Battle of Britain in the Second World War

“We shall never surrender” Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as the Prime Minister of Great Britain on 10th May, 1940. He knew very well that it was a move that brought danger in his life and his political career. It was the turning point during the Second World War as he was a capable foil to the thinking of Adolf Hitler and the strategies of the Third Reich. They were outsmarted by him. It is another matter that the backbone of the East India Company and the British Rule was broken as a result of the Second World War, resulting eventually in the Independence of the Indian Empire in August 1947. In 1940, Germany had already invaded and taken over Poland, followed by Norway and Denmark. It was marching on to take over Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France. Britain remained as a big thorn in the flesh and obstacle in Hitler’s plan for dominating Europe. He began believing that no one would be able to stand in the way of his plans. Hermann Goering had promised Hitler that Germany’s Luftwaffe (Air Force) would bring down England to their knees with the help of relentless air pressure and bombing and setting the buildings of principal cities on fire. Goering was hell bent on teaching the Brits a lesson that they were foolish to think that they could be a thorn in the flesh of Germany’s ambitions and the might of the Third Reich. Goering promised that the English citizens would be horrified and they would ultimately force their government to submit to the German terms in exchange for peace and end to the aerial bombing. This was how the Germans expected the scenario to unfold in 1940. Churchill and the British were not at all interested in peace in the style of Neville Chamberlain and on Germany’s terms. They were, however, very well aware that France was succumbing to Germany and the United States of America was trying to act neutral like Switzerland for the Americans thought that it was purely a European conflict. So, the British stood alone, being led by the wiles of Winston Churchill and the nation took courage from his words, “We shall never surrender.” The Germans made fun of that slogan and tested England’s boast as their Luftwaffe planes crossed the English Channel and pounded the British Territory with their bombs. The people were forced to take refuge in the air raid shelters and this became a way of life for the poor civilians for a long time. It has been documented that on one night in July 1940; the London Underground gave protection for more than one hundred and seventy thousand people. The impact on human and material life was quite a punishing one from this month onwards for the next ten months; which was the duration of the Battle of Britain. During this time, more than forty thousand people were killed. The streets of London were ravaged and turned to rubble. The damage was devastating. While the Germans were dominating the air scene, they could not make inroads for a situation that warranted surrender of Britain. Not many people are aware that during these ten months; the Royal Air Force got alerted by radar when the German planes were approaching London and many gallant air force pilots flew up to meet their foes and gave capable replies and Goering was stunned by their resistance and resilience. The Royal Air Force inspired Winston Churchill to pass his famous comment, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The German Luftwaffe was puzzled by the skills of the Royal Air Force and all those who have not seen the movie, `Battle of Britain’; they need to look that up. It was released in 1969 and had Christopher Plummer, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine and Robert Shaw in it, directed by Guy Hamilton. The Germans were finally driven away from the British skies at the end of the tenth month in May 1941 and the first military engagement that was fought between enemy air forces would end up as the first disappointment and in a way; defeat that the Germans would suffer. The Battle of Britain remains more than a military encounter. It was, as per Churchill, a test of the human will. He repeated that brave spirit at the Battle of Dunkirk again. It was not just Churchill. King George VI refused to move to Canada with his family for safety as per suggestion of the State. He had replied, “I will not leave the country in any circumstances, whatever.” It was this kind of an iron will or spirit that exemplified the resolve of the British response to German aggression. If not for such will and the patience of the British civilians, the administration would have been forced to accept Hitler’s terms and seek peace at any price. The citizens of Great Britain accepted the reality that freedom has to be earned with a price tag. Churchill never sugar-coated the harsh truths nor the threats that they faced and he was quiet successful in saving Britain from a certain Dark Age if Hitler had succeeded. Once again his words have to be quoted, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that; if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasted for a thousand years from now; men will say that this was their finest hour.” Sitzkrieg – The Sitting War The German invasion of Poland began on 1st September 1939. Prime Minister Chamberlain declared war on 3rd September of that year. This declaration was followed by air raid sirens indicating that an air attack was imminent but the warning was a mistake. Though it was unreal, the British civilians prepared for battle, sending their children