Author: Bijoy Venugopal

The second newsletter from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is out. This fascinating and ambitious project compiles the work of several researchers in a very attractive and user-friendly format. A web of webs, it comprises several sites linked together in a daisy chain, sort of like life itself. Content partners…

Wildlife Direct links to a large number of excellent wildlife blogs from around Africa. The list also covers a blog about Orangutans in Malaysia, Snub-nosed Monkeys in Vietnam, Amazon Parrots and a blog on the wildlife of the Seychelles. An excellent resource. More here Technorati Tags: Wildlife Direct, conservation, blogs…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFm8xWmIyF0] For the second time (the video above is the first sighting), a Sumatran rhino in Borneo has shown itself on camera. This guy is one of about 25 or 50 individuals known to remain in the wild. A camera trap was successful in capturing the subject, thought to be…

KolkataBirds has compiled a very interesting showcase of the best bird photographers in India. There is a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that brushes aside all criticism or opinions one may have of this list and the methods employed to compile it. It’s a bewildering list – some…

From a respectful distance, I have always admired Kalyan Varma for his gift – the talent to tell stories and unravel mysteries through his wildlife photographs. But his coverage, in March this year, of a leopard trapped in the village of Valparai is sheer testament to the fact that this…

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, stop whatever you are doing and bring your eyes here to ogle at the tallest legs in zebra stockings on the unglamorous ungulate that Cousin Giraffe nicknamed Shorty. Only relatively, of course. Enough bad puns. After long years, a wild Okapi has been recorded…

With the death, by Sting Ray stinging, of Steve Irwin in 2006, couch potatoes lost a beloved star prankster. The natural world, to its immense relief, lost a bothersome pest. And naturalists, most of them wallflowers who shied away from television cameras, must have smiled smugly at the warming absence…

Six birders – some green, some brown, others a primed yellow – made a trek to the Garhwal Himalaya in April 2007. I, who used to consider myself one of the primed yellow category, found myself so clueless at times that I became a birder of many colours. An account…

(Image: copyright BBC) Wonderful news for cat lovers. If you like cats of all sizes, that is. Camera traps have revealed the presence of the rare Bornean clouded leopard in Sebangua National Park, an area where the animals not been recorded before. This is particularly exciting given that recent studies…

Here’s an endearing portrait of that wonderful, little known and oft-misunderstood fatso of the Arctic pack ice known as the Walrus. Natalie Angier in NYT: In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly…

Envy is a dish best served lukewarm. And it is with immeasurable helpings of that emotion that I serve you Gopi Sundar’s fantastic photographic essay on a birding trip to see North American warblers in springtime. The good news is that Gopi is back in India. The bad news is…

If zoos are meant to aid conservation, this is certainly NOT how they should go about it. Kindness and compassion are one thing, but wholly different (though not exclusive) from scientific approaches. Consider this dilemma: If you had all but one motherless baby red panda in the world with a…

Chanced upon this very disturbing and heartbreaking story via Truemors. It’s published in MSNBC and is available at this link Both pollution and global warming are being blamed. No Happy Feet on the Beaches of Rio via Truemors by Colby on 7/19/08 Penguins washing ashore in Brazil from Antarctica is…

Could the ‘porpoises’ that cruise operators show off in Goa’s Mandovi and Zuari estuaries be Irrawaddy River Dolphins? Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh thinks so. His argument is compelling… The author Amitav Ghosh in conversation with me, then short-haired and propah. Photo © Rediff.com – All rights reserved.  I met Amitav Ghosh for a…

I posted this on another blog in 2002: In 1999, as an intern training at the editorial office of The Week in Kochi, I came to be known as the Birdman thanks to a feature on Kashmir’s Dal Lake that I had to rewrite. I peppered the piece with pintails,…