India/Pakistan border guard: confrontation ceremony Gorillas and water Wild western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) were observed to use water to generate spectacular 'splash displays'. Most of these displays were made by silverbacks in an agressive context, and the observers proposed that they are primarily linked to the intimidation of potential rivals for female acquisition. This unusual behaviour may have developed only in gorillas that visit open swampland, where visibility greatly exceeds that encountered in the forest and highly visual, long-distance displays are therefore of value. https://www.nature.com/articles/35085631 Animals that dance to impress https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/animals-that-dance-to-impress.html Gestures of great apes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-017-1096-4#Abs1 Orangutans in the wild and held captive https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221012736 Yoga animal poses https://kidsyogafun.com/66-easy...

In 1960, Dr. Deets Pickett, gorilla hunter, transferred nine baby gorillas from Cameroon to the United States. He described the journey from Africa as a harrowing ordeal, with the infant gorillas arriving "half-dead from cold, respiratory ailments and lack of motherly love." Pickett continues: "I got eight baby gorillas in Yaounde, Cameroon... . The youngest were grieving for their mothers, who had been killed by the natives. At Douala on the seacoast ... all collapsed with heatstroke and one died. At Paris, where it was cold, two more died of pneumonia. When we arrived in New York, five were unconscious, Hibou nearly dead." For the next flight from New York to St. Louis, "two of the baby gorillas rode with Dr. Pickett in the cabin . . . the other two, moaning and grumbling, were carried, crated, in the cargo hold." One of the gorillas to survive capture and transfer to the United States, was sold to the Memphis Zoo for approximately five thousand doll...

The last Eskimo Curlew tells his story throughout a year during his migration from wintering grounds in the pampas grass-lands of Argentina and Uruguay to the Canadian Arctic in search of a mate. It’s a bird’s eye view of a perilous migratory journey of up to 8,000 km, which paints a realistic and detailed picture of this bird's life and his behaviour. The lone survivor crying for a mate, that never comes. stands for the entirety of a species on the brink of extinction, and for all in nature that is endangered. The Eskimo Curlew is gone because humankind hunts for leisure; it's never coming back. The message hits especially hard because it follows this individual bird, and you become invested in his life and you want him to succeed, but you know that's not happening. The Last Curlew’s story was written by Fred Bodsworth, a Canadian newspaper reporter and naturalist, in 1954. Decades later the science journalist Sonia Shah in her book ‘The Next Migration: Beauty and Terro...

  Applying Arts Reasoning To Explain Sustainability Durer’s imaginary woodcut of Genda The image is based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist in 1515 On 20 May 1515, an Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon from the Far East.  It was a gift from Sultan Muzaffar Shah II, ruler of Cambay (modern Gujarat), to Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, who was seeking permission to build a fort on the island of Diu.  Albuquerque’s mission failed, but diplomatic gifts were exchanged, including the rhinoceros.  At that time, the rulers of different countries would occasionally send each other exotic animals to be kept in a menagerie. The Diu rhinoceros was already well accustomed to being kept in captivity so Albuquerque decided to forward the gift, known by its Gujarati name of Genda, and its Indian keeper, named Ocem, to King Manuel I of Portugal. The rhino and its keeper sailed on the Nossa Senhora da Ajuda, which left Goa in January ...

  Technically, a CMS is a project-based planning and recording system aimed at managing conservation features within acceptable limits of variation. A feature is any component of the environment that has to be managed e.g. a footpath or a species. A 'project' is simply a programme of work leading to an output e.g. 'construct a footpath', 'patrol an area' or 'record a species'. Projects are work plans that control specific factors that help or impede the attainment of management objectives. Each project includes a description of a process, e.g. the work to be done, when and where it is to be done and the inputs of resources required. When a project is completed, what was actually done is recorded. This is an output. The outcome of a CMS is the state of the feature at the end of the project and is measured by performance indicators. Performance indicators are quantitative or qualitative attributes of the features e.g. numbers of a species, and they are mea...