to the countryside villages, away from the cities to keep them safe from the Luftwaffe bombings. The Polish, meanwhile, were anticipating that they would be rescued from the German invaders. As the Germans drove further from the West, they realised that the Allied declaration of war was just a fart. About three million Polish were sent to Germany to work as slaves because the Germans considered Slavs to be racially inferior to them and intended ethnic cleansing. Poland would offer Lebensraum to the German, meaning living space so that they could expand their borders. Occupied Poland became site of deadly concentration and extermination camps that were managed by the Nazis; example – Auschwitz, Treblinka, Birkenau and Sobibor. These camps became centres of death as Nazis drove their annihilation efforts of Jews and other inferior races. Poland was not an attraction for Allied defence moves despite the promise made by the British to defend that nation. France was Germany’s next target. The Germans had never forgiven the French for the humiliation through the terms that Germany had to go through at the end of the First World War. These two countries have been adversaries for quite some time now. They viewed one another as natural enemies and Germany was keen to go to war with the French. The British expeditionary force began arriving in France in the second week of September 1939. There was no plan to aid the Poles. On 12th September 1939, the French and the British Supreme War Council met and decided that the Allies would put an end to their offensive operations and convert the war into a defensive one. The British sent four divisions made up of one hundred and fifty-eight thousand infantry members and twenty-five thousand vehicles. It was a small force to defend against the Germans but the French were confident that they would defend the Maginot Line along the border between France and Germany. The physical map of Europe was changing at a rapid pace as the Soviet Union was busy occupying Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland. The Allies opened a front in the Balkans and shut off oil to the Soviet Union. The British were also successful in thwarting the Germans from obtaining iron ore from Norway as shown in the film, `Heroes of Telemark’. German U-boats sank more than a hundred merchant vessels that were en route to Britain during the months of October 1939 to January 1940. German U-boats were destroying the pride of Britain which believed that it owned the seas. HMS Royal Oak was sunk by the Nazis in October 1940. The Germans were even attacking passenger liners and sunk Athenia with a loss of life toll of one hundred and twelve. In June of 1940, the Norwegian military surrendered to the Germans. Germany imported ten million tons of iron ore from Sweden. They were looking for a port that did not freeze during the winter months. They found that port in Narvik, in Northern Norway. Control of the coastline of Norway gave the Germans easy passage through the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. On 1st March, 1940, Hitler called for the invasion of Denmark. An attack by British bombers against the German warships was unsuccessful but it did make the Germans vulnerable. The Danish and the Norwegians found it difficult to ward off the Germans. The attack by the Germans was effective and Norway surrendered easily. Denmark also gave way quickly as King Christian X called for an end to resistance against the Germans. The Germans had no intention of stopping now. They were quite content with taking up France and Netherlands. They launched a blitzkrieg and their plan worked as the Dutch surrendered in six days. The Scandinavian countries were not the actual aim of Hitler. Yet, occupying Denmark gave Germany extra naval bases and they protected their iron ore shipments from Sweden. Belgium was next. The Germans sent their paratroopers and divisions along with air gliders to take over Belgium. The Belgians did not give up without a fight but after twenty days, their military surrendered. These countries that were earlier free now had to fly the Swastika and they were occupied by Germans who were all over, particularly in France. The Germans, with their superiority in the air, had an advantage in the sky battles as the allied planes were not found offering support to the infantry. They had the extra job of offering defence and aerial reconnaissance. They also lacked the ground to air communication finesse which the Germans had and their synchronised attacks were consequently; effective and efficient. The Germans knew well that they had to demoralise the people of the countries that they were attacking and occupying. Hitler and his Generals were so far successful in catching the Allied countries off guard and devastate their attempts in defence. The Allies believed that the region of Ardennes would be difficult for the Germans to move their troops into France but they were duped as Germany’s Group B rolled into action and their Group A Panzers cut off the British Army along with the French. The Germans raced to the coast after the Maginot Line with seven armoured divisions. They took risks, but those risks paid off. The British Expeditionary Force was almost surrounded by the Germans and the latter knew how to capitalise on massive tank formations. Earlier, the Poles also did not know how to counter such attacks. It was becoming evident that even the Allies did not know, either. Within three days, the German armoured units made their way through the tough terrain of the