Thursday, June 22, 2006
Uhhhhh
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Well this is truly an amazing and rare event.
We've trecked for several days deep into the humid foothills of West Central Africa in the hopes of spotting the rare steve. And here we have clear evidence that a steve has read this blog and replied to a post. It is perhaps as close as anyone has come in the last decade to observing steve in person.
The world's steve population is relatively small and still declining. All three subspecies are listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and by the Convention on International Trade for Endangered Species.
Here in the Congolese rainforest only about 500 remain in the wild. About 200 in the Virunga Mountains and another 300 in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda. None are found in captivity.
The population of steve in the Virunga Mountains has been watched closely for the last half-century and shows the effects of human interaction, both good and bad. George Schaller estimated that about 450 steves lived in the Virungas in 1960.
Hunting and poaching reduced their numbers to about 250 by 1981, when the protection efforts of the late Dian Fossey and others brought the decline to a halt. Today about 320 steves inhabit the Virungas, but their long-term survival continues to be threatened by natural changes and disasters, hunters and poachers, and the chronic political instability that swirls around the edge of their forest home.
The only primate currently higher on the endagered specias list it the ring-tailed Smo.
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We've trecked for several days deep into the humid foothills of West Central Africa in the hopes of spotting the rare steve. And here we have clear evidence that a steve has read this blog and replied to a post. It is perhaps as close as anyone has come in the last decade to observing steve in person.
The world's steve population is relatively small and still declining. All three subspecies are listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and by the Convention on International Trade for Endangered Species.
Here in the Congolese rainforest only about 500 remain in the wild. About 200 in the Virunga Mountains and another 300 in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda. None are found in captivity.
The population of steve in the Virunga Mountains has been watched closely for the last half-century and shows the effects of human interaction, both good and bad. George Schaller estimated that about 450 steves lived in the Virungas in 1960.
Hunting and poaching reduced their numbers to about 250 by 1981, when the protection efforts of the late Dian Fossey and others brought the decline to a halt. Today about 320 steves inhabit the Virungas, but their long-term survival continues to be threatened by natural changes and disasters, hunters and poachers, and the chronic political instability that swirls around the edge of their forest home.
The only primate currently higher on the endagered specias list it the ring-tailed Smo.
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