Giant Otters of the Amazon

There is a special place in my heart for Otters.  They are large aquatic mustelids, closely related to weasels and wolverines.  I have been fascinated by them since I was a child. In the river, lake,  estuarial and marine shoreline habitats where they live, they are apex predators, so good at catching a meal that they have abundant time on their hands to play and goof around. Watching Otters being Otters is a total delight.

The link below is for a full length documentary about the giant river Otter, a species that is indigenous to South America and the Amazon river basin.  Giant Otters can be over six feet in length as adults. They are formidable predators, but like all species of Otters, they are also experts at playing and having fun.

This documentary was produced by British cinematographer, Charlie Hamilton James,  who has long had his own fascination with Otters.  

Charlie Hamilton James

 



I have great admiration for people like Charlie James.  It takes more than just skill with a camera to capture the kind of images and video footage that reveal the beauty of extraordinary species like the Otter. You have to love nature and the creatures that become your focus.  You have to be willing to spend countless hours in the wild places where they live and endure the worst kind of hardships and weather conditions. People like Charlie James provide the means for their audiences to truly appreciate the gifts of nature. There is no way to put a price on something like that.  



 

Here is a link to a You Tube presentation titled, Giant Otters of the Amazon... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYLb6X2Jy-8

 

 

 

Tickling a Loris

The loris is a funny faced creature indigenous to India and Southeast Asia.  Apparently they like being tickled.   I'm posting this entry because it shows this creature to be intelligent and also endearing.  The best way to appreciate the loris is to leave it alone,  free in the forest where it belongs. Loris's are wild animals.  We should not be encouraging people to have them as pets. The best thing we can do for them is protect the forested lands they depend on for survival. 

I would love to tickle a loris, but I prefer they be left alone to live out their lives free of human interference.

Here is a link to a loris getting tickled...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ5ACLVjYwM&NR=1&feature=endscreen

Gorillas - 98.6% Human

Here is a link to a wonderful short film that's up close with wild gorillas. We have an obligation to protect these near human ceratures. If we don't they will be gone in the wild by mid-eentury.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co8NneR8ilc

Bruno Manser - Laki Penan

I first learned about Bruno Manser maybe 15 years ago when I saw a story about him on CBS 60 Minutes  The Swiss born Manser was showcased as a strident advocate for the Penan people of Malaysian Borneo.  Manser spent 1984-1990 living in remote settlements with the Penan, writing a journal of his experiences. Manser was in Borneo when the forests the Penan have occupied for millennia  came under assault from commercial loggers. It turns out the massive logging operations that were stripping trees from Penan territory were owned substantially by high ranking Malaysian politicians. 

Bruno Manser

Manser became a fearless champion of the Penan people, taking their story of  political exploitation and ecological destruction to a global audience.  The Malaysian government banned him from entering the country.  The high ranking Malaysian government officials behind the logging and the rapacious industry leaders they were in cahoots with put a price on Manser's head. 

Bruno Manser was last seen in a remote village in Borneo in May of 2000.  He is presumed to have been murdered sometime after that. The mystery of his dissappearance remains unsolved. He was declared dead by a Swiss court in 2005.  

Bruno Manser understood the threats against him, yet he plunged forward undeterred. Many would argue that he was reckless in his pursuit of justice for the Penan people. Maybe, but he deserves to be remembered as a hero, who gave his life defending the indigenous people and the tropical forest landscape that he loved. Hats off to Bruno Manser. He was an extraordinary human being.


Here is a link to the website for Bruno Manser - Laki Penan, a film done about Manser's life and death in Borneo...  http://www.brunomanser-derfilm.ch/p/manser_en.htm

Here is a link to aa You Tube presentation of a part of that film, with English sub-titles...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8RqHqdLVh8

Here is a link to the Bruno Manser Fund that carries on his work on behalf of the Penan and other indigenous peoples around the world.
http://www.bmf.ch/en/

Treeless Paper

Paper is made mostly from fibrous cellulose that comes from trees. To print one edition of the Sunday New York Times, it takes 63 thousand trees.   When you consider how many newspapers are printed around the world, how much toilet paper is consumed, and add to that all the product packaging, shipping materials, and paper we write on and and use in our computers, it's no wonder deforestation is a very serious problem. 