Ardennes and crossed the River Meuse, forcing the Allies to retreat. The Army Group A of the Germans reached River Somme on the English Channel by the third week of May in 1940, trapping the main forces of England and France. The British began to fall back in order to survive and headed to Dunkirk. Their annihilation was looking certain. Hitler made a calculation error then and decided that the German tanks needed rest to destroy the French Army. Hermann Goering as the Luftwaffe Commander was sure that his air force would be able to destroy the British Army that had gathered at Dunkirk. This decision to rest proved costly to the Germans as the British prepared for the evacuation and it went a long way in preserving the British military. By the time the Luftwaffe attacked from the skies, the British evacuation was helped by a masterstroke of Churchill where he managed to arrange eight hundred little boats belonging to private fishermen and marines who decided to respond to the call of the nation to help more than three hundred thousand trapped soldiers. These lines of soldiers had to rush to the dunes to avoid being hit as the German planes flew overhead. Churchill applauded his nation’s feat as Germany realised that Britain was the only nation in Europe that refused to buckle down to its knees. Battle for the Skies Winston Churchill said this after the Dunkirk episode, “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free; but if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States of America and all other countries that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.” On 15th May, 1940, The French Prime Minister called up Churchill to tell him that the French had been beaten. The German blitzkrieg had charged through the country of Belgium and Netherlands and crossed the Meuse River, attacking the French Army at Sedan on the northern part of the Maginot Line which was a two hundred and eighty mile stretch of long fortifications that were designed to protect the French from the Germans. The Maginot Line, in reality, proved no match for the German planes and tanks. On 14th June, the Germans marched into Paris and the city was immediately divided into two zones; one was under the control of the Germans and the other zone was under the control of the World War I hero, Marshal Philippe Petain, who was now the leader of the Vichy Government. Germany started ruling France. Churchill did not lose heart after the turn of these events. He was not discouraged nor did he cow down. Even though the Germans took Poland, Scandinavia and France with ease, they faced a tough nut to crack in Churchill. He wrote at this time, “I am now walking with destiny and that all my past life; it had been but a preparation for this dark hour and this trial.” Hitler was confident that Churchill and the English would get scared of the German victories in Europe and expected them to be crushed, eventually. However, the British never negotiated nor were ready for any settlement. Soon after, Hitler’s directive for Operation Sea Lion was issued. The invasion of Southern England was scheduled for autumn and the Luftwaffe was preparing to destroy the Royal Air Force of Britain. Once air superiority was achieved, the Germans would pressurise the British to accept peace on their terms. Operation Sea Lion would unfold as per the German plans by the middle of August in that year unless Great Britain decided to come to the negotiating table. Going by numbers, The Luftwaffe did have the advantage over the Royal Air Force as they had more than three thousand fighter planes, bombers and dive bombers in comparison with the latter’s less than two thousand aircraft. The British were looking for help and suggestions to prepare their air defence. As the soldiers were saved from the shores at Dunkirk, this time the government sent out another plea for help for provisioning aluminium. The Ministry of Aircraft Productions devised a campaign that said, “We will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes.” To the credit of the British, they had a darn good radar system which was effective and it was capable of detecting incoming German aircraft as they would fly over the English Channel. Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) was developed in the nineteen thirties and the British had not wasted their time in making capable and sufficient radar stations along their coastline. This system could easily identify the location of the Luftwaffe aircraft and respond promptly by sending fighters to intercept the Germans, taking out the element of surprise on the part of the Germans from the equation when they came raiding. The Royal Air Force had the benefit of maintaining the effectiveness of their aircraft. The Spitfire, with its ability of taking sharp turns, could elude its pursuers effectively. The Hurricanes would be able to carry forty-millimetre cannon guns. In comparison, the single-engine fighters of the Germans and their limited radius coupled with the insufficient bomb-load capacity would give them a slight handicap. The Germans began to attack the ships along the English coastline in the early part of July that year. This technically began the air chapter of the Battle of Britain. The date that is remembered is 10th July, 1940. British radar system started picking up the signals and reported that German reconnaissance planes were looking out for convoys to attack. More than a hundred German planes attacked a British shipping convoy in the English Channel. Dockyard installations in Southern Wales were struck by