Zipline canopy tour from the comfort of home

by Jamie Rhein on

It wasn’t until I saw this video that I remembered the whirring sound that the pulleys of a zipline make as they zip along the cables, whizzing people from tree to tree.

Although the quality is a bit grainy, the essence of the Hocking Hills Canopy Tour are captured here in just a few minutes. I posted about my personal experience a couple of days ago, but the video is a way to bring you along for the ride.

The people who filmed this, and posted it on YouTube, held a camera at such an angle that it feels as if the viewer is on the trip as well. There’s also footage of one of the rope bridges you walk across during the tour. After the last zipline, there’s a rappel down from the last platform to the ground. That part is also included. Plus, there’s a mix of music and conversation. Nice touch.

Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 2 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of this story here.

The excited cry of a park ranger pierces the stillness of a bamboo forest high in the Min Mountains. Zhan Xiangjiang, an ecologist who I’m hanging out with for the day, bounds through waist-deep snowdrifts to investigate. Catching up with the ranger, he kneels down and points at a small, round object that, at first glance, looks like a greenish yam. “Smell this!” he says to me.

The not-unpleasant odor of fresh bamboo wafts up. Along with other clues–chewed bamboo stalks, paw prints, and urine-marked trees–the fresh scat is the latest evidence that Zhan’s monitoring team is hot on the heels of a giant panda.
Their quarry may be elusive, but Zhan is upbeat. “Pandas are making a comeback here,” he declares. In the mid-1980s, poaching and a mass bamboo die-off sent China’s flagship animal into a tailspin: The country’s wild panda population plummeted to about 1200, landing the species on the endangered list. Experts decried its imminent extinction. But with a logging ban in all panda habitats since 1999, the species appears to be on the rebound.

It is a hotly debated question, however, whether panda populations are just beginning to regain lost ground or are already healthier than they have been for many years. Virtually nothing about the iconic mammal is without rancor. Another controversy swirls around China’s program to breed giant pandas in captivity. Last year, the effort produced more than 30 cubs–a record–as well as the first captive released into the wild. Some conservationists say the breeding program can bolster wild populations. Others are skeptical.

Zhan, or as I like to call him, Chuckie (asI kept forgetting his Chinese name), cups some scat in his bare hand and grins as it shimmers in the sunlight. “The shiny layer is mucus,” he says–and it’s full of DNA. To gauge how many pandas are prowling Wanglang, he spent much of 2003 and 2004 combing the area for precious panda droppings. His zeal almost got him killed–in 2004, he slipped and broke his spine and had to endure a bumpy 400-kilometer ride to a hospital in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. He was not paralyzed, however, and returned to work after a 3-month-long convalescence.

Panda experts agree that the species needs all the help it can get. Tourism and development are nipping at the reserves. Tourists leave garbage, and villagers lay traps for game animals that inadvertently snare pandas. One wildlife NGO, Conservation International, is testing a new community-based conservation model that will give villagers financial incentives to protect panda habitat outside the reserves. Three villages abutting Wanglang have signed on, and negotiations are under way to add 100 more sites in the next 3 years.

The central government, too, is taking action. Its Wildlife Conservation Protection Program seeks to bring 90% of wild pandas under the reserve system, from 75% today. In the 1980s, there were fewer than 20 reserves for pandas. Now there are 60.

Down from the mountain, Chuckie’s monitoring team encounters a pair of blue-eared pheasants, their most dramatic wildlife sighting all day. No black-and-white bamboo eaters–but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he says. It means the pandas are somewhere in the highlands, deep in the bamboo forest, and safe from humans for another day.
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Dispatch from China: Tracking and playing with pandas (part 1 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

On a single-lane dirt road wending between misty crags deep in Sichuan Province, traffic has slowed to a crawl. Hundreds of dump trucks and steamrollers are expanding the only road to Wolong Nature Reserve into a modern freeway. Conservation biologist George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City was the first Westerner to study giant pandas in China when he came to Wolong, about 500 kilometers southwest of Wanglang, in 1980.

Now, more than 100,000 tourists every year flock to Wolong, the country’s most famous panda reserve, to see its 120 captive-bred pandas, the largest such population in the world.

