Are we doing enough to protect the magnificent hornbills? Although the snake does not fly, it has caught the hornbill, whose home is in the sky. Akan Proverb Wrinkled Hornbill Apparently not enough, especially in some African countries like Ghana and Cameroon where uncontrolled hunting and habitat degradation is decimating the hornbill population. If you…
Early this month an article in National Geographic prompted me to re-publish one of my first posts about the amphibian extinction crisis. The article titled Ground Zero of ‘Amphibian’ Apocalypse Finally Found summarizes a research article published in Science in early May. The research article Recent Asian Origin of chytrid fungi causing global amphibian declines,…
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” -William Blake There are many fascinating things about these amazingly weird looking birds; a couple of them are pretty obvious their colorful and in some species huge casques and large bills. The other one, which is not so obvious, but very interesting, is…
The extraordinary habit of the male, in plastering up the female with her egg, and feeding her during the whole time of incubation, and until the young one is fledged, is common to several of the large hornbills, and is one of those strange facts in natural history which are “stranger than fiction.” -Alfred Russel…
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 7 years to get…
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up.It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the…
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration” -Claude Monet Back in 1987, while living in Israel and working for the George S. Wise institute of Life Science at the University of Tel Aviv, I was invited to spend a weekend of adventure at a Kibbutz in central Israel. My host,…
The largest cat of all. Top of the food chain. One of the most culturally important animals on this planet. But with as few as 3,200 surviving in the wild, the tiger faces extinction by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. -WWF OK, I know I promised more posts on the giant panda,…
They’re unique and extraordinary animals and the world would be poorer without them [on giant pandas] -David Suchet Tai Shan, the beloved four and a half year-old resident of the National Zoo in Washington D.C. has finally arrived in China where he will be part of a panda breeding program at Wolong’s Bifengxia Panda base…
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. -John Muir For the first time I can really say once in a blue moon and really mean what I’m saying…Like many around the world I always thought that blue moon literally meant blue or a…