TED on Tuesday: Paul Nicklen's Animal Tales From Antarctica

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Paul Nicklen: Animal tales from icy wonderlands

Diving under the Antarctic ice to get close to the much-feared leopard seal, photographer Paul Nicklen found an extraordinary new friend. Share his hilarious, passionate stories of the polar wonderlands, illustrated by glorious images of the animals who live on and under the ice.

Good News for Yellowstone’s Bison

Adult bison and calf in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Arturo de Frias Marques.

Some people travel to kill the wildlife. Others travel to admire the same wildlife living in its natural habitat.

Most readers will surely be aware of the mass slaughter of the American Bison during the 1880s, when bison herds numbering in their tens of thousands were reduced to giant piles of bleached white bones in just a few short years. Thankfully, enough bison survived the slaughter to begin the reintroduction of this magnificent creature to some of America's national parks, including Yellowstone National Park.

In a previous post (Ending The Elephant Slaughter), I wrote about the campaign to end the continuing slaughter of this great animal for its ivory. In this post I am reproducing an article from the American Defenders Of Wildlife organisation that fights for the survival of many ever diminishing species on the North American continent, while also championing the reintroduction of threatened species to their former natural habitat.

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It’s getting better all the time for Yellowstone’s bison. 

Under Gov. Steve Bullock, the state of Montana is at last allowing bison that leave Yellowstone National Park to roam free year-round on almost 400,000 acres. And the National Park Service announced in January it is moving forward with a plan to relocate some of Yellowstone’s bison to tribal and public lands rather than send them to slaughter.

Bison wander at will when they stay inside park boundaries. But when snow falls in Yellowstone’s high country and grazing becomes difficult, bison often trek to lower ground outside the park. In the past, they were allowed only a tiny portion of public land during winter when cattle are not present. Not all bison leave the park, but those that did risked being rounded up and sent to slaughter in years when their numbers exceeded an arbitrary cap of 3,000.

Last year, some 900 animals were killed—just for searching beyond park boundaries for food. Defenders has long opposed the slaughter and advocated for wild bison restoration to the Great Plains as a much-needed alternative. 

In recent years, Defenders helped the Assiniboine, Gros Ventre and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Indian reservations bring Yellowstone bison back to their ancestral lands. 

The latest relocation of 130 genetically pure bison (no cattle genes) occurred last year. These bison were the first “graduates” of a 15-year effort to study the feasibility of quarantining and testing bison for brucellosis. This contagious disease originally spread to bison and elk from Old World cattle in the last century. Ranchers often opposed bison grazing outside the park because brucellosis can cause cows to miscarry. However, there has not been a single documented case of bison transmitting the disease to cattle in the wild in Montana. 

“Yellowstone’s bison are our nation’s most genetically valuable bison,” says Steve Forrest, Defenders’ senior representative for the Rockies and Plains. “They are essential in our efforts to restore the species across North America and for too long they have been needlessly sent to slaughter. We are delighted with the governor’s new rule that gives bison room to roam. It finally acknowledges that bison are wildlife, not livestock, and recognizes that their seasonal, age-old winter migration routes know no political boundaries. Further, the park’s proposal is a win-win for bison and for the American public. We are so proud to see all our hard work paying off.” 

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Only select articles from Defenders are available online. To receive 4 issues annually of the full award-winning magazine, click here to become a member of Defenders of Wildlife!

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Defenders of Wildlife...

Ending The Elephant Slaughter

Intercepting poachers at Lewa Conservancy.

I have never understood the attraction of hunting, either for profit or for adventure. I do of course understand the need for hunting if your personal survival depends on it. I also understand that many native populations around the world still rely on hunting wild game to supplement their diets, even if they have access to modern food sources. However, it is rare, if not completely unheard of for native populations who hunt wild game to indiscriminately slaughter large numbers of wild animals simply for ‘sport’ or ‘adventure’.

I was shocked to read recently that the Convention on The Trade in Endangered Species estimates that at least 20,000 elephants were killed for ivory in 2015. In fact, there are now fears that more elephants are being slaughtered each year than are being born. Needless to say, it is impossible to know exactly how many elephants are dying each year at the hands of criminal poaching gangs.

In 2016, the Great Elephant Census indicated that poachers slaughtered nearly 30% of East Africa’s savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, some 144,000 animals. Poachers also killed nearly two-thirds of central Africa’s forest elephants between 2002 and 2013. Currently, fewer than 400,000 elephants are believed to remain in 18 sub-Saharan countries. While this figure may seem large, when elephants are being slaughtered at the rate 20,000+ creatures a year, it doesn’t take a brilliant mathematician to work out that at the current rate of slaughter, Africa’s wild elephant population could be extinct in twenty years.

