Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Milk? Second row on the left !
Rumble: Hero rats detect landmines, tuberculosis
110 million landmines lie in the ground on every continent. It will cost $33 billion and at the present de-mining rate, it will take 1,100 years to clear them all.
70 people are killed or injured every day by landmines. That's one person every 15 minutes, 26,000 people per year. (More)
Bart Weetjens, an engineer with Apopo, a Belgian organization focusing on “vapour detection technology,” uses pouched rats to detect land mines and disease detection.
The rats are smart, thrive on repetitive tasks, have a top-notch sense of smell and are cheaper to train than dogs.
Watch also the second part of this video.
Via the HeroRAT website, you can help and adopt-a-rat. Choose between Allan, Chosen One, Kim and Ziko, all rats trained for mine detection.
Discovered via TrackerNews's editor's blog
Rumble: Seychelles animals
The Seychelles feature an amazing variety of wildlife. We snapped a few:
A Small Seychelles Day Gecko interested in literature.
A pigeon interested in our breakfast crumbs
Another visitor, this time at the dinner table at Anse Lazio on Praslin
Hannah with one of the giant land turtoises on La Curieuse
A couple of fairy terns on Cousin island. Fairy terns are mates for life.
A small chick on Cousin island
Hannah with a small land turtoise on La Curieuse
A close-up from a baby land turtoise on La Curieuse
Lana and Hannah checking out a small land turtoise on La Curieuse
More posts on the Road about the Seychelles. Read the full post...
Rumble: A Happy Easter Gorilla
A gorilla picking Easter eggs at the Cincinnati Zoo
Picture courtesy AP Photo/Al Behrman. Source: Universal Jellyfish Read the full post...
Rumble: Aid Work with a Different Flair....
One of the advantages of being an aid worker, is to come in areas where few people go. [Tine says that the places I go to, nobody in his right mind would want to go anyway! :-) ]
When I worked in Goma in a country then called Zaire, we once drove to the Virunga National Park to see the mountain gorillas. You remember, from the movie 'Gorillas in the Mist'. At that time, just after the Rwanda genocide, the whole area was off-limits for tourists, so we had the park rangers and the primates 'all to ourselves'. We sat for hours in the dense jungle surrounded by gorillas.
Last night, I tried to find the link to the Virunga Park, and stumbled onto a wonderful blogsite from Wild Life Direct, titled "Blogs from the Wild". It is the 'mother' site to dozens of others blogsites, all with one common team: wild life and nature preservation in Africa. From blogs by park rangers to blogs of people working with communities in protected areas. From blogs about habitat conservation to the field blog of a Congolese warden working in the Virunga Park.
All blogs are really high quality, very well written and with masses of pictures and videos. Worth a look. It is a different read from what I normally write about. But it shows aid and development work comes in different flairs and flavours...
Read the full post...
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
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