this relevant to a wildlife and environment blog?
Tesla is there to transition the world to sustainable transport, as a goal. of the roughly 4.1 trillion kwh of electricity used in the USA last year roughly 500 went on bitcoin (roughly 1 in 8) or 13%.
Reintroducing Jaguars to the south west of the USA?
It might be a shock to many, but Jaguars were once native to the USA. What’s more despite humans biggest efforts, the eradication was not completely successful. The third largest big cat, after Tiger and Lion, was persecuted along with many other native fauna after Europeans started to settle in the USA.
Killer whale shows jumping high from the water is a natural behaviour
There is often an argument that Orca (or killer whales) should not be displayed in aquariums as they show unnatural behaviours. While doing trick after trick would not be seen, and in the wild they might roam tens or hundreds of thousands of square miles in a year, many of the behaviours are indeed something that is seen in the wild.
Perhaps the most likely place to see interesting behaviours is during a hunt, and that is indeed what was recently captured.
Orcas swim most oceans around the world. Increasingly, humans are recognizing that far from being one species, there is actually many which have not interbred for in some cases millions of years. Furthermore, many populations are geographically isolated rarely meeting up with other members.
However, this demonstrates that while there are a number of effective predators in the sea from dolphins to sharks and whales, the killer whale is usually the undisputed predator. As well as taking dolphins reasonably regularly, killer whales often target other big predators including great white sharks. Indeed, while it is never easy to be sure of the reason that a wild species changes its behaviour, it is thought that the disappearance of the south african great white shark is linked to more regular sightings of the Orca in South African waters during the second half of the year when they are thought to be in residence.
Silvopasture
Silvopasture is the idea of integrating food crops that grow high such as orchards and grapevines, but allowing grazers to graze underneath on grass. Is also often known as Agriforestry
In theory many farm areas would be capable of producing large quantities of grape vines (or other fruit) without reducing the amount of sheep that they feed on their land.
Agrovoltaics : what what is it and why are they interesting
There is often a concern that advances in efficiency and green technologies use more land and more resources, with these two processes that is not the case.
Agrovoltaics involve putting solar panels above food crops. Food crops using a very small portion of the light that falls on them, and as such can often grow very effectively under solar panels so long as they don’t cut off too much of the light. Furthermore, while putting solar panels a metre or less of the ground is cheaper, these raised solar panels have a similar cost to roof based solar.
However there are also advantages for the the plants growing underneath. The amount of water evaporation is vastly lower, allowing more water hungry plants to grow well with less. The lower temperature also benefits many of the plant species.
Added to this of course is the ability for the farmer to sell megawatts of electricity each year. If enough farmers entered into this business and we invested in enough battery to store it for use in the evening and at night, we would eliminate the need for gas and coal powered electricity. Perhaps supporting rollout of Silvopasture could end the need for farmers to need additional finance from the government.
In the next article I will look at Silvopasture.
