Leopard Nurtures Baby Baboon After Killing Its Mother

The quality is not great but it's a good story.

Via 3quarksdaily

TATA Nano vs. The Turtles

Gahirmathas seas are one of the worlds largest breeding areas for the Olive Ridley Turtle. The Dhamra port could signal the end of this habitat forever.
Tata can save the turtles

Aurora Borealis

Photograph: Rolf Hicker/Barcroft Media

Image gallery of the breathtaking formations of the northern lights over Yukon, Canada. I think the photo above, taken near Tombstone Mountain Lookout, Dempster Highway, Yukon, looks like a Lawren Harris painting.

The Amami Rabbit

The Amami rabbit — a threatened species found only in the Ryūkyū Islands — may become Japan’s first endangered animal clone. Scientists at Osaka’s Kinki University have cloned an embryo of the endangered rabbit and are awaiting its birth next month, it was announced earlier this week.

The Amami rabbit (Pentalagus furnessi) is a nocturnal, forest-dwelling “primitive” rabbit with dark fur, short legs, large curved claws and small ears. Found only on the islands of Amami-Ōshima and Toku-no-Shima, it is sometimes called a “living fossil” for its resemblance to ancient rabbits that once inhabited the Asian mainland. The Amami rabbit’s dwindling population — now estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000 — has earned it a spot on Japan’s endangered species list.

Unfortunately these cute clones will be living in zoos unless people address the root cause of the problem: encroachment on their habitat.

Read more at Pink Tentacle

Lift of the penguins

Brazil launches airlift to return penguins washed ashore on Rio beaches. More than 1,000 penguins have washed up on Brazilian beaches - 2,000 miles north of their traditional breeding grounds.
Hundreds of the flightless birds are being airlifted back to the South Atlantic by the country's air force.

A fungus firing its spores to the tune of the Anvil Chorus

Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video. Ultra fast. As in 250,000 frames-a-second fast. He knew exactly what this kind of video was made for. To film fungi that live on dung as they discharge their spores. These tiny fungi can blast spores as far as six feet away, boosting the odds that they’ll land on a clean plant that a cow or other grazing animal may eat. The fungi develop inside the animal, get pooped out with its dung, and fire their spores once more.

Via 3quarksdaily

The Rhizotron of Illinois

Let the U.S. Department of Interior declare the tunnels a national park open to the public, and you have the Rhizotron of Illinois.

There, while ducking low ceiling, getting soiled, fighting claustrophobia and coughing up pulverized coal, you get to survey the ecology of an extinct landscape. Over there is a dense mat of ferns, and over there are some delicate fronds frozen in time. Look up, and you might see the grass-like leaves of the giants of coal age forests, the lycopids, or the diamond patterns of their bark.

As splendid as the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux. As marvelous as the Sistine Ceiling, though this might have a truer version of the Creation story.

Found at Pruned

Baby Hummingbirds

Sweet. The mother hummingbird doesn't seem vicious like the robins that nested on my front porch.



Seen at Dot Dot Dot

Signposts for Butterflies

GFB uses images of milkweed flowers to broadcast the location of food sources to monarch butterflies. In the prototype at left, the graffiti is placed on a wall above an actual milkweed plant in New York City, signaling the presence of nectar to hungry monarchs in the vicinity. More

I've planted milkweed in my garden and we always get a lot of monarchs.
Via

Les Animaux Amoureux

Trailer for a film by Laurent Charbonnier with music by Philip Glass.

Via Frogsmoke

Weirdos

Why do people steal birds' eggs? Why indeed? Just when I was becoming increasingly jaded and thought I'd heard it all - a crime I never knew existed!

To most of us, eggshells are the remnants of an English breakfast or something to paint on Easter morning. But to a small group of collectors, they are a dangerous and unlawful obsession. Why do they steal rare birds' eggs?

Flocking Starlings

The last couple of mornings while walking along the Niagara Parkway I've been amazed by the enormous swarms of starlings forming intricate visual displays. The sound they make is also incredible. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera but I found this video that shows some starlings indulging in really remarkable behaviour.

Seeing the huge numbers of the birds it's hard to believe that North American starlings are all descended from 60 birds freed in Central Park by wealthy pharmacologist Eugene Schieffelin in the 1890s.

In pictures: Malta's hunt victims

Malta allows hunters to shoot turtle doves in spring, as they migrate from Africa to Europe, despite a decline in numbers. But many rarer birds are also killed illegally during the season.
More pictures

Via Information Junk

Butterfly Crossing

Motorway shut to let butterflies swarm past
"In the history of road transport, there can rarely have been such a poetic excuse for a traffic jam: Taiwan will close a busy motorway section this week to allow butterflies to flutter by."

I'd like to be there to see it.

Some of My Best (Animal) Friends Are Gay

Live Science gives us the lowdown on alternate lifestyles in the wild.

30,000 Swans a Swimming

The Independent reports a major threat to the British ecosystem - swans. But there is nothing to be done about it because most swans are owned by the Queen or protected from culling by law. The article offers this potential solution to the problem:

Recipe: A medieval way to roast a swan *
Ingredients: One swan (with giblets); lard; salt; broth; toasted breadcrumbs; ginger; galingale (an aromatic root); red wine vinegar
To prepare a swan (from Middle English): Wash him, & do on a spit & lard him fair & roast him well; & make a fair carving. Sauce: Take the issue [giblets] & wash it well, & scour the guts well with salt, & boil the issue all together, & wash it well & hew it small, & take bread & powder of ginger & of galingale & grind together & temper it with the broth, & colour it with the blood. And when it is boiled & ground & strained, salt it, & boil it & season it with vinegar.

*Note: I would never eat swan meat.