  The British idea of a  management system for nature conservation may be traced to an upsurge of sentiment after the Second World War that the world should be made a better place. It was the UK botanist Arthur Tansley who pleaded for organised nature conservation on the double ground of scientific value and beauty. He had advanced the concept of the ecosystem in 1935, and a number of key ideas of relevance to nature conservation stem from this. In the immediate post-war years, he hoped for an 'Ecological Research Council', and a 'National Wildlife Service'. In this context, the idea of national standards of conservation management can be traced to the formation of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), and its great survey of UK habitats and species, the Nature Conservation Review , published in 1977.  From this time there was general agreement that the common purpose of wildlife, conservation management systems was to transform situations of ecological confrontation ...

  Conservation management begins with the identification of a measurable environmental feature that is valued for its own sake, but is subject to a factor or factors causing its decline from a favorable condition. A conservation management system (CMS) provides the logic for controlling such factors in an action plan. It is simply a filing tool for scheduling and recording the sequence of actions of a wildlife manager responding to a scientific or probabilistic rationale.  A conservation rationale provides the reasoning or justification for an action or a choice he or she makes to meet measurable objectives.  Its aim is to promote efficient and effective operations, and allow recording of the work that was done, what it cost and  whether or not the objective was achieved. As part of the plan, t he feature’s condition is monitored as a performance indicator. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of rationale that define conservation management systems.  These ca...

"I’ll never forget the day I came face to face with one of the world’s most iconic species - the giant panda - as this charismatic and universally loved species is rarely seen in the wild. As I stood staring into his dark solemn eyes, I was overcome with a sense of tranquility. I also felt  thankful to have shared this unique experience alongside our dedicated field team who work passionately to protect this incredible species." Nicola Loweth. WWF Regional officer for India and China. Pandas live mainly in temperate forests high in the mountains of southwest China, where they subsist almost entirely on bamboo. They must eat around 26 to 84 pounds of it every day, depending on what part of the bamboo they are eating. They use their enlarged wrist bones that function as opposable thumbs to manipulate the bamboo.. China’s Yangtze Basin region holds the panda’s primary habitat. Infrastructure development (such as dams, roads, and railways) is increasingly fragmenting and isolatin...

  They’re cute, curious little seabirds that spend their lives trying to eat delicious fish and breed among the coastal rocks. Unfortunately, humanity is threatening to drive them to extinction. Luckily, there are a number of puffin patrols and rescue societies out there trying to help. Puffins come from a family of birds known as auks. They live in coastal areas and are instantly identifiable by their black-and-white coloration, thick beaks that turn orange in the spring, and rounded shape. Also known as the “sea parrot,” or the “clown of the ocean,” the adorable birds can be found in a few places across the globe including including along the coast of the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. Their colorful beaks and pudgy stature make them a winsome sight wherever they are found, and their friendly attitude doesn’t hurt either. Also, they’re total goofs. “They are quite flighty, flying off when people come too close in boats and they are also very clumsy on lan...

  THE sun had not shared its warmth with the island for weeks but this morning it rose over the eastern side of the bay into a crystal-clear sky. The sea, which had not settled for months on end, now rested in a quiet calm. A gull drifted silently across the cliff face, following its own distorted shadow cast by the early morning sun. The only sounds to break the stillness were the piping calls of oystercatchers on the rocks beneath the cliff and the gentle lapping of the wavelets as they gurgled between the boulders. The stillness of the day was demonstrated by a whiff of smoke, rising vertically from the chimney of a lonely cottage which nestled into the cliff top. Far out at sea, a white speck appeared for a moment or two. Within an hour, the silent gull had been joined by others of its kind on the west side of the bay yet, although they now squabbled amongst themselves over some trivial matter, their cries did not destroy the harmony of the island.  The speck on the sea, w...