about seventy German bombers. The idea was to attack the ships so that Britain would not be able to get the supplies and material it required and to trigger and tempt the Royal Air Force fighters to come up in the skies for dog fights and air battle engagement with the Luftwaffe fighter escorts. On the first day, three British Hurricanes and four Luftwaffe planes were lost and one ship sank by the coast. It has been recorded that on that first day; the Royal Air Force flew over six hundred sorties to intercept the Luftwaffe when they came raiding. For the next round of sorties, the planes needed to be re-armed and refuelled when they returned from the skies to their base fields. Another weapon that helped the British was the Dowding System which was kept as top secret. It was linked with fighter control. As per reports, about a month of engagement; on 18th August, the Luftwaffe flew 850 sorties and the RAF responded with 927 sorties. RAF lost 68 planes against 69 of the Luftwaffe. The heroics of John Beard, a member pilot of a squadron are mentioned as he fearlessly dove onto the tails of several Heinkels. He downed all of them with a pair of two-second bursts, resulting in flames shooting out from the fuselage of the German planes and sending those planes spinning away and blowing up into many pieces. Two months into the air engagement, the Germans grew desperate and targeted their raids on the shipping warehouses on ports to damage the ability of the British to provide food for their civilians. The Battle of Britain for the Germans stretched into almost ten months, from July 1940 to end of March 1941 and resulted in a loss of 1,733 planes against 915 of RAF. The result was that the Germans had to give up their dream of gaining supremacy over British skies. The Royal Air Force had already made its mark as a certain force to be reckoned with. In a speech on 20th August, 1940, Churchill said at the House of Commons, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” He was referring to the diehard spirit of the Royal Air Force pilots and the boats of individual fishermen that rescued soldiers from Dunkirk beaches. The British were hell bent on not surrendering. This new twist to the developing war was turning the British civilians into a kind of domestic frontline forces. All the citizens were now accepting their new roles as defenders of their country, taking relevant positions in local organisations that were designed to protect their communities in the likelihood of attacks by the Germans. Children were being evacuated to the less populated countryside places so that they would be safe. Some children were even evacuated to places like Canada across the Atlantic, to the United States of America and to Australia. Separation was quite hard on their families but they all understood that they could not buckle down to their knees. The civilians had to go through food rationing, as was the case in Germany. In addition to food, clothing, leather and petrol were also rationed. Some private people made sure that they planted gardens and had extra food supply. For poor people, the government provided the Anderson Shelters. These were buried halfway into the ground with soil on top to offer protection from shell fragments and bomb splinters. They were made out of sheets of corrugated iron that were bolted at the top with steel plates at each end and they measured six feet by four and a half feet. People tried to stay within these shelters whenever the air raid sirens went off. Then, there were Morrison Shelters which were designed like a cage. They provided shelter to people who did not have gardens or cellars. They were initiated in March of 1941. They were assembled out of more than three hundred parts. By the end of 1941, more than half a million such shelters had been distributed. They got their names from Ministers and their aides in Home Security. They were made of heavy steel. This was a period of national unity as the civilians worked together and they were confident of their purpose in resisting the attack of the Germans. During the ten months of this Luftwaffe Blitz, the Germans dropped almost fifty thousand tons of bombs in their attack on the British civilians. More than a million were left homeless and more than forty thousand were killed. This was the first time in the history of Europe that a civilian population was punished like this by air bombing on such a huge scale. The London Blitz “During the Battle of Britain, London was ripped and stabbed with fire,” said Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent and a journalist. September 15, 1940 would later come to be known as Battle of Britain Day. It was the unleashing of Nazi terror, from the skies. At 1100 hours on that fateful day, the first wave of Luftwaffe bombers came into sight with two hundred and fifty bombers crossing the English Channel. The Royal Air Force was able to intercept at least half of these planes but the rest proceeded to London. At 1400 hours, the second wave and round appeared, heading for South London and Kent. The raid and the bombing went on, through the night. Britain was saved in a way on that day as targeting London for raids posed few problems for the German aircrafts. Their escorts had limited fuel capacity and had only ten minutes of flying time left till they reached their destination. They had to turn back after that. This fact left the bombers undefended by fighter escorts. Germans were trying to adapt the Messerschmitt to take care of this deficiency but it was not a very big help. The