Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
As is well known globally, the Kruger National Park in South Africa has had a very serious problem with rhino poaching over the last decade or so. A significant proportion of the remaining wild white rhinos live with in the Kruger so it is not a surprise that this is where much of the white rhino poaching has gone on.
At the same time, there has been a significant issue of man-eating lions within the Kruger National Park.
Recently the UK Prime Minister Theresa May made it completely clear that Brexit is taking up all of her attention. While it may be more immediate, climate change is clearly of greater threat.
I wrote a few months ago about the news that Bolsorano had been elected as the next president of Brazil. I talked about the things that he had promised to do that would be detrimental to the environmental condition in Brazil and potentially South America.
While it has taken a few months for him to start changing things, it is not encouraging.
For another month the Royal Geographical Society are holding an exhibition of photographs taken by a group of people who spent a considerable length of time exploring the Rwenzori mountains. The exhibition is in London, at the North end of Exhibition Road.
Despite a pledge by the UK government in 2013 to halt lion trophy imports there are still roughly five a year being imported into the UK. While this doesn’t sound like much, a number of things need to be held in mind.
Will  Burrard Lucas,  a British wildlife photographer, has taken the wildlife jackpot shot and managed to photograph a wild black leopard in Africa, in Laikipia Wilderness Camp in Kenya.
Her took the photo in Kenya, on a camera trap he had set up. Black leopards (as with jaguars, servals, tigers and other cats) are normal leopards which have an extremely rare recessive gene. Given that the gene in question is recessive it is rare that a leopard would have both parents carrying the recessive gene and so ends up black.
In specific parts of the world, Â black leopards are far less rare – on the Malaysian peninsula as much as half of the leopards are black. However, these leopards live in dark jungles which means there is more dark shadows for the leopards top hide in. This means that there is a higher advantage for black leopards, making them more likely to have many young.
While leopards are active mostly at night, and therefore black leopards can be easier camouflaged, for savannah leopards they need to be able to hide during the day. Although they mostly lie up a tree during the day, a black leopard is more visible.
Andrew Wheeler was appointed by Donald Trump to be the head of the Environmental Protections Agency, taking on the role permanently in January 2019. When asked, Wheeler stated that he did not believe the climate change was the greatest crisis. This clearly isn’t really a person that should be put in a position of this responsibility in this field. He also claimed this is a problem that can be only dealt with globally, but the fact is that this global community is trying to do exactly that, and that America is one of the only countries who have refused to sign up to that attempt. He is intentionally ignoring the fact that as EPA chief he can do an awful lot, but clearly this is not something that matters to him.
The RSPO (Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil) has finally decided that deforestation is not sustainable. This has always been a serious concern about the RSPO as there is no way that deforestation can ever be classed as sustainable (by definition if it relies on cutting down rainforest, what happens when it runs out?).
The Nunavut government has put together a report looking into polar bear Inuit interactions. The report suggests that population growth has pushed the polar bears into close proximity with the Inuits and the result of this is likely to be more and more clashes and potentially deaths of humans.
The Chinese government has put off a difficult decision it has to make on whether to lift the ban on trade in rhino horn and tiger body parts. Trade was banned back in 1993, but in October they announced that they would allow these parts to be used for scientific medicinal and cultural reasons.