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Culture

The Soul of the Rhino by Hemanta Mishra

Hemanta Mishra is a Nepali conservationist who, among other things, was part of the campaign to set up Nepals’ first national park, primarily to protect what is usually referred to as the Indian Rhinoceros, but which he refers to, for understandable nationalistic reasons, as the Asian one-horned rhinoceros.

This book is a memoir and is primarily a book about people rather than rhinos; that is, about the practicalities and politics of conservation, rather than the behaviour and habits of Rhinoceros unicornis.

So he has to deal with farmers whose crops are being damaged by rhinos; deter poachers; encourage tourism; work with bureaucrats and foreign NGOs; to learn from the practical experience of rangers and trackers; to capture rhinos for captive breeding programmes overseas; and after a brief battle with his conscience, he organises a ritualistic rhino hunt for the new king to kill a rhino for traditional symbolic purposes.

For most of the book he is telling a conservation success story; the population of rhinos in Nepal increases from about 100 to 650, including some relocated from Chitwan to a new national park elsewhere in Nepal that established a breeding population. Depressingly though, it ends with the country being thrown into chaos by the Nepalese Civil War, and poachers taking advantage of the power vacuum to kill about 270 rhinos in a few years. The book was published in 2008; as far as I can tell from a bit of quick googling, the situation has been stabilised and the rhinos are once again better protected, but it is a reminder of how fragile these populations can be.

I commented that 88 Days was a book with interesting material, but written by someone who wasn’t primarily a writer; The Soul of the Rhino is both more interesting and better written than 88 Days, but it has something of the same quality. Mishra certainly has enough interesting stories from decades of conservation work to fill a book, and he does a solid enough job of telling them, but it doesn’t transcend the subject matter; it’s not one of those books I would recommend to people just for the quality of the writing. However, if you’re interested in conservation, or rhinos, or Nepal, you will probably find it worth reading.

The Soul of the Rhino is my book from Nepal for the Read The World challenge.

» The photo of tourists on safari in Chitwan National Park is © Nomad Tales and used under a CC by-sa licence.

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Nature

Furry great tits

The cats are shedding at the moment — at times recently Dolly has seemed like a walking cloud of hair with a cat faintly discernible somewhere in the middle.

So I got a Furminator to help collect some of the excess, and that means great big clumps of cat hair to dispose of, so I put it out for the birds to use as nesting material. And it has been gratifyingly popular.

Incidentally, it is amazing how much you can rescue a picture taken in RAW format. I didn’t have the right camera settings when I took these pictures and they were all overexposed; especially that last one. This is what it looked like when I downloaded it from the camera:

And basically all I did was turn down the ‘Exposure’ setting in iPhoto, and a little bit of fiddling with the sharpness and the white balance. The adjusted version is hardly perfect, but when I saw it I assumed it would be completely unusable, so I’m pretty happy with the result.

Categories
Nature

Bird of the Year 2010: best performances in a supporting role

2010 wasn’t a vintage wildlife year for me. I didn’t go anywhere exotic, or even spend much time outside the M25. My longest wildlife-watching trip was to the car park of B&Q in Folkestone.

Despite that, I did manage to rack up some pretty good bird sightings, but it was pretty slim pickings for the minor categories.

Best Plant

Clearly it’s ludicrous that I can’t think of any stand-out plants for the year. After all, they’re not difficult to see. But nothing springs to mind.

Best Fungus

I don’t think I’ve had this as a category before, but this was a good year for fungi, and I saw loads of them. However I made the important discovery that actually identifying them is almost completely fucking impossible. This one at least is easy; Shaggy Inkcap:

Best Insect

It was nice to see a few seven-spot ladybirds in the garden, because it meant that the Harlequin ladybirds haven’t completely eliminated them. There was the parasitic wasp Gasteruption jaculator, which was a neat little beastie. And apart from the  the usual mix of butterflies and dragonflies, there were a couple of stand-out species. One was a very battered convolvulus hawkmoth brought in by the cat: which means that I have now seen this species exactly twice, and in both cases it was because the cat brought them in.

