Gadling

Read part 1 of this story here.

The automated gates chug and clatter open as a jeep, its windows ribbed with steel, noisily announces its arrival in the tiger park. Without the usual gaggle of tourists to impress, the occupants of a neighbouring jeep toss out a skinny pheasant as the driver shouts obscenities at a dozen lounging Siberian tigers.

One tiger finally takes notice and lunges at the fluttering fowl, which has enough brains to scuttle under one of the jeeps. The tiger, neither as sharp nor as small as the pheasant, slams into the vehicle with a thud. And as the hulking beast shakes off the dust and disappointment of his failed attempt, the pheasant dashes into the brush. The striped leviathan promptly settles back down, seemingly deciding that the prey isn't worth the effort.

And why not, for these tigers are already well-fed, particularly by the 300,000 tourists who flock every year to the tiger park at the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Centre on the outskirts of Harbin in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province.

On a nondescript street near downtown Harbin, the Double Mountain Local Products Wholesale Center offers the usual array of kitsch items stripped from the wilderness: deer antlers, pelts and dried starfish. A request for tiger wine, a traditional brew of corpse-steeped cheap liquor with dozens of reputed medical benefits, raises a stern eyebrow from an employee who informs me that as such concoctions are illegal, they are not available at the store.

But at the mention of American money, a store manager intervenes - $100 would buy two bottles, and true to the employee's words they are not at the store; they will be delivered via courier. Doubts about the brew's authenticity are shooed away.

The manager is certain the bottles are the genuine article because, she says, "they came from over at that tiger park". She is referring to the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Center on the outskirts of the city. By most accounts, that tiger farm is an enviable success. Started in 1986 with 8 Siberian tigers, it is now home to 800 of the big cats. Compare that with the estimated 150 Siberian tigers in US zoos. The largest tiger-breeding facility in the world, Hengdaohezi - like its cousin down south at the Wolong Panda Reserve - has learned the art of churning out cubs, 100 this year alone.

The Imperial-styled strip mall may look like a relic of the past, with its clay tiles, ornate sidings and those Chinese New Year red lanterns, but like much in China, it's spanking new. Yet relics of the past are good business here. In one of the mall's countless stores, apron-clad Zhang Lijie is chipping away the rock around a 120 million-year-old fish fossil that she plans to sell for $3. Zhang, 38, went from selling vegetables a decade ago to hawking fossils on a street corners. Now, she owns her own store, The Treasure Mansion, which stocks the fossilized remains of ancient fish, trees, plants and insects - but no dinosaurs, which are officially illegal.

"Business is OK," she says with a blush of modesty, after reluctantly admitting she earns 10 times what she did as a farmer, and now lives comfortably in an airy loft above the shop.

I'm struggling to make friends here. Miriam, a 9-month-old orangutan orphan who's learning how to climb a tree, almost scales past her trainer when I approach. For good measure, she starts to cry. Another orangutan signals displeasure by emulating the sound of a Harley barreling toward me. In fact, the only one who tolerates me is 11-year-old Leuser, and not because the 42 air-rifle pellets lodged in his body have mellowed him. He's also blind.

At any zoo, these surly apes would bomb the aw-isn't-he-cute exam, but here at the world's most successful school for rescued orangutans, they're taught to get back in touch with their wild side. Even playtime is serious business. Passing, say, the test of recognizing a friend (another orangutan) versus a foe (a human logger) could spell life or death for these critically endangered icons of the old world jungle.

Everything happens here with one goal in mind: graduation day, when the shaggy students are set loose into the harsh Sumatran rain forest. But for the students to have a shot at survival, handlers must teach them to avoid humans at all costs, a tough task considering they need to be fed by humans.

And teaching them about the dangers of Homo sapiens means no lines of gawky tourists dangling bananas and posing for pictures. That's why this center at the far north of Sumatra – one of the main islands of Indonesia – is closed to the public and barely known to outsiders. Even if you made it to the nearby village – where the specialty dish is fruit-bat soup and the humid air is clouded with mosquitoes - this part of Sumatra is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Rachel Atkinson hops like a Darwin finch from one volcanic outcropping to the next, then plunges into ankle-deep mud. Squishing as she walks, the botanist with the Charles Darwin Research Station homes in on the ailing invaders: blackberry, passion fruit, and quinine bushes clustered near Santa Cruz Island's last shrubby stands of Scalesia trees. Atkinson smiles in approval. One more blast of herbicide ought to prevent the aliens from regrowing and give the Scalesia a shot at survival after all.