On a March afternoon, there are so many pandas in the “kindergarten pen” here that it’s hard to keep track of their antics. One is attempting a handstand while three others are playing king of the hill. These carefree cubs, a record 19 from Wolong’s breeding season, are part of the dramatic comeback for a symbol of conservation: the giant panda.
The toddlers may one day follow Xiangxiang, the first captive panda released into the wild in April 2006, as part of the campaign to prop up the wild population, estimated at 1,600 in 2001. China’s central government has increased the number of reserves from 13 a decade ago to 59 this year, with two to three coming online every year. The reserves cover 50% of the panda’s habitat and 75% of the population. The government has also banned logging of natural forests and started a “Grain for Green” campaign to encourage farmers to restore the native habitat.

Wolong will soon build a new captive breeding facility that can house 300 pandas, a goal that would ensure the survival of the captive population for 100 years and maintain 95% of its genetic diversity.

Almost two-thirds of captive panda births each year happen at Wolong, thanks to the reserve’s obsession with perfecting artificial insemination over the last 15 years and discovering in 2000 how to keep twins alive by removing one of them from the mother.

A decade ago, the captive birth of a single cub would cause a huge media sensation. Back then, if a mother bore twins, she would invariably abandon one and raise the other. In 2000, breeders figured out how to raise twins by allowing one cub at a time to stay with the mother and raising the other by hand. They frequently swap cubs so both learn survival lessons from mom. Now Wolong is trying to outdo last year’s record number of births by artificial insemination.

The reintroduction campaign took a serious hit recently when a rival male badly injured Xiangxiang. Because of his mild manners from a captive upbringing, he has been having a difficult time fitting in with the wild crowd. And earlier, rangers lost track of him when his GPS battery died.

The size of that population, it turns out, is a bit controversial. One Chinese research team recently published a study claiming the population might be double the estimate of 1998’s Third National Survey. Using DNA fingerprints collected from fresh feces, they were able to identify 66 individuals in a key reserve. The Third National Survey found just 27 in 1998.

If this controversial study turns out to be accurate, pandas would be off the international list of endangered species. But perhaps they’re not out of the woods–or shall we say bamboo forest–yet. Read part 2 tomorrow to find out why, as I go panda tracking with a Chinese guy named Chuckie.

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Dispatch from China: The time I got drunk off tiger wine (part 2 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of this story here.

The automated gates chug and clatter open as a jeep, its windows ribbed with steel, noisily announces its arrival in the tiger park. Without the usual gaggle of tourists to impress, the occupants of a neighbouring jeep toss out a skinny pheasant as the driver shouts obscenities at a dozen lounging Siberian tigers.

One tiger finally takes notice and lunges at the fluttering fowl, which has enough brains to scuttle under one of the jeeps. The tiger, neither as sharp nor as small as the pheasant, slams into the vehicle with a thud. And as the hulking beast shakes off the dust and disappointment of his failed attempt, the pheasant dashes into the brush. The striped leviathan promptly settles back down, seemingly deciding that the prey isn’t worth the effort.

And why not, for these tigers are already well-fed, particularly by the 300,000 tourists who flock every year to the tiger park at the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Centre on the outskirts of Harbin in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province.

But in the last year or so, the center has been subject to all sorts of media attention, from gruesome videos on the Internet of tigers eviscerating a bull as tourists gape, to reports of plans to reintroduce 600 of the cattle-fed, people-friendly tigers into the wild.

At a UN meeting last June in The Hague, the Netherlands, China’s tiger-breeding program was criticized for at best creating tourist traps, and at worst being flat-out farms for the animals. Indeed the Hengdaohezi facility was developed as a government-run enterprise to capitalize on the tiger-bone trade. Since the practice was outlawed in 1993, the park has depended on tourism for 80% of its $4 million per year operating costs. But shortly after the CITES meeting, Wang Wei, a deputy director at the State Forestry Administration in Beijing threatened the imminent reopening of the tiger trade, inviting 70 international tiger experts to Hengdaohezi that July to hear the merits of such a move.

