A Better Conservation Model

In How Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park is rebounding from war, National Geopgraphic takes a look at conservation efforts which include the local community, protecting wildlife by improving the lives of local farmers and families.

Circumstances were just as grim on the lands surrounding the park. About 100,000 people lived in what planners now call the buffer zone—mostly families growing corn and other subsistence crops, barely able to feed themselves, their children shorted on education and health care. When the soil tired and the corn failed to thrive, the farmers would cut forest, burn the slash, and try again on a new patch.

Dolphin Rescues Whales

Great story this morning about a dolphin “who rescued to stranded whales”:http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/save-the-whales-how-moko-the-dolphin-came-to-the-rescue-of-a-mother-and-her-calf-795025.html in New Zealand. The two “pygmy sperm whales”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_sperm_whale had been discovered by locals, and repeated efforts to free them had come to naught.

"They kept getting disoriented and stranding again," Mr Smith said. "They obviously couldn't find their way back past [the sandbar] to the sea." He was beginning to contemplate killing the pair, to save them from a slow, painful death, when Moko – as local people have named the dolphin – arrived. Moko, who often plays with humans at Mahia, approached the whales and guided them 200 yards along the shoreline and out through a channel into the open sea.