Robber fly - Nature photographer Thomas Shahan specializes in amazing portraits of tiny insects. It isn't easy. Shahan says that this Robber Fly (Holcocephala fusca), for instance, is "skittish" and doesn't like its picture taken.

Nature by Numbers (Video)

"The Greater Akashic System" – July 15, 2012 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Caroll) (Subjects: Lightworkers, Intent, To meet God, Past lives, Universe/Galaxy, Earth, Pleiadians, Souls Reincarnate, Invention: Measure Quantum state in 3D, Recalibrates, Multi-Dimensional/Divine, Akashic System to change to new system, Before religion changed the system, DNA, Old system react to Karma, New system react to intent now for next life, Animals (around humans) reincarnate again, This Animal want to come back to the same human, Akashic Inheritance, Reincarnate as Family, Other Planets, Global Unity … etc.)

Question: Dear Kryon: I live in Spain. I am sorry if I will ask you a question you might have already answered, but the translations of your books are very slow and I might not have gathered all information you have already given. I am quite concerned about abandoned animals. It seems that many people buy animals for their children and as soon as they grow, they set them out somewhere. Recently I had the occasion to see a small kitten in the middle of the street. I did not immediately react, since I could have stopped and taken it, without getting out of the car. So, I went on and at the first occasion I could turn, I went back to see if I could take the kitten, but it was to late, somebody had already killed it. This happened some month ago, but I still feel very sorry for that kitten. I just would like to know, what kind of entity are these animals and how does this fit in our world. Are these entities which choose this kind of life, like we do choose our kind of Human life? I see so many abandoned animals and every time I see one, my heart aches... I would like to know more about them.

Answer: Dear one, indeed the answer has been given, but let us give it again so you all understand. Animals are here on earth for three (3) reasons.

(1) The balance of biological life. . . the circle of energy that is needed for you to exist in what you call "nature."

(2) To be harvested. Yes, it's true. Many exist for your sustenance, and this is appropriate. It is a harmony between Human and animal, and always has. Remember the buffalo that willingly came into the indigenous tribes to be sacrificed when called? These are stories that you should examine again. The inappropriateness of today's culture is how these precious creatures are treated. Did you know that if there was an honoring ceremony at their death, they would nourish you better? Did you know that there is ceremony that could benefit all of humanity in this way. Perhaps it's time you saw it.

(3) To be loved and to love. For many cultures, animals serve as surrogate children, loved and taken care of. It gives Humans a chance to show compassion when they need it, and to have unconditional love when they need it. This is extremely important to many, and provides balance and centering for many.

Do animals know all this? At a basic level, they do. Not in the way you "know," but in a cellular awareness they understand that they are here in service to planet earth. If you honor them in all three instances, then balance will be the result. Your feelings about their treatment is important. Temper your reactions with the spiritual logic of their appropriateness and their service to humanity. Honor them in all three cases.

Dian Fossey's birthday celebrated with a Google doodle

Dian Fossey's birthday celebrated with a Google doodle
American zoologist played by Sigourney Weaver in the film Gorillas in the Mist would have been 82 on Thursday (16 January 2014)

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Rescued Orangutans Return to the Wild

The Jakarta Globe, Andrew Higgins

Lone Droscher-Nielsen, left, and her staff at the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Project plan to release 75 rehabilitated orangutans into the wild early next year. (Photo: Linda Davidson, AP)


Over the past decade, Lone Droscher-Nielsen, a former Scandinavian Airlines Systems flight attendant, has saved nearly 600 orphaned orangutans in Borneo from almost certain death. Funded by donations from abroad, she’s given the apes food, shelter and better health care than many humans in these parts ever get.

Now, the 46-year-old Dane is preparing for a more difficult — and controversial — task: returning for the first time ever tame orangutans to the wild. “They were born wild and they deserve to go back in the wild again,” said Droscher-Nielsen, founder and director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Project. “That is our ultimate objective.”

Early next year, if all goes according to plan, she’ll release a first batch of about 75 rehabilitated orangutans into a remote forest in Central Kalimantan. Tiny radio transmitters placed under the skin will monitor their movements — and also help answer a big question: Can they survive?

Some experts wonder whether orangutans raised by humans will be able to hack life in the forest, and also worry that diseases they might have caught in captivity will harm kin that never left the jungle.

Droscher-Nielsen, whose 10-year-old project has grown into the world’s largest primate rescue effort, expects most to make it. “The ones we set free are not going to be wild, but they can manage,” she said.

It will take a couple of generations for bad habits picked up in captivity to be completely purged. Disease, she added, shouldn’t be a problem because the area selected for the trial release doesn’t have a viable orangutan community of its own.

The orangutan — which in Indonesian means “man of the forest” — is one of mankind’s closest cousins in the animal kingdom, sharing about 97 percent of its DNA with humans. But it has suffered catastrophically from contact with man.

A century ago, Borneo had more than 300,000 wild orangutans. Today, the number has fallen to about 50,000, most of which live in Central Kalimantan. They could vanish if forests keep getting chopped down at the current rate of what Indonesian environmentalists say equals the size of six football fields every minute. Palm oil plantations, which have expanded rapidly in recent years as demand for the cheap oil surged, have led to an even bigger influx of baby apes at the rescue center.

Droscher-Nielsen initially hoped to start returning orangutans to the wild years ago but, as forests kept retreating, it became increasingly difficult to find a safe place to put them. The task was further complicated by the fact that rehabilitated apes don’t fear humans — a big problem when many humans see them as a menace and want them dead.

Keeping orangutans fed and sheltered is expensive. The Nyaru Menteng project has a staff of about 200 people. Salaries, food, medicines and other expenses mean that it costs about $2,000 a year for each of the nearly 600 apes in residence. That is more than twice the average annual income for humans in the area. Another 400 or so are being cared for in other rehabilitation centers elsewhere in Borneo.

“I’d like to be an orangutan,” said Nordin, a local environmental activist. “They get given meals and when they get sick they get sent to hospital.”

Adult orangutans spend much of the day in a nearby peatland forest that is off-limits to loggers and oil palm growers. Each afternoon, dozens come out of the trees for a “social hour” in the main compound. They munch fruit, climb on a jungle gym and play on swings. At night, the adults are escorted to a cluster of cages while the young are piled into wheelbarrows and taken to a separate sleeping area.

To survive back in the wild, orangutans will have to forget their pampered past lifestyle. Droscher-Nielsen’s staff has devised a number of techniques to try and help prepare them for life on their own in the forest. About 125 apes have been moved onto islands in a nearby river, where they have little contact with humans. They still get most of their food provided but have to work harder to get it: It has been stuck up in trees instead of just left on the ground.

Some of her center’s orangutans, said Droscher-Nielsen, have scant chance of ever surviving in the wild, so they will have to stay put until they die. This could mean decades, as the average life expectancy is 40 to 45 years. Those likely to stay include the blind, the maimed and apes “just too plain stupid to make it.”

Rescuing baby orangutans is a “welfare issue but it is not good for conservation,” said John Burton, head of World Land Trust, a British conservation group. He’s against returning orangutans that might be carrying human diseases to the forest and thinks that keeping them in expensive rehabilitation centers is “not cost-effective” as it only adds to a “world surfeit of captive orangutans.” The main focus, he said, should be on protecting forests and the wild apes that live in them.

“I don’t look at this with my brain. I look at it with my heart,” Droscher-Nielsen said. “We’re the cause of their becoming orphans. What should we do, just euthanize them? Should we just kill them and say, ‘I don’t really care?’ ”

The Washington Post

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