In one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable thing has happened—the scimitar-horned oryx, once declared extinct in the wild, is now classified only as endangered. It’s the first time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest conservation organization, has ever moved a species on its Red List from ‘Extinct […]
Tag: Oryx
South Africa selling tiger and lion hunts to Chinese nouveau riche
Critically endangered tigers, considered to be ‘functionally extinct’ in China, are now offered by several South African hunting businesses. Since tigers are primarily defined as an exotic species in South Africa, the captive breeding, trading and hunting of this CITES Appendix I species is unregulated, with an estimated 60 mostly unlicensed tiger breeders, including several […]
Group of ‘extinct’ antelope released into wild in southern Sahara
A group of scimitar-horned oryx, an antelope declared extinct in the wild, have been reintroduced to their original home on the edge of the Sahara desert. Fourteen captive-bred animals were released in a remote area of Chad and joined a first group reintroduced in August 2016, conservationists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said. […]
Poachers Went After This Amazing Antelope for Fun
Life in the Sahara is no cakewalk. The baking sun raises temperatures to more than 120 degrees, howling winds conjure up dust devils and sand storms, and years can pass before a drop of rain falls. One desert creature is spectacularly adapted to these conditions: the addax, an ethereal-looking antelope with elongated, corkscrew horns. The […]
The Promise of Rain
I’ve been keeping this photo under wraps for a while – it just never felt like it was time to share it – until now. By now, if you’ve followed my work for some time, you would know that I have this sort of fetish for contextual atmospheric wildlife photos taken with shorter focal lengths. […]
Helping orangutans survive: new project aims to connect habitat fragments in Kalimantan (Part II)
Two decades ago, a project to convert one million hectares of forest to rice paddies was undertaken by the Indonesian government in southern Kalimantan. As predicted by experts, this Mega Rice Project (MRP) was a massive failure and was eventually abandoned, but not before it destroyed critical orangutan habitat. Now a new project is trying […]
Marooned in shrinking forests, Bornean orangutans hang on as disaster looms (Part I)
The great apes are among some of the most endangered species on Earth, the targets of poachers and the victims of deforestation. However, from time-to-time there comes news of hope. A study published recently in Oryx describes the dire situation faced by Bornean orangutans, as well as an ambitious project to help save them. The […]