WildWorld break
November 19th, 2009 by NickWildWorld is taking a break to concentrate on the Iberianature and Britainnature sections.
Back soonish
Nick
WildWorld is taking a break to concentrate on the Iberianature and Britainnature sections.
Back soonish
Nick

Cyprus is a Mediterranean island - the third largest, after Sicily and Sardinia. It belongs to the European Union but geographically it’s part of the Middle East: the nearest neighbour is Turkey, 75 km away and clearly visible from Cyprus’ north coast, currently under Turkish dominion. Syria and Lebanon lie just over 100 km to the east.
The weather of Cyprus can be summarised in one word - sunny. It has a typical Mediterranean climate, with long hot summers and mild wet winters. Nevertheless, thanks to its topography and position, it has some interesting climatic idiosyncrasies. Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate World Animal Day Boston.com has published this remarkable set of photos of animals from around the world. This was one of my favourites. An international team of scientists perform an autopsy and DNA analysis on Lyuba, a baby woolly mammoth. Sucked to her death in a muddy river bed, Lyuba spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost where her body was so perfectly preserved traces of her mother’s milk remained in her belly. (RIA NOVOSTI/AFP/Getty Images)

The BBC’s new flagship natural history series Life has just begun in Britain. Narrated by the the wise old man of nature David Attenborough, it portrays stunning scenes of various forms of animal behaviour, and looks are how animals have adapted and evolved to flourish in their own unique environments. Some clips are now available online including this one of an unsinkable Pygmy gecko. These geckos have hydrophobic skin which repels water just like a waterproof jacket.
Each week, incredible clips from the programme will be available online. The 10-part series of Life is currently showing on BBC One “Life” and will include studies of Reptiles/Amphibians, Mammals, Fish, Birds, Insects, Creatures of the Deep, Plants and Primates. It will then gradually become available around the rest of the world. The clips are avaiable as a way of promoting the BBC Wild Live Finder <http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/> Launched in 2009, this BBC site features short video and audio clips from the past thirty years of wildlife film making. The material can be searched by species or by habitat, adaptation (behaviour, communication, and so on), or ecozone.
I thought this list of terms in other languages for the Milky Way was interesting. Complete list here from Wikipedia.
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World Press Photo have just released on the Net its remarkable archive gallery some 10,000 images. The above photo of a snow leopard was taken by Steve Winter, whose report here on snow leopards in Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas won the nature category in 2008. “A snow leopard walks a high mountain trail, photographed using a remotely operated camera trap. The camera recorded just a single image in five months.”
More nature reports from World Press Photo

Not all bad news from Congo. The WWF reports here on the successs of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership in saving the world’s second biggest rainforest. Some of its accomplishments:

A lioness taking a kip in a tree in Queen Elizabeth National Park (Southwestern Uganda). Ishasha lions are famed for tree climbing, a trait only shared with other lions in the Lake Manyara region in Uganda and Southern Tanzania. They often spend the hottest parts of the day in the ficus trees found throughout the area, probably to escape the bites of tsetse flies. It is appears to be a learnt behaviour, and so can therefore be seen as a culture trait of these lions, but it is still unclear why this behavior is rare in other lions groups. Photo by Stefan Gara (Creative Commons, Flickr).
Video of tree climbing lions

The establishment of new reserves in China and Vietnam could save two of the world’s rarest primates, the cao vit gibbon and the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey. Just 110 cao vit gibbons and about 200 Tonkin snub nosed monkeys are thought to survive in the wild. The new sanctuary for the gibbons, the 6,500-hectare Bangliang Nature Reserve in China’s Guangxi Province, runs adjacent to Vietnam’s Cao Vit Gibbon Conservation Area, and more than quadruples the amount of protected forest for the gibbon. The cao vit gibbon currently lives mainly on the Vietnamese side of the border but it now can expand into China.
Video of cao vit gibbons:
The other protected area, in Khau Ca forest in northern Vietnam, is home to 90 Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. The new 2,000-hectare reserve also supports a relatively pristine sub-tropical forest with a wide range of other wildlife. The wildlife charity Fauna and Flora International ( above photo), which works for wildlife protection in developing countries, was instrumental in establishing the new reserves.

A Mughal painting showing cheetahs hunting leopards
An international meeting in India of cheetah experts and conservationists has agreed that the case for the reintroduction of the cheetah is strong.
The plan, backed by the Indian government, is to bring the cheetah back to India and make it, as many wildlife experts say, the “flagship species” of the country’s grasslands, which today lack a prominent species on which to base conservation.
Seven sites in the four states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh have been shortlisted as potential homes for the cheetah. They will now be surveyed to ascertain the state of the habitat, the number of prey and prospects of man-animal conflicts. India would then import the animals from Africa, as the numbers of the Asiatic cheetah still surviving in Iran have fallen to less than 100. Genetic studies suggest that the similarities between the Iranian and African cheetah is “very close”.
Conservationists are split on the plan. Some say are concerned that if the the cheetah is brough back too quickly, they will end up being housed in semi-captive conditions in huge, secured open air zoos, but not free in the wild. They say without restoring habitat and prey base and the chances of a man-animal conflict, viable cheetah populations cannot be established. MK Ranjitsinh, chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India, says the plan is to release the cheetahs in the wild in designated open areas, after studying them thoroughly.
Reintroducing cheetahs in India has symbolic value. The first cheetahs to be bred in captivity were in India during Mughal rule. See also history of Cheetahs in India.