May 20th, 2008 at 9:30AM: Read part 1 of this story here. The excited cry of a park ranger pierces the stillness of a bamboo forest high in the Min Mountains. Zhan Xiangjiang, an ecologist who I'm hanging out with for the day, bounds through waist-deep snowdrifts to investigate. Catching up with the ranger, he kneels down and points at a small, round object that, at first glance, looks like a greenish yam. "Smell this!" ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
reintroduction posts
Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 2 of 2)
May 20th, 2008 at 9:30AM: Read part 1 of this story here. The excited cry of a park ranger pierces the stillness of a bamboo forest high in the Min Mountains. Zhan Xiangjiang, an ecologist who I'm hanging out with for the day, bounds through waist-deep snowdrifts to investigate. Catching up with the ranger, he kneels down and points at a small, round object that, at first glance, looks like a greenish yam. "Smell this!" ...Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 1 of 2)
May 19th, 2008 at 9:00AM: On a single-lane dirt road wending between misty crags deep in Sichuan Province, traffic has slowed to a crawl. Hundreds of dump trucks and steamrollers are expanding the only road to Wolong Nature Reserve into a modern freeway. Conservation biologist George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City was the first Westerner to study giant pandas in China when he came to ...Dispatch from China: The time I got drunk off tiger wine (part 1 of 2)
May 14th, 2008 at 9:00AM: 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 ...Tigers in Africa
Nov 28th, 2007 at 9:30AM: A friend of mine, Li Quan, has been raising tigers in Africa. The first thing you should know is that tigers are not found in Africa. The second thing you should know is that she gave up a cushy career in the fashion industry to become a cat conservationist. Both points seem strange. But what's most bizarre is that her tigers are Chinese. In fact, they're one of the rarest animals in the world. ...