Forests are essential to the health of the planet.  They absorb carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas created by human addiction to fossil hydrocarbon energy sources like coal and oil.  Trees  expire oxygen in the photosynthetic process.  They provide food, shelter, and a lot more to the insects, birds, and animals that are adapted to live in them. The more trees we have, the better off we all  are. 

Fortunately, a lot of factors are at work to reduce demand for paper from trees. Technology has evolved to a way that is replacing newspapers, magazines, and books printed on paper with electronic versions available on smartphones and tablet computers. Paperless communication is an idea that has arrived and is here to stay.

Packaging that once depended to a high degree on cardboard and paper is evolving rapidly. Plastics have taken over a lot of the burden from paper, and now more and more of the plastic packaging  we use is made of biodegradable, plant derived materials that are relatively benign to the environment.

There is always going to be a requirement for paper, but cutting down old growth forests and reducing them to pulp to make toilet paper makes no sense at all.   The cellulose plant fiber used in paper can be readily provided by seasonal crops like switch grass, begasse from sugar cane, kenaf, and industrial hemp.  Instead of taking years to grow, these plants grow over a matter of months into a form that is readily harvestible and easily processed into paper. 

It used to be, we depended on forests for building materials and for making furniture. These days, we have environmentally friendly substitutes that serve those same purposes. 

Biofuels have become an important part of the equation for replacing oil and coal.  Cellulosic biofuels can be made from corn stalks and other waste materials that are part of growing food crops.  Stripping trees from forestland to make bio-fuels is not cost-effective and it cannot be justified in any way when the raw materials can be acquired from fast growing cultivated crops.

We have reached a point in evolution when we can no longer take from our environment without consequence. We.must embrace our proper human role of stewardship. We must be the nurturers of our biosphere.  The transition to treeless paper is a big step in the right direction.

Daredevil Pilots of Columbia

We're not talking about thugs who fly cocaine out of the jungle.  This little video showcases professional pilots who fly ancient, twin engine Douglas DC-3 aircraft delivering supplies and passenger service in and out of grass strips in the jungles of the western Amazon. 

First flown in the 1930s, the DC-3 is a remarkable airplane. Tens of thousands were built for the war effort.  There are probably several hundred of them still in commercial service. In places like Coumbia, few aircraft can match the DC-3 in serving that nation's remote communities.  The conditions in which Columbian pilots operate regularly are daunting to say the least.

Here is a link to the video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-F-cBF5ZbQ&feature=watch-vrec

Encyclopedia of Earth

Here is a tremendous, open source, immanently accessible, peer reviewed information resource on all subjects related to the Earth sciences.

http://www.eoearth.org/

Talking to Bonobos

The bonobo, Pan paniscus, looks like a smaller version of the chimpazee. In fact, they are close relatives to chimps, but are a separate species.

Bonobos live in a small area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Size is not the only thing that makes them different from chimps.  Bonobo culture is considered matriarcal, with male status tied to the mother's status in the group.  Bonobos are significantly less aggressive than chimps, very likely because they are highly sexual.  Relationships and social status are reinforced with frequent sexual activity, both heterosexual and homosexual, among both sexes.  Perhaps one of the reasons bonobos are not often found on display in zoos is because they are are prone to sexual behavior, all day, every day.  As a way of maintaining relationships and keeping the peace, it appears to work very well for them.

Given that bonobos are such close relatives to humans, could it be that our cultural morays are causing us to stifle our own natural sexual instincts?   I think that case could be made, just on the anecdotal evidence.  Bonobos benefit socially from the frequent expression of their sexuality.  I don't guess we're going to see humans emulating them any time soon, but we might benefit from being a bit more tolerant of the many ways that people do express that part of their lives.