Royal Air Force had some wise minds and they were able to scatter their bombers in effective formations so that when the Luftwaffe planes dropped their bombs, they were not as deadly as they fell over a wider region. On 15th September, the RAF shot down sixty-one German planes and it was the highest loss to the Luftwaffe while RAF lost thirty-one planes. It may seem relative but it did have one positive result. The Germans subsequently dropped their ides of bombing London during daytime and this neutralised the London Blitz. The bombing continued from 16th September during the night and it did bring destruction to the defiant Londoners. Ernie Pyle, the journalist quoted above wrote that he could feel his hotel room shaking from the vibration of the air guns. He mentioned, “You have all seen big fires but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires, scores of them, perhaps hundreds. I could see from the windows that buildings at a distance were being torn apart by the explosions from the aerial bombs. I could hear the flames from the fires as they crackled and the yelling of the firemen. Every few minutes, a new wave of planes was flying over. Their motors sounded like bees buzzing in their fury. The thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the loneliness of the view of London, stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. This became the most hateful single scene I have ever known.” Churchill and his Role in the War The leadership of Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the German aggression was not at all inspirational for majority of people in the British government. When May 1940 arrived, many members of the Labour Party refused to serve under him. Winston Churchill was made the Prime Minister in a rush by the then king George VI who was in two minds and wanted to push his close friend Viscount Halifax for that job. Churchill got the nod because he had served in various government positions and was a good tactician along with good leadership skills. He served as the First Lord of Admiralty in the First World War and despite the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign was still considered better than Halifax. Churchill’s strategy, to throw the Osman Empire out of the First World War and create a direct supply route of munitions and arms to Russia through the Dardanelles Strait and the Black Sea against the canny alertness of the Germans and the Turks, was an unsuccessful one and marred his image in the eyes of King George VI. Winston Churchill was born to Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie Jerome. He belonged to the privileged class. Lord Randolph became the First Duke of Marlborough and was also a military hero. Winston took part in action in Sudan and India. He was taken prisoner during the Boer War in South Africa but managed to escape and wrote a book on his dramatic exploits. He won a seat in the Parliament in 1900 and managed to rise up the political ladder. He promoted the modernisation of the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty and also initiated the Royal Navy Air Service. After the Gallipoli campaign disaster, Winston left the government in 1915 and rejoined the British Army, serving on the western front during the First World War. He promoted the increase in the production of munitions, airplanes and tanks. He was then made Minister of Munitions. Winston also concentrated on his fine writing ability and completed a book called `A History of the English Speaking People’ that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. He was recognised through this book for his expertise in historical and biographical description and also for his brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values. This was also his motivation when he became Prime Minister in 1940. He considered the German Nazi group to be totally evil in their thoughts and lacking in fine human values which he held dear. When Adolf Hitler was rising in power during the early nineteen thirties, Winston Churchill recognised the threat which Nazism posed to the whole of Europe. Before the War started, he was proactive against Germany by occupying the iron mines and sea ports of Norway while Neville Chamberlain continued to resist his ideas and arguments. Chamberlain and Halifax were meek and wanted peace agreements with Germany. On 10th May 1940, Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and Winston Churchill replaced him. On that same day, the Nazis had begun their advance towards Norway. On 18th June 1940, Churchill spoke to the House of Commons and made it clear that the Battle of Britain had started. Several military experts in England had thought the country would eventually not be able to defend its land against the mighty Germans. Churchill had different ideas and he was not the one to be cowed down; even with a mind as that of Adolf Hitler’s. He convinced the British that they were fighting against an enemy which was seeking to eliminate all that were progressive and noble in civilisation. Churchill’s oratory prowess rallied the minds of the English civilians and also that of the marines and army personnel. His courage inspired his countrymen even as the Germans poured countless bombs on them and their lands. He calmed the fears of the entire nation. He told his countrymen that he could offer them nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He knew that victory would ultimately be theirs. After the brilliant evacuation of the British from the beaches at Dunkirk, Churchill knew that one