It’s Mount-Everest-climbing season, apparently – with the National Geographic team attempting to recreate the route used in the first American ascent of the mountain, the 1963 NG-sponsored American Mount Everest Expedition. The team is live-updating their progress online, with a live stream of photos, blog posts, and twitter updates. I think one of them’s using Instagram, too.
The City of Cape Town has released its official report on the fatal shark attack that claimed the life of bodyboarder, David Lilienfeld, 20, on Thursday at Kogel Bay, “Caves”, near Gordons Bay. In it, the City concluded that the tagging of False Bay sharks for a documentary could not be directly linked to the attack.
Wherever humans and wild animals come into close contact with one another, there will likely be negative consequences for one or the other, or both. 13-year-old Richard Turere, who lives in Empakasi, on the edge of the Nairobi National Park, just south of Nairobi, has invented a system that keeps his family’s cattle safe from lions that had previously sought an easy meal from their herd.
Advice from the first official British government report into fracking has been published today. In it, British ministers have been informed that they should allow the controversial process of fracking for shale gas to be extended there, this despite the process having been blamed for causing two earthquakes.
Recently published photos have revealed what is believed to be the world’s first “strawberry” leopard. The big cat was discovered in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve and is an incredibly rare find.
King Juan Carlos of Spain is no stranger to controversial hunting. Six years ago, it was asserted that the 74-year-old shot a drunken Russian bear that had been lured with honey and vodka. Officials dismissed the allegations as ridiculous. The Spanish media have just had another field day though, after they learned he’d broken his hip hunting in Botswana recently.
Paintball guns were the weapons of choice for eight Scarborough residents who were among a group of 35 individuals that battled two troops of baboons in and around the sleepy coastal Cape village on Easter Monday. They fought for hours, but the baboons had the last laugh by returning later in the evening.
The owners and employees of Lombardini Game Lodge near Jeffrey’s Bay in the Eastern Cape were left somewhere between surprise, anger and hilarity when they arrived at work yesterday to discover that one of the lodge’s precious (though not living) inhabitants had been brutally attacked overnight.
By now, most of you would be aware of what wingsuit flying is, thanks to Jeb Corliss. But, quietly over the years, others have joined in on the rather crazy hobby too. Take Roberta Mancino, for instance. She’s an Italian model and has skydived naked a few times. Then she met Jeb. She absolutely kills it in this video.
Before you begin to make fun of the headline used for this article, we must tell you that the vermin extractors will also be serving an educational purpose. Johannesburg’s general owl population has been in decline for years as a result of urbanisation, but new owl projects are helping to combat this.
He’s eaten from a zebra carcass, swum across freezing lakes in just his undies to see what it’d be like, and he once slept in a dead sheep’s carcass for warmth. Sadly, it might be a while before we get to watch any of Bear’s antics again. The Discovery Channel set him free for good yesterday by announcing their relationship is over.
The debate around re-opening the international rhino horn trade is still raging. While government has not given any indication yet of whether it will support the proposal to lift the ban, the demand for rhino horn from Chinese medicine practitioners is not going away.
A rather large Great White Shark, measuring 4,3 metres in length, was caught 400 metres behind the breakers of Fish Hoek beach yesterday. Local fishermen from Kalk Bay accidentally caught the large female in fishing nets they had set late on Saturday night.
Our local wildlife can be very… independent minded. A giraffe and a baboon have made separate headlines today for their remarkably free-thinking behaviour.
It would appear that authorities are finally starting to make serious inroads into the rhino horn trafficking underworld. A suspected kingpin, and former Mpumalanga police officer, was arrested on Friday in Hazyview. He was found with four rhino horns, and over R60 000 in his possession.
At least six people have reportedly died as a result of tropical storm Irina, which struck the KwaZulu-Natal coast over the weekend. Rescue teams, emergency workers, and the police worked continuously yesterday to help KwaZulu-Natal residents through the worst of the storm. Durban surfers, however, enjoyed themselves.
Environmental planning authorities in sleepy Fish Hoek on the False Bay coast are reconsidering the installation of an exclusion net across the bay adjacent to the town, to try stave off the regular loitering of Great White sharks near the popular beach front.
These pictures were taken in February at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. An elephant was giving birth when a group of lions and hyenas mistook her newborn for a potential breakfast. But watch as the rest of the herd comes to the female’s aid by huddling around her until she delivers her calf.
It’s difficult to act surprised at the announcement from SANParks this morning, stating that four Kruger National Park wildlife officials were arrested yesterday in connection with rhino poaching activities. There are such large amounts of money involved with the rhino poaching syndicates, and just too many closely related coincidences, for there not to have been someone involved on the inside.
Capetonians: on Janssens Road, in Tableview, near the bike shop, this traffic light is sporting a new “green” signal. Apparently, this isn’t the first traffic light that’s been sporting this kind of “green” signal either.
[Thanks, Jake R]
Google Street View is pretty great! It lets me see rural villages, the National Gallery in London, post-crisis Fukushima, and your house. And soon, in collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, it’ll be letting people explore Great Barrier Reef as part of the expanding ‘Seaview’ project.
For around two weeks each February, the sunset turns the Horsetail Falls in Yosemite Park, California into an incredible bright orange “firefall” that looks like flowing lava. And it’s happening right now – take a look at the video after the jump.
It would seem that South Africa is not the only country facing a poaching crisis. Demand for ivory has led to a massive spree of poaching in Cameroon, which has left almost 300 elephants dead since mid-January. This is according to the country’s minister of forestry and wildlife.
The Colombian pop singer and woman with the hips that don’t lie, Shakira, appears to have narrowly escaped the menacing attack of a Cape Fur Seal on the weekend. She’s been in Cape Town on holiday, and escaped with some minor cuts and bruises while attempting to take photographs of seals.
As the death toll from the bout of extremely cold weather in Europe has surpassed the 500 mark, a Swiss man is doing his best to stay warm. He’s installed a wood-burning stove to heat up his car when he needs to drive.
A man in his thirties has given birth to a healthy child, in what is Britain’s first “male mother” case in recorded history. The man, whose name has not been made public, was born a woman but underwent a sex change as an adult. The news has been met with much tsking from Brits, wondering whether the kid’s going to call him “Mummy” or “Daddy”.
Commenting on the weather is usually as insightful as commenting that a pregnant chick’s belly “is growing”. It’s obvious, a bit silly and we all still do it. But in Cape Town this week the weather really was worth mentioning – and worth looking back at.
The 102 turbine Walney Offshore wind farm located approximately 15 kilometres off Walney Island, Cumbria, in the Irish Sea in the UK, is about to start harvesting the wind. It will provide electricity for 320 000 homes and the project has cost £1 billion.
Scientists have done something they have been working on for over two decades: successfully drilled more than three kilometres through sheer Antarctic ice into a freshwater lake to take a sample. All they really know now is that Lake Vostok has had no contact with atmospheric pollutants for millions of years.
Scientists believe they have discovered the oldest works of art known to mankind. Although the six pieces are supposedly of seals, they’ve been described as somewhat of “an academic bombshell”. That’s because they’re 42 000 years old, and are the only known pieces created by Neanderthal man, who preceded homo sapiens, more commonly known as humans.