In Iowa, there is a research center, where a family group of bonobos resides.  They are clearly very intelligent. The whole group has learned 400 symbols that relate to ideas or words. They are able to communciate with researchers using these symbols.

Now, there is an effort underway to create an electronic interface that will translate bonobo symbolic communciation into words spoken by a robotic bonobo.  A clever way to foster interspecies communications. 

Here is the link to the robotic bonobo development project...

http://www.gizmag.com/bonobo-chat-ape-communication-app/22002/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=5156a9d703-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

There are only about 40,000 bonobos left in the wild. Their numbers have dropped significantly in recent years, mostly because of poaching.  The Congo is a place where a large portion of the growing human population relies on bushmeat from wild animals for food.  They hunt bonobos and kill them for food.

In fact, human population growth is the chief threat to bonobo survival. The Congo is a place larger than all of Europe combined. It is also the center of an ongoing human genocide. More than ten million people have died violent deaths over the last two decades.  Despite that fact, the human population has been growing at a rate of 3% annually. The current population of nearly 70 million is expected to swell to 180 million by 2050. What does that mean for the Congo's wild animal species? It's deeply depressing to think that bonobos, chimps, and gorillas, the closest relatives to humans, could be wiped out by humans consuming them for food.  That very likely will happen before the end of this century. We humans should find a way to prevent it. We shoud encourage a sustainable future for the Congo that celebrates and protects that nation's unique biological heritage. Unfortunately, very little like that is happening,  and time is running out.

My Close Encounter with a Spirit Bear

In late September of 1999, I found myself on the Canadian raincoast, 400 miles north of Vancouver, B.C.  I was there to produce a documentary on the destructive impact of clear cut logging on that remote, incredibly beautiful stretch of coastal wilderness.

Traveling aboard, Maple Leaf, a restored 19th century schooner, the production team we put together followed the documentary project's host, James Cromwell and Ian McAllister, former leader of the Raincoast Conservation Society, as they talked about salmon, bears,  whales, and the lush forests that dominate the landscape, except where loggers have stripped the land clear of trees.

It happens that one of the rarest bears in the world can be found only in one small area of the raincoast. The Haisla, the Canadian First Nations people, native to that area, call this bear,  Kermode or Spirit Bear.  It's actually a genetically distinct, common black bear that happens to have white or blond fur.  There are only about 400 known to exist.

During this trip, I had one the most thrilling experiences of my life. It happened  on a day we spent sitting next to a rocky waterfall, watching and filming wild bears catching and eating one salmon after another. The bears would come around to the falls, one at a time - a territorial thing, we were told. After hanging around long enough to catch and eat a couple of fish, the bear would move on, making away for another bear looking for a meal. This went on, hour after hour. The biggest thrill was the arrival of a Spirit Bear. There was a special kind of magic to this encounter, and not just because this white bear was considererd a spirit by the locals. He was big as bears go; and very healthy looking; probably well over 400 pounds. It's no wonder the way he dined. During the 75 minutes he was with us,  that white bear caught and ate one salmon after another; eight total. The weight of the fish consumed; at least 40 pounds. He knew we were there. He didn't care. He'd catch his fish, then amble across a log into the forest, where he would settle back on his butt against a tree (really, he did that; eight times!), and  eat his catch.  At one point, Marc Griffith,  our cameraguy,  set up just three feet below the log that bear walked over, each time with a fish flapping in its jaws. I was right behind Marc. We were assured we would not be in danger, unless we tried to take the bear's fish.  No chance of that happening. The whole experience was amazing. The most exhilerating animal encounter of my life.

Years later,  the B.C government changed its raincoast policy away from unbridled exploitation to the point that much of the Great Bear Rainforest is now protected.  Where logging continues, it is  subject to closely monitored regulation. I like to think my colleagues and I made a modest but useful contribution to that very encouraging outcome.

The link below is a short video shot by Ian McAllister that features the Spirit Bear and images of the Canadian raincoast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IRxdk6m17s