Thankfully, there are organisations and people prepared to do whatever they can to minimize—even if they cannot completely end—this wild life slaughter. One of these people is the philanthropist (and former co-founder of Microsoft), Paul Allen, who has funded a new high tech anti-poaching system known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS). Responding to the elephant poaching crisis in the Great Elephant Census report, Allen and his team of technologists and conservation experts are partnering with park managers across Africa to provide the new technology to help protect this iconic species and other wildlife threatened by human activities. 

(Stock image). Credit: © jhvephoto / Fotolia

The Domain Awareness System aggregates the positions of radios, vehicles, aircraft and animal sensors to provide users with a real-time dashboard that depicts the wildlife being protected, the people and resources protecting them, and the potential illegal activity threatening them.

Other high tech tools that are helping in this vital fight are satellites, drones, camera traps, animal sensors, weather monitors and eventually new technology yet to be invented. The new technology also helps take the guess work out of the anti-poaching fight. With real-time data at their fingertips, park rangers can respond quickly and effectively to catch poachers before they wreak havoc on elephant herds and other wild game. 

Sadly, however, it is not just the wild game that are threatened by poachers. Each year, heavily armed poaching gangs kill dozens of park rangers across Africa’s numerous game reserves. The Game Ranger website reports that, “More than 1,000 rangers have been killed worldwide and many more injured over the last 10 years.” Clearly, the stakes are high for both the wild life and their human protectors, so anything that can help reduce the human and animal death toll is to be applauded—which brings us back to the Domain Awareness System. 

The system has been installed at six protected wildlife conservation sites since November 2016. Working with Save the Elephants, African Parks Network, Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Singita Grumeti Fund as well as the Lewa Conservancy and Kenya’s Northern Rangelands Trust, a total of 15 locations are expected to adopt the system this year.

When the system is fully operational by the end of 2017, it will cover more than 90,000 square miles of protected area. An ongoing consortium of conservation NGOs, government partners, and technology companies, is working with Paul Allen's team to integrate DAS with software used in nearly 500 sites across 46 countries to measure, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of wildlife law enforcement patrols and onsite conservation activities.

One can only hope that the combined forces—human and technological—arrayed against the illegal trade in elephant tusks, can put an effective end to this criminal practice before it is too late.

Here is a short video outlining how the Domain Awareness System works in practice:

More Information

Great Elephant Census...

Convention on The Trade in Endangered Species... 

Study: Legalizing ivory trade won’t save elephants…

Game Rangers Association of Africa…

Armchair Travel: Rewilding Europe

Rewilding Europe wants to make Europe a wilder place, with much more space for wildlife, wilderness and natural processes. The organization aims to rewild one million hectares of land by 2020, creating 10 magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas of international quality. To this end the organization has already begun focusing on Europe’s huge areas of abandoned land, and on providing a viable business case for the support and promotion of wild nature.

To date, Rewilding Europe has focussed on five regions: Western Iberia, the Eastern and  Southern Carpathians, the Danube Delta, and Velebit (Croatia).

Rewilding Europe is an initiative by WWF Netherlands, ARK Nature, Wild Wonders of Europe and Conservation Capital.

More Information:

Video produced by Studio Kuskus Berlin…

Rewilding Europe…

Things You Discover Walking: Suburban Koalas

One of the fascinating things about nature, and the creatures that inhabit what is left of our wild places and natural landscapes, is how these creatures have learned to adapt to our suburban environments.

Whether we are talking about the bears and wolves in America, that weave their way through suburban front yards looking for sources of food discarded in compost and trash bins, or whether referring to the foxes that creep through Australian backyards searching for the occasional stray chicken – wild nature is closer than you think.

In Adelaide, where I live, native animals like the koala (please don’t call it a koala bear), are slowly finding their way out of the surrounding Adelaide hills into suburban back yards and parks.

Look carefully at the photo illustrating this blog post. Can you see it? There it is, perched on the fork of a branch calmly surveying man and machine as they come and go in the car park of the Mitcham Shopping Centre on Belair Road.

This is one of at least two koalas that I have noticed in a line of large eucalyptus trees that follow the path of Brownhill Creek as it winds out of the nearby hills on its way to the ocean. I assume the koalas have been following the river as well via the trees that line its banks.

Koalas are quite solitary creatures. They never gather together in family groups, nor do the males watch over a bevy of female koalas, fighting off the amorous approaches of other males of the species. They don’t mate for life with one partner, like some other wild animals do, and all in all, seem to be quite happy with own company.

Like kangaroos, koalas are marsupial animals, meaning that the female gives birth to relatively undeveloped young. A baby koala is referred to as a ‘joey’ (as is a baby kangaroo), and is hairless, blind, and earless at birth. The joey, which is only a quarter of an inch long at birth, crawls into a downward-facing pouch on the mother's belly and attaches itself to one of two teats, and there it remains for about six months, only feeding on milk.

It was interesting to watch people walking beneath this tree and its occupant – completely oblivious to its presence. I knew there was a koala in the tree somewhere, after noticing droppings on the asphalt below the tree. However, I must admit that even I was surprised by just how close to the ground this koala was.

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