So far, Western scientists are unconvinced that the proceeds from farming the animals might fund conservation efforts. Moreover they doubt whether conservation is something the facility is interested in or even equipped to do.

In a concrete bunker off-limits to gawking tourists, mother tigers nurse their cubs in tiny cages. The park’s chief scientist, Liu Dan, proudly surveys his charges. For him, the objective is straightforward. “Our goal is to reintroduce them into the wild,” he says. He denies media reports of an earlier failed reintroduction. The center did, however, send ten tigers to a small area resembling alpine forest in the Changbaishan reserve, close to the North Korean border. “It’s a very good wild habitat. A good exercise in all aspects of training, but still a big difference to the wild,” Liu Dan says to me.

The park contains roughly twice the number of Siberian tigers that exist in the wild, and letting loose even a few captives would have widespread conservation implications – especially in the small remaining natural range in northeastern China where perhaps ten tigers reside. But reintroduction wouldn’t be just about bolstering the wild population.

At Wolong Panda Reserve, keepers are increasing the population to maintain a healthy genetic reservoir in case of a sharp drop or extinction in the wild. Three hundred pandas is apparently the magic number, and tourists are no less impressed. There, as in Hengdaohezi, even keeping the animals caged can benefit conservation, as long as pedigrees are tracked and specific pairs matched to maximize diversity.

The tourists here love the liger enclosure – they can’t snap enough pictures as the tour bus slowly rolls past lions, tigers and their enormous hybrid offspring, all basking next to each other. The huge animals, a cross between a male lion and a female tiger, are a dramatic sight, but such disregard for intermixing could lead to bigger problems. The property also contains Bengal tigers, technically a different subspecies from their Siberian cohabitants, and the subspecies could produce harder-to-spot hybrids together.

In general, Hengdaohezi’s breeding strategy is crude compared with Western practices. Unlike US and European zoos that use computer models to calculate exactly which animals should mate together – and stud books to track every individual at Hengdaohezi, this tourist haven doesn’t control or record which tigers breed together

In captivity each female may mate with several male tigers when sexually receptive, confusing keepers on the paternity of the resulting cubs. The centre also rarely exchanges tigers with other breeding facilities. US zoos regularly shuttle tigers across the country to breed. The breeding facility is also not a member of the international stud book for Siberian tigers, which includes almost all US and European zoos.

For now, the Siberian tiger’s foothold seems sturdier than that of its cousin, the South China tiger. As a result of poor breeding and poaching, the South China population now numbers 66, all caged in a handful of zoos.

So the next time you’re happen to be in Harbin, should you drop by this place? After visiting, my take is an emphatic no! If you’re really curious, check out the Youtube videos of tigers at the park devouring a live bull in front of photo-snappy tourists. But that’s exactly the problem with this tiger farm. It’s a tourist trap, and an evil one at that.

Supporting this operation through tourism will encourage the tiger trade to reopen and possibly even harm the wild population. Basically you’ve just run over a cute little tiger kitten in a oil-spewing Hummer. You don’t want that to be you, right?

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Eco-Travel Toolkit

by Neil Woodburn on

Now that green is hip and cool, eco-friendly travel has appropriately transformed itself from hippy yurt farms to eco-luxury resorts that help save the planet while also coddling guests with comfort and style.

But that’s not all. Sustainable travel now encompasses the entire travel industry. This is hardly a surprise; those that express an interest in seeing the greater world, tend to also possess the desire to help protect it.

One of the better resources I’ve come across recently to help conscientious travelers seek out the greenest and healthiest travel alternatives is the Eco-Travel Toolkit published in Plenty Magazine (tagline: It’s easy being green).

The Eco-Travel Toolkit breaks green travel down into six categories; Where to Stay, Green Getaways, Up & Coming Destinations, Where NOT to Go, Getting There, and Seals of Approval. Each category is loaded with a bevy of links pointing green travelers in the right “Al Gore” direction–such as towards the very “first five-star green lodge” near Petra, Jordan (due to open in 2009).

While green travel isn’t for everyone, there will come the day that travelers may accidentally find themselves staying in a green lodge without actually knowing it. In the meantime, you may want to check out the Eco-Travel Toolkit and help edge things along.