Wildlife of East Africa Free Ebook

FREEWILDLIFE OF EAST AFRICA EBOOK Martin Withers,David Hosking | 256 pages | 11 Aug 2002 | Princeton University Press | 9780691007373 | English | New Jersey, United States Fauna of Africa - Wikipedia The week before Christmas, Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist, celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. He is lucky to have reached the milestone. A tall man with the burned and scarred skin that results from a Wildlife of East Africa lived outdoors, Leakey has survived two kidney Wildlife of East Africa, one liver transplant, and a devastating airplane crash that cost him both of his legs below the knee. For the past quarter century, he has moved around on prosthetic limbs concealed beneath his trousers. In his home town of Nairobi, Leakey keeps an office in an unlikely sort of place—the annex building of a suburban shopping mall. His desk and chair fill most of his cubicle, which has a window that looks onto a parking lot. The space has no adornments other than two framed photographs, each sharply symbolic of the parallel interests that have absorbed most of his adult life: the world of extinct prehistoric hominids and the contemporary natural environment that is being pushed toward extinction by humankind. In one of the photographs, Leakey is three decades younger, a trim man wearing a dark suit and standing amid a group of senior Kenyan Wildlife of East Africa, including then President Daniel arap Moi, who are gathered next to a pile of elephant tusks. It is a snapshot fromwhen, as the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Leakey oversaw the public burning of several tons of poached elephant ivory. At the end of the nineteen-seventies, there were an estimated quarter of a million elephants in Kenya, but, when the photograph was taken, only sixteen thousand were left. Leakey wanted to stigmatize the ivory trade by treating poached tusks in the same way that police treated cocaine seized from drug traffickers. His Wildlife of East Africa gambit worked, making global headlines and leading the way for an international ivory ban that went into effect that same year. Today, Kenya has a relatively stable population of about thirty-five thousand elephants. The other photograph shows a high ridgetop overlooking a sweeping valley. On the edge of the ridge, two contiguous white stone structures rise, daggerlike, into the enveloping sky. In the sixties, when Leakey was still in his twenties and following in the footsteps of his famous paleoanthropologist parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, he began directing expeditions in northern Kenya and later on made breakthrough discoveries of his Wildlife of East Africa, with previously unknown hominid species. Leakey became involved in Kenyan politics, including his early stint at the Kenya Wildlife Service, which ended with his plane crash which he believes was an assassination Wildlife of East Africa. He also founded an opposition political party, served in parliament, and was put in charge of the Kenyan civil service, where, as part of an anti-corruption drive, he ordered the dismissal of tens of thousands Wildlife of East Africa public employees. His zeal soon cost him his job, however, when President Wildlife of East Africa, who had hired him for the job, summarily fired Wildlife of East Africa. In a meeting we had one bright Nairobi morning a few months ago, Leakey lived up to his reputation for blunt outspokenness. During the past half century, many animal species have been devastated because of civil wars, unrestricted poaching, surging human population growth, and habitat encroachment. Even so, it has been the hope of many conservationists, and also concerned governments, that an international network of breeding zoos, national parks, Wildlife of East Africa private conservancies will ultimately save the most endangered species. I wanted to know why. Before our meeting, I had spent several weeks visiting wildlife reserves and Wildlife of East Africa conservancies in Kenya and Tanzania. The critically endangered black rhino population had stabilized and even increased slightly, thanks to protective security fences and armed guards. But the populations of lions, cheetahs, hyenas, giraffes, and other once abundant species had all plummeted in recent years because of shrinking habitats and the increasing use of industrial pesticides. Poaching was only part of a much larger problem of long-term sustainability—the result of an ever-expanding human population, chronic water shortages, and spreading desertification, triggered by prolonged drought and compounded by overgrazing from cattle herders. Michael Dyer, Richard Bonham, Tony Fitzjohn, and other conservationists I met acknowledged privately that, beyond their individual successes in helping to keep certain species alive thanks to a complex combination of efforts that included land-use arrangements with local communities, income from high-spending Western visitors, and international donation drivesthe future was highly uncertain. The next thirty to fifty years would be decisive. Kenya, but now [almost] all the ice is gone from