Whether they hibernate, have thick fur coats or take shelter, animals are masters of surviving the cold weather. Here are a number of interesting animals and the fascinating things they do to survive harsh conditions.

1. Japan’s macaques monkeys keep warm by taking hot baths in volcanic springs.

2. Polar bears (or "solar bears") soak up the sun with their black skin, which is covered by a coat of  clear hair that conducts the sun’s heat. Not to mention they also have a handy 4 inches of fat to insulate them.

3. Animals will also flock to warmth created by humans, such as pigeons in Chicago that huddle around the Eternal Flame and manatees that seek out warm water discharge from power plants.

4. Aside from having blubber, penguins avoid losing energy and heat when they exhale by using special nasal passages to reclaim the warm air.

5. Some honey bees huddle together to make a winter cluster in order to keep warm.

6. Bees aren’t the only ones that huddle together, even bats and ladybugs will huddle for warmth in a safe place.

7. Various plants depend on snow to trap heat and insulate them from cold winds.

8. Seals have a special set of blood vessels that function to conserve heat.

9. Occasionally some fish will use a natural anti-freeze to keep from freezing in low temperatures.

10. When water is scarce, wild bactrian camels will eat snow.

source: blogs.nwf.org

Scientific name: Actitis macularia

Family: Scolopacidae, Sandpipers

Description: 7 1/2″ (19 cm). A starling-sized shorebird that bobs its tail almost constantly. Breeding adults are brown above, with bold white wing stripe, white below with bold black spots on breast and belly. Fall birds lack black spots below, have brownish smudge at sides of breast.

Habitat: Ponds, streams, and other waterways, both inland and along the shore.

Nesting: 4 buff eggs, spotted with brown, in a nest lined with grass or moss in a slight depression on the ground.

Voice: A clear peet-weet; also a soft trill.

Depleted by over-harvesting and pollution, the world’s major fishing grounds are now severely threatened by climate change as well, according to a UN report released Friday.

Warmer water and acidification caused by the seas’ absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide are disrupting fragile natural cycles and threaten a dramatic collapse of fish stocks, the report said.

‘What we do over the next decades has the potential to affect ocean chemistry for tens of thousands of years, and marine life for millions of years,’ said one of the authors, marine scientist Ken Caldeira of Stanford University.
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NEW DELHI — The Indian government plans to spend more than $13 million establishing a special ranger force to protect the country’s endangered tigers, following pressure from international conservationists to save the wild cats.

The funding proposed Friday by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram follows the announcement just weeks ago of a $153 million program to create new tiger reserves, underscoring renewed efforts by India’s government to protect the big cats.

New estimates suggest India’s wild tiger population has dropped from nearly 3,600 five years ago to about 1,411, the government-run Tiger Project said last month. Read the rest of this entry »

Climate change is a significant and emerging threat to public health, and changes the way we must look at protecting vulnerable populations.

The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that there is overwhelming evidence that humans are affecting the global climate, and highlighted a wide range of implications for human health. Climate variability and change cause death and disease through natural disasters, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts. In addition, many important diseases are highly sensitive to changing temperatures and precipitation. These include common vector- borne diseases such as malaria and dengue; as well as other major killers such as malnutrition and diarrhoea. Climate change already contributes to the global burden of disease, and this contribution is expected to grow in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Sirajul Hossain

A leading daily newspaper published news about the death of two Bengal tigers (panthera tigris tigris) in Sunderban mangrove during research by anesthesia and radio-collaring (Prothom Alo, January 31, 2008). According to the news the first tigress was captured around end April 2005 and died six months later having the collar on. The second tigress captured in March 2006 and second time tranquilized in December 2006 to remove the collar. The BBC film crew captured this second tranquilizing sequence of near dead tigress and added it to the film “Ganges” and now showing worldwide the last scenes of that pathetic tigress. The tigress assumed dead immediately afterwards.

The research project was initiated about four years back by Bangladesh Forest Department. James. L. D. Smith, Professor, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology of The University of Minnesota appointed as a consultant and Adam Barlow, a Ph.D. candidate in the Conservation Biology Program is engaged in the field research. The project effectively started its field activities in February 2005. They claimed that the idea for creating such a project was first developed during a field survey in 2001 conducted by Md. Osman Gani, Ishtiaq U. Ahmad, James L. D. Smith and K. Ullas Karanth1. Read the rest of this entry »

What was once seen as the solution to all our CO2 problems, the ability of trees to soak up anthropogenic carbon dioxide, has itself been hindered by global warming.

A 20-year analysis of 30 sites in the frozen north has discovered that trees ability to take in CO2 is weakening. Whereas once it was assumed that just by planting more trees we could slow down the climate change tide. These results tell us unquestionably that we need to stop passing the buck, and stop creating CO2.
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Scientific name: Columba livia

Alternate name: Rock Dove

Family: Columbidae, Pigeons and Doves

Description 13 1/2″ (34 cm). The common pigeon of towns and cities. Chunky, with short rounded tail. Typically bluish-gray with 2 narrow black wing bands and broad black terminal tail band; white rump. There are many color variants, ranging from all white through rusty to all black.

Habitat City parks, suburban gardens, and farmlands.

Nesting 2 white eggs in a crude nest lined with sticks and debris, placed on a window ledge, building, bridge, or cliff.

Voice Soft guttural cooing

Discussion Everyone knows Rock Pigeons, or domestic pigeons, as city birds that subsist on handouts or country birds that nest in pigeon cotes on farms. Few have seen them nesting in their ancestral home-cliff ledges or high among rocks. Over the centuries, many strains and color varieties have been developed in captivity through selective breeding. Since pigeons have been accused of carrying human diseases, there have been several attempts to eradicate them from our cities, but they are so prolific that little progress has been made in this endeavor.

source: enature.com

OSLO (Reuters) - Deforestation in a single Indonesian province is releasing more greenhouse gases than the Netherlands, and the loss of habitats is threatening rare tigers and elephants, the WWF conservation group said on Wednesday.

It said that Riau province, covering one fifth of Indonesia’s Sumatra island, had lost 65 percent of its forests in the past 25 years as companies used the land for pulpwood and palm oil plantations. Big peat swamps had also been cleared.

The changes meant Riau was “generating more annual greenhouse gas emissions than the Netherlands,” according to the report by WWF and partners RSS GmbH — a German forest monitoring group — and Japan’s Hokkaido University.

At the same time, the number of Sumatran elephants and tigers in the province plunged as the forests vanished, it said. Read the rest of this entry »

Some pics taken with mobile phone camera k750i