We were on the front-line of an epic war being waged on all sorts of invasive species in the Galápagos Islands. Surprisingly, the culprit seems to be global warming, which is usually associated with polar bears and other sorts of cold things-not an archipelago situated one degree south of the equator.

It all started in the late 1980s, when the periodic El Niños became more frequent and severe. Of course, we do have to give some credit to the pirates and whalers who began visiting the Galápagos in the 1700s and leaving behind goats, pigs, and other animals as a living larder for future visits. That couldn't have helped.

This is the second post of a 2-part series. Read the first part here.

The swamp here could be the stuff of nightmares. Because this happens to be the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the trails are meant to be waded, not walked. Yet I am utterly stuck, knee-deep in pungent red mud with stagnant water up to my waist. Ellen Meulman, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, doubles back to pull me out of the quagmire. It takes a few hard yanks. "Be careful," she says. "You can disappear in these waters." Thoughts of leeches and king cobras vanish, replaced by a more immediate fear.

We've been slogging and hacking through the jungle for nearly three hours, on our way to rendezvous with today's observation team. The field staff hustles day in and out to arrive at the nest-site before dawn and do not return until after dark. In between, they track the individual behaviors of the orangutan in excruciating detail: Is the subject playing with a neighbor? Eating, and if so, what? Vocalizing? Using a tool?

The orangutans here already know some remarkable tricks. They've learned how to fashion a seed-extraction stick to crack open the prickly shell of the Neesia fruit. The theory goes that this rather complicated skill developed from simpler abilities to use tools to dig for honey, fish for termites, and scoop for water. Yet primatologists know little more than that these smarter-than-we-thought apes possess culture; the pressing question now is to figure out how it's acquired and transferred.

Forget for a moment the dreadful conditions in this miserable Sumatran swamp, which include being eaten by tigers (seven in the surrounding area last year). Just getting here is an ordeal in itself. Start by taking the 1,400-kilometer flight from the capital, Jakarta, to Sumatra's bustling northern port, Medan. Then it's a grueling twelve-hour ride straight across the island's dramatic mountains-and poorly maintained roads-to the Indian Ocean, where a puttering speedboat will be waiting to make the hour-long trip upriver.

If all goes well, you arrive at camp for the daily rationing of rice and canned mackerel. This is assuming you secured the four permits required for a visit to this hidden corner of Leuser National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Yet despite the remoteness or food or the fact the Suaq Balimbing field station is in the middle of a flooded swamp, the scientists here couldn't be happier at their return. "We were all waiting for this place to reopen," Andrea Gibson, a PhD candidate at University of Zurich who had to delay her orangutan fieldwork by three years because of the station's hiatus, said to me.

I just churned out--fine, it was more like laboriously dragged out of me--another dispatch for The New York Times. It's appearing in this Sunday's print edition, but up online today (at precisely 12:20 am, as a matter of fact).

OK, so I should've probably first told you what it's about. In the off-chance you ever happen to be in New Haven, and on a specific day of the month to boot, this story could become semi-relevant. There's this chic new architectural talk series where each month, an architectural firm will open its doors and let random people off the streets goof off in their office. And you can drink.

Then, at the talk, they'll try to solve a design challenge around town. Don't worry, the architects usually "solve" the problem beforehand, that is, before they start drinking the wine that's provided.

This was another fun story for me. After the talk, I got to fill my tummy with a huge steak at Central Steakhouse, which, get this, was shipped overnight from Uruguay. No wonder I had to write a positive story :-).

Before I go, I want to give a shout-out to Scott Healy, Kathleen Krolak, and their staff at Town Green Special Services District for putting together this series. Didn't have space in the story to acknowledge you guys, so here you go.

I thought the commute back to New Haven from New York during rush hour was bad, but check out this train from somewhere in Asia. My guess is it's Japan, the land of the famed train-pushers? I love how they keep it classy by wearing gloves.

Anyone been on such a crowded train? Tell us about your experience, and why exactly didn't you just walk.

News of Improv Everywhere's latest prank has been zipping all over the Internet tubes in the last 24 hours, and dare I say, it's perhaps their most successful--and heartwarming--performance.

Basically they managed to turn a little league game in California into the season's biggest event, complete with actual NBC sportscasters, a JumboTron, a Goodyear Blimp, oh, and a really professional-looking press conference. And the parents and players (even the team managers) had no idea what was going on, even after it was over.