If you watch the video in yesterday’s post, here, most of the way through, you’ll hear Douglas Adams talking about the kakapo, an endangered and quite flightless parrot from New Zealand:

It’s this big, soft, fluffy, lugubrious bird. It’s forgotten how to fly. Sadly it’s also forgotten that it’s forgotten how to fly… So, a seriously worried kakapo has been known to run up a tree and jump out of it… Opinion is divided on what happens next. Some people say it’s developed a rudimentary parachuting ability. Other people say it flies a bit like a brick.

He’s referring throughout that video to his adventures researching one of his best books, Last Chance to See, co-authored with Mark Carwardine, nearly twenty years ago. The BBC have made this book into a new documentary, in which Carwardine returns to re-visit many of the animals from the original book, and I have found at least one clip from it, below.

This is one of the funniest animal videos I have seen in a long time, I won’t spoil it for you.  But bear in mind Adams’ lengthy description of the kakapo mating ritual, from the video:

It turns out that the mating habits of the kakapo are incredibly long and drawn out, and fantastically complicated, and almost entirely ineffective. Some people will tell you that the mating call of the male kakapo actively repels the female kakapo.

For about 100 night of the year it goes through its mating ritual, and it finds some rocky outcrop on which to perform its mating call… It sits there night after night, performing the opening bars of “Dark Side of the Moon”. It’s a very deep bass sound… You more feel it, like a wobble in the pit of your stomach, rather than hear it. These deep bass sounds have two important characteristics: one is they travel great distances: great long, deep bass sound waves fill these great long valleys of the south island of New Zealand. And that’s good. But the other characteristic of bass sounds, which you may be familiar with, if you’ve have a subwoofer you know you can put it anywhere in the room you like, because the other characteristic of bass sounds, and remember we’re talking about a mating call here, is that you can’t tell where it’s coming from.

So just imagine if you will a male kakapo, making all this booming noise, and if there’s a female out there, which there probably isn’t, and she likes the sound, which she probably doesn’t, she can’t find the person who’s making it. And then, even if she finds him, she will only consent to mate if the podokuk tree is in fruit.

Now we’ve all had relationships like that…

All the lightheartedness aside, the kakapo is seriously endangered, even after a hundred years of conservation efforts. Only 123 individuals remain alive. (This is actually an improvement from their lowest point of about 40). The introduction of cats, rats, and stoats to New Zealand, animals which eat the birds and their eggs, has decimated their numbers. Two small islands just off the coast of New Zealand are maintained as predator-free zones  expressly for the purpose of keeping the kakapo refugees safe. Fortunately there’s good dedication in New Zealand to their preservation, and little black market demand for kakapo products, so they may just survive a bit longer.

Via my friend Craig, here is a long-lost classic TED talk by the late, great, and much-missed Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a bunch of other very, very funny books. Adams is beloved by many in the scientific community (Richard Dawkins eulogized him at his funeral a few years ago), not only for his sense of humor but for his acute understanding of science. It’s well worth watching the whole thing:

He begins by telling a long and very story about a visit to Madagascar to search for a highly endangered species of lemur called the aye aye. I have been to Madagascar, and seen a variety of lemurs, but not the aye aye, which is found only on Nosy Mangabey off the north coast of the main island. But for those of you who haven’t seen photos of an aye aye, they’re worth seeing– easily one of the oddest looking animals in the world.  (From National Geographic, here):

Baby aye aye

Read the rest of this entry »

In a depressingly predictable example of life imitating art, the meagre storyline of Avatar is being played out right now in the backwater Indian state of Orissa, which is in the East-center of India, south and west of Kolkata. It’s one of the few parts of India which are sparsely populated, and home to people still living traditional lifestyles. It’s one of the places I really wanted to visit when I was there a couple years ago, and I have been kicking myself ever since for not making it happen. Watch the video, but be warned, it’s heartbreaking.

Somehow I don’t think that a global ethernet network or hordes of flying blue pterosaurs are going to save them from the evil mining company. But the Dongria Kondh think that James Cameron just might:

Survival International's appeal to James Cameron in UK's Variety magazine

Fortunately, there is something you can do. Details here at Survival International.

The other day, I came across  this link from the local paper in Manitowoc, Wisconsin:

An Asiatic black bear at Lincoln Park Zoo bit off all or parts of four fingers from the hand of a 47-year-old woman Friday after she went past barriers and was trying to feed the animal, a Manitowoc police captain said. “It appears that she suffered loss of some fingers,” specifically, all of her thumb and forefinger and parts of her middle and ring fingers, said Capt. Scott Luchterhand.

Stories like this pop up every once in a while– a few years ago, I think some very foolhardy zoo visitor in Europe was killed by a polar bear when he swam the moat and entered its enclosure. But I find this one particularly funny, because I lived for a couple years in Oshkosh, just down the road from Manitowoc. I can see this happening to any number of the intellectually challenged individuals I had to deal with 0n a daily basis (I am really hoping she was that woman from the testing center at UWO– yeah you know who you are). The schadenfreude is delicious and irresistable.

And the kicker?

In a similar incident, a wolf at the zoo chewed off the right arm of Jared Mraz of Manitowoc, then 2, on Dec. 20, 1994.

What the hell is wrong with people in Wisconsin?