But the species of the year, both because it’s a dramatic-looking thing and because it was so unexpected that it turned up in the garden: Silver-washed Fritillary (in the name of full disclosure: that picture was taken by me, but not this year and not in the garden). One of Britain’s largest butterflies. And not exceptionally rare, but still a complete surprise, especially as it’s mainly a woodland species.

Best Invertebrate (other), Best Fish, Best Reptile

Best Fish and Best Reptile are often quite difficult categories, of course. But it’s a bit embarrassing that I can’t think of anything for Best Invertebrate (other), which is such a big group of organisms. Obviously I have seen various spiders and slugs and things in 2010, but none I can think of that seem worth a namecheck.

Best Amphibian

This was the year of toads in the garden (i.e. Common Toad, Bufo bufo). There have been the occasional toad before, but this year they were all over the place — commoner than frogs. Which was nice.

Best Mammal

Discounting your basic urban vermin (foxes, rats, mice, squirrels) and the remnant of hedgehog I found in the local woods, I think I saw five species of wild mammals this year.

In January when it was VERY COLD, there was a particularly active and fearless stoat at Rainham Marshes which was scurrying around near and on the pedestrian walkways. Stoats are always a pleasure to watch, bouncy manic furry wiggly critters that they are. And I saw some deer: muntjac, fallow deer, red deer and Sika — but only the muntjac counts as ‘wild’, I think, as the others were in deer parks.

And I went on a bat walk in the local park, where we saw three species of bat: Daubenton’s bat, Common Pipistrelle, and my mammal of the year for 2010 which is… Soprano Pipistrelle.

The best thing about the Soprano Pipistrelle is the brilliant name. Common and Soprano Pipistrelles were only split into separate species in 1999; there are apparently various differences of food and habitat, but they were initially split because the Soprano Pipistrelle has a higher-pitched call: 55kHz to the Common’s 45kHz.

Best Ecosystem

Because most of my birding has been in London this year, all my best sightings have been in artificial habitats: a wetland on the site of an old water-treatment plant, a marsh which was formerly an army firing range, a canal and reservoirs originally built to supply water and transport for industrial north London, Victorian suburban parks and ancient royal deer parks, all of them now managed as public amenities and for the benefit of wildlife by various conservation charities, by local councils, and by central government agencies.

Now I know that ‘nature reserve’ is not actually a distinct ecosystem. But fuck knows, if you live in a densely populated, post-industrial, intensively farmed place like southern England, and you have any interest in nature, you owe an intense debt of gratitude to the people who create and manage little pockets of land for the benefit of wildlife instead of turning them into golf courses and housing estates.

Specifically, thank you to: the RSPB, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, Southwark Council, the Royal Parks, London Wildlife Trust and anyone else who puts in the hard work to make sure these animals have somewhere to live.

Categories
Nature

My new favourite animal

Well, until tomorrow anyway.

I went on a bat walk in the local park — i.e. a guided walk led by people with those ultrasonic bat detectors — and we found three species of bat. There was Britain’s commonest and smallest bat species, the Pipistrelle; the Daubenton’s bat, which hunts low over the water; a and a species which is very like the Pipistrelle but whose calls are at a slightly higher frequency.

And that species is called the (drumroll please)… Soprano Pipistrelle.

Which I think is a deeply cute name.

Categories
Me

Bionic Cat!

One of those OMG I’M LIVING THE FUTURE!!! moments.

We have our cats microchipped, so that if they get lost, they can be traced back to us. But that isn’t the futuristic bit; no, the futuristic bit is that we have a new cat-flap which has a chip reader and an electric catch… so it’s a cat flap which electronically scans the cat and only opens for cats it recognises. Very Star Trek.

If I’d designed it, it would have flashing lights and a robotic voice that said cyberfeline identity VALIDATED when the cat came through. Which is just one of the reasons why I’m not an industrial designer.

» that’s not my cat, btw.  Cat with glowing eyes is © Random Tony and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

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