Russian reserve created for Amur leopard and tiger

The Russian government has announced a 1,000 square mile protected reserve to safeguard habitat for rare Amur leopards and Amur tigers.

The national park, dubbed Land of the Leopard, is in Russia's Far East.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) says it combines existing wildlife refuges and previously unprotected land along the Chinese border.

But one expert said it was "too little, way too late" to save the Critically Endangered leopard.

Conservation groups have commended Russia for the move.

WCS Russia's program director Dale Miquelle said he was "optimistic" that it would "provide a critical refuge for some of the most endangered big cats on the planet".

An estimated 30 Amur leopards occupy a narrow sliver of forest between the Sea of Japan to the east and Jilin Province, China, to the west.

In a wider area of forest habitat, about 500 Amur tigers are thought to remain in the wild.

Joerns Fickel, from the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany, who has studied both the Amur leopard and Amur tiger said it was a "significant step in the right direction" but pointed out that safeguarding such a large area from poachers would be difficult.

"Regarding the tigers, he explained that prey density and cover were the "two main components to secure [their] survival".

"[It is not clear whether] this has been considered and if the park size provides space for at least a moderate population growth.

"For the leopards - where we don't even know how many of the last ones are still reproducing - but the situation is very gloomy."

The WCS pointed out that tigers regularly moved across the border into China, and the reserves' proximity to that border represented "a critical source population for recovery of tigers in North-East China".

WWF agreed that this "connection across the border" was crucial.

The conservation organisation's head of species, Diane Walkington, said: "Hopefully, by providing leopards with protected space to live, hunt and breed they will start to make a similar recovery to the Amur tiger, which is still endangered but has made a spectacular comeback since the 1930s when as few as 20 were left."

Peter Zahler, WCS deputy director for Asia said in a statement: "The creation of this park greatly increases the amount of land protecting critical populations of two of the world's big cats, and it will go a long way to securing their future.

"We look forward to continuing to provide whatever support is requested to help conserve tigers and leopards in the region."

Dr Fickel was less optimistic.

"It's better than nothing, and maybe for the tiger, it is not totally too late,"

"[But] for the leopards, hope dies last."

New arrivals at Moscow zoo

Moscow’s zoo going public has a wider variety of fauna to look forward to, as the zoo ushers in some new animals.

“Eight Javan langurs, five males and three females will be delivered from Hanover zoo to Moscow,” a representative from the zoo informed.

Feral cats, a snow leopard, a pair of polar wolves, two pairs of Benett kangaroos, four male and three female mongooses, three pairs of meerkats, black-tailed prairie dogs, two pairs of elephant shrews, one male and two female Eastern Bettongs, are also on the list, from different origins.

Rare whale makes appearance off the coast of Kamchatka

A rare North Pacific right whale has been spotted off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia's Far East for the first time, said a local environmental official informed.

"The mammal, accompanied by humpback whales, was observed near the Kozlov cape," he said.

The North Pacific right whale is now extremely rare due to heavy whaling during the19th and 20th centuries . According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the North Pacific right whale is the most endangered whale on Earth, with the current population accounting of only 2,000. Before whaling, there were as many as 50,000 of them.

The spokesman said officials at a local nature reserve took samples of whale's skin using a crossbow in order to carry out genetic testing.

"The examination that has been carried out... proves that it was a Pacific right whale," he said.

He added that a dead North Pacific right whale was once found near the Lopatka cape off the Kamchatka coast

Putin and his predators

After eyeing her visitor warily, the Persian leopard bared her teeth and hissed at Vladimir Putin.

"Don't be mad," the prime minister said, gazing steadily into the animal's eyes. "I'm not mad."

For the cat, the staring contest during Putin's visit to Sochi nature reserve earlier this month may have been nothing more than a territorial power play, as the zookeeper explained that her behaviour indicated she was just comfortably marking her space.

For Putin, whom the journalism watchdog Reporters without Borders has controversially recently labelled a "predator of the press," macho escapades with animals, predatory and otherwise, have long been seen as part of a carefully-crafted PR strategy.

But what if Putin simply likes animals - and predators in particular?