Mt. What will the animals inside drink? They can smell water and can break out of the electrical fences, or they die. Leakey apologized for his bleak assessment. And I was sincere. And I am quite sure I gave enough attention to the fact that we were swimming against the current, and I even went into politics. For an instant, he looked despondent. Wildlife of East Africa, in the longer term, say, in a timescale of several hundred years, I can be very optimistic. Leakey became more enthusiastic when I asked him about his museum project, Ngaren. In the heartland of private philanthropy, the United States, where he had always been successful in fund-raising, he had been running into unexpected new challenges. Are you sure you want to imply that climate change is causing extinction? He shook his head. There are a number of European countries with heritage funds where I think I can raise quite a bit of money. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. The right-wing side blames the presence of sharks on liberal efforts to protect the seals they feed on; the left-wing side makes a vague claim that climate change is responsible. By Adam Gopni k. To bridge the divide between wolf-lovers and ranchers, the conservationist Karin Vardaman had to change many minds—including her own. By Ingfei Che n. The celebrated naturalist discusses the resilience of nature and what unites us all. The New Yorker Recommends What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. Read More. Culture Desk. Wildlife – The East African Wildlife Society The fauna of Africain its broader Wildlife of East Africa, is all the animals living in Wildlife of East Africa and its surrounding seas and Wildlife of East Africa. The more characteristic African fauna is found in the Afrotropical realm. Whereas the earliest traces of life in fossil record of Africa date back to the earliest times, [2] the formation of African fauna as we know it today, began with the splitting up of the Gondwana supercontinent in the mid- Mesozoic era. The isolation of Africa was broken intermittently by discontinuous "filter routes" that linked it to some other Gondwanan continents MadagascarSouth Americaand perhaps Indiabut Wildlife of East Africa to Laurasia. Interchanges with Gondwana were rare and mainly "out-of-Africa" dispersals, whereas interchanges with Laurasia were numerous and bidirectional, although mainly from Laurasia to Africa. Despite these connections, isolation resulted in remarkable absences, poor diversity, and emergence of endemic taxa in Africa. The first Neogene faunal interchange took place in the Middle Miocene the introduction of MyocricetodontinaeDemocricetodontinaeand Dendromurinae. During the early TertiaryAfrica was covered by a vast evergreen forest inhabited by an endemic forest fauna with many types common to southern Asia. In the Pliocene the climate became dry and most of the forest was destroyed, the forest animals taking refuge in the remaining forest islands. At the same time Wildlife of East Africa broad land-bridge connected Africa with Asia and there was a great invasion of animals of the steppe fauna into Africa. At the beginning of the Pleistocene a moist period set in and much of the forest was renewed while the grassland fauna was divided and isolated, as the forest fauna had previously been. The present forest fauna is therefore of double origin, partly descended of the endemic fauna and partly from steppe forms that adapted themselves to forest life, while the present savanna fauna is similarly explained. The isolation in past times has resulted in the presence of closely related subspecies in widely separated regions [8] [9] Africa, where humans originated, shows much less evidence of loss in the Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, perhaps because co-evolution of large animals Wildlife of East Africa early humans provided enough time for them to develop effective defenses. There are large gaps in human knowledge about African invertebrates. Wildlife of East Africa Africa has a rich coral fauna [12] with about known species. More than species of Echinoderms and species of Bryozoa live there too, [13] as well as one Cubozoan species Carybdea alata. Of Nematodesthe Onchocerca volvulusNecator americanusWuchereria bancrofti and Dracunculus medinensis are human parasites. Some of important plant-parasitic nematodes of crops include Wildlife of East AfricaPratylenchusHirschmanniellaRadopholusScutellonema and Helicotylenchus. Of marine snails, less diversity is present in Atlantic coast, more in tropical Western Indian Ocean region over species of gastropods with 81 endemic species. The land snail fauna is especially rich in Afromontane regions, and there are some endemic families in Africa e. AchatinidaeChlamydephoridae but other tropical families are common too CharopidaeStreptaxidaeCyclophoridaeSubulinidaeRhytididae. The African millipede Archispirostreptus gigas is one of the largest in the world. The soil animal communities tropical Africa are poorly known. A few Wildlife of East Africa studies have been undertaken on macrofauna, mainly in West Africa.

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