"He flies an airplane, he hunts, he dives to the bottom of Lake Baikal, he goes fishing - there's a certain logic to this, maintaining a personal image campaign," said Dmitry Badovsky, an analyst at the Institute of Social Systems in Moscow. "But there's also a sense that he just likes animals."

The leopard, one of two females sent to the Sochi reserve from Iran to help revive the local Persian leopard population, was reportedly destined to mate with one of two leopards sent from Turkmenistan, which were similarly welcomed by Putin last year.

The encounter was one of a long line of photo-ops featuring dogs, cats, cattle, horses, dolphins, beluga fish, tigers, bears, sheep, pigs, reindeer and ponies.

The pony was added to Putin's growing menagerie at Novo-Ogaryovo in 2005 and he christened it Vadik. Other Putin pets include his official pet Labrador, Koni, a couple of poodles and a goat named Skaza.

Putin might like animals but, strangely, he doesn't like dogs - and some dogs don't appear to like him either, said independent analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky. "During one campaign clip in 2000, you could see that his toy poodle, Tosya, was forced to sit in his lap and it was terrified and tried to run away."

Koni, his black Labrador, got along better with Putin, probably because she was a large animal.

"As for predators - he does have a certain relationship with them, on a human level," Pribylovsky said. "He likes to be around them, he associates himself with them. Although they are predators, they make him look more human."

Just days before his meeting with the leopard, Putin pressed paws with a sedated polar bear in Franz Josef Land and kissed it on the ear. "He has a strong handshake," Putin told reporters afterwards.

Then there are the tigers. In September 2008, the prime minister was shown in a Far East forest shooting a tiger with a sedative and saving the television crew from attack. As with other animals he was out to rescue, he placed a collar on the tiger's neck, kissed it and wished it farewell. Just weeks later, on his 56th birthday, he received a tiger cub that he would later place in a zoo.

As for the marine animal kingdom, Putin was once so taken with a beluga sturgeon during an August, 2007 visit to a fishing nursery in Astrakhan that he kissed the fish on the head.
Badovsky said that as part of a larger PR strategy, it is definitely successful in showing the former president as more down to earth.

"It makes him look more positive, open. Children and animals elicit trust, after all. For every separate instance, you can't exclude the political context."

In the case of the leopard encounter in Sochi, it showed his concern for the area's natural beauty ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics - long considered a pet project of Putin's.
As for the polar bear, "It's a symbol of Russia. it's a symbol of our presence in the Arctic. And it's a symbol of United Russia. This means the image can be used in the future for certain purposes," said Badovsky.

Once any particular image is used on television or the Internet, Badovsky said, it can take on a life of its own. Leopards can be associated with the Winter Olympics, tigers with the vast spaces of Siberia and bears with political stability and Arctic expansion.

Tight Times In Ukraine Means Cramped Quarters For Its Zoo Animals

KIEV, Ukraine -- Tatyana Shvets strode through the Kiev Zoo recently as if it were her own backyard, feeding scraps of bread to the bison (“Hello, my dears!”), cooing to the storks (“Oh, you must be cold!”) and lavishing love upon every creature in sight, as she has since she first visited as a child half a century ago.
But often enough, her glee turned to dismay.The camels’ corral was a mess, she insisted. The elephant was scrawny. The hippopotamus seemed depressed. And the monkeys’ cramped accommodations?“God, what a nightmare,” she said.Ms. Shvets chased after and berated zoo workers, making mental notes about complaints that she would send to the zoo’s management. There was a lot to write up.The Kiev Zoo, it seems, has seen better days. Ukraine’s government is in disarray and the political discord has been unrelenting — and, yes, now even the lions and tigers and bears have been drawn in.The zoo was expelled from the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria in 2007 over poor conditions and mistreatment of animals. Advocates and former workers maintained that a giraffe and other animals died from the zoo’s ineptitude, and that money was siphoned from the zoo’s budget through corrupt schemes.The zoo’s director was dismissed last year by Kiev’s eccentric mayor, Leonid M. Chernovetsky, after failing to find a mate for an elephant — or so Mr. Chernovetsky said. The new director has stirred an uproar among the staff for her supposedly tyrannical ways, and in October, a brawl erupted among workers during a celebration of the zoo’s centennial.Lately, animal rights advocates, including Ms. Shvets, have contended that the zoo’s distress has been orchestrated by top city officials who want to sell the zoo’s choice urban real estate to developers and move the animals to the suburbs. The advocates call the strategy, “No animal, no problem,” a play on Stalin’s infamous saying, “No person, no problem.”“This is being done so there are less and less animals, and they can make money from the land,” said Ms. Shvets, 60, a retired government worker. “The authorities in Kiev these days, all they care about is money.”The troubles are not always immediately obvious. During a walk around the zoo on a Saturday morning, the place seemed more shabby than squalid, as if it once aspired to great-zoo status but had fallen on hard times for lack of money and attention.Still, advocates said the worst conditions were obscured behind closed doors, and they have circulated photographs that they said revealed how the animals were treated out of sight.Many of the primates and bears are held in claustrophobic quarters because the public enclosures are run-down, they said. Construction was begun on a primate pavilion at great cost, then abandoned last year. Workers tell visitors that most monkeys are “under quarantine.”“I really cried when I went inside and saw the conditions for the monkeys,” said Tamara Tarnawska, leader of SOS-Animals Kiev. “It was absolutely horrible. I felt ashamed to be human.” She said the animals were crammed together in cages that were poorly lighted and dirty.The zoo’s management disputed many of the criticisms, saying that they were voiced by disgruntled former workers or outsiders with no expertise. The zoo’s director, Svetlana Berzina, did acknowledge that the zoo was in bad shape when she took over last year. She said the previous management was incompetent and had begun projects that were expensive, unnecessary and never finished, like the primate pavilion.Ms. Berzina said she was replacing workers, spearheading renovations, bringing in consultants and establishing a code of ethics.“We are consistently dealing with all these issues,” she said. “But I think that you can understand that problems that accumulated over decades cannot be resolved in a single year.”“A significant number of workers at the zoo clearly were not doing their jobs, and many were simply drinking heavily on the job,” she added. Ms. Berzina denied that there were plans to sell the zoo’s land, and she called publicity over the fight at the zoo’s celebration in October overblown, saying that it was provoked by former workers.City officials said they hoped to improve the zoo enough to have it reinstated to the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, but the association said the zoo would have to wait at least until 2012.While conflicts over the zoo have been widely publicized, some visitors said they did not see what all the fuss was about.“Compared to other zoos I’ve been to, the animals live pretty well here,” said Aleksei Nazarenko, 22. “There are all these zoos that travel from city to city in Ukraine, and the animals live pretty poorly there. Here, they seem O.K.”But Yelena Ryabova, 55, said she was worried that the zoo would be relocated.“They want to put it 40 kilometers away,” she said, referring to the persistent rumors. (Forty kilometers is about 25 miles.) “That is a long way to go.”When Ms. Shvets overheard people saying that the animals seemed fine, she shook her head. She said that in her many years of coming to the zoo, things had never been so unsettling. During Soviet times, the zoo’s facilities might have been relatively spare, but the care was far better, she said.Now, she noted, signs were out of date, animals were mysteriously missing and the zoo was pocked with deserted renovation sites.And then she stalked off to do some more snooping.“Where is the hippopotamus?” she demanded of a worker, standing at the edge of an empty outdoor enclosure.“When the mayor gives us money for repairs, you can see the hippopotamus,” the worker grumbled.Ms. Shvets located the forlorn animal in a small pen elsewhere. “Good morning, my darling!” she said.

Ukraine Finds 250 Contraband Turtles On Train

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian border guards seized 250 turtles being smuggled into the country on a train, where they had been hidden and strapped down with tape to prevent them from moving, officials said on Monday.
The turtles were seized late on Sunday at the Ukrainian-Russian border on a train from the central Asian country of Uzbekistan, the Ukrainian border guard service said in a statement.The reptilian cargo belonged to an Uzbek conductor aboard the train, which came from the Uzbek capital Tashkent and was bound for the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine.The turtles, some of them hidden in bags, had been stashed in toilets and inside a train carriage wall."The turtles were initially left on the premises of the customs service to undergo veterinary control," Mykhailo Kablak, a spokesman for the regional branch of the border guard service, told AFP."According to preliminary information, they are all in good health and will be taken to the zoo in Kharkiv," Kablak said. He added that the smuggler had sought to sell the turtles in Ukraine.