masterstroke would not take care of the struggle that lay ahead. His brilliant tactic of sending individual civilian boats to help his marooned troops was like a shot of adrenaline to all in England, much to the egoistic chagrin of Viscount Halifax and the suspicions of King George VI. He gave a speech on the radio, “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” While this was going on to boost the morale of the English, France fell to the Germans. Despite this bad news, Churchill was not disheartened. He told the country, “we shall not sink into the abyss of a new dark age which is being made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science. Out of all this darkness, this will emerge as our finest hour.” After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7th December, 1941, United States entered the War and became Britain’s ally. Churchill’s service as the prime Minister of Britain during the Second World War defined his destiny and the British people never forgot him. In 2002, a survey was done to pick the greatest Briton of all time. It did not come as a surprise that Winston Churchill received 447,423 votes and won that honour. Hitler’s Move to divert his Attention to Russia that cost him the War Adolf Hitler issued a `Directive 21’ which was an instruction for “The German Wehrmacht to be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign with Operation Barbarossa”. This was not a good tactical move as it was issued even before the conclusion of the Battle of Britain. Germany’s massive raids did not bring in positive results against England by September 1942. England did not succumb and was not brought to its knees. The Germans had to reassess their timeline for the invasion of Britain. Germany had lost more than one thousand six hundred aircraft. The Luftwaffe was running out of crew as well as planes. The Germans had grossly underestimated the size and resilience of the Royal Air Force. Hitler gave Germany time till 8th October to achieve results against England. When that did not happen, he asked for Operation Sea Lion to be temporarily postponed. England did not survive without considerable damage. More than forty thousand civilians were killed and thirty-two thousand were wounded in the German air raids. The Battle of Britain had been a costly one but not without inflicting the German military and air force its first major defeat. The Royal Air Force had defended England against the German attack and was the major factor in throwing Hitler into a state of panic and towards making weak decisions. Germans had lost morale, more so than England. For Churchill, the finest argument in his favour was his masterstroke of evacuating his troops at Dunkirk. His decision, taken during his darkest hours, made sure that England and its army would not capitulate at the hands of the Germans. The Americans watched from across the Atlantic and what they saw impressed them. President Franklin Roosevelt was suspicious of England’s ability to survive the bombing and air raids of the Germans. He decided that it was time that USA supported Britain. Meanwhile, Hitler’s determination to capture the giant land mass of Russia proved his undoing as it did for Napoleon Bonaparte. The Battle of Britain made sure that England would not be conquered but from a wider perspective; it broke the spine of the British Empire and they lost their colonies, chiefly India. In a span of fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, countries in Asia, Middle East and Africa saw the British Union Jack off their flag poles. The independence of these nations was a direct by-product of the Battle of Britain. This Battle would go down in history as a battle fought and won not only by brave pilots of the Royal Air Force and efficient soldiers and sailors but also by resilient and determined civilians of Britain.

Why are Tasmanian Devils dying from oral cancer?

Before we get into this ailment, let us understand what these Tasmanian devils are - a Tasmanian devil is a well-built marsupial with a large head and powerful jaws; they have black fur and they are not found anywhere else in the world except in Tasmania. They are lethargic and slow-moving but aggressive and feed mainly on carrion. The Tasmanian devil is the world’s largest living carnivorous marsupial. It is about the size of a small dog, Tasmanian devils are well known for their piercing nocturnal shrieks and their strong jaws. They are found only on the island of Tasmania, to the south of the mainland of Australia. Being marsupial mammals, Tasmanian devils give birth to tiny and underdeveloped young, completing their development in the mother’s pouch. The Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) is a distinctive form of transferable cancer which harms its victims by causing tumours to grow around the face. These tumours interfere with their feeding patterns and lead ultimately to starvation. The lack of genetic variation in Tasmanian devil population leaves them particularly vulnerable to mass infection. Hence, the disease has eradicated a large percentage of Tasmanian devils, inflicting havoc in the survival of this already endangered species. Perhaps no animal is better suited to its name than the Tasmanian devil. While it might look cuddly; in reality, this animal is quite the opposite. With the strongest bite of any mammal and a wicked blood-curdling scream, the Tasmanian devil is a ferocious creature which is known to assault animals many times its size. The irony is that even this devil is no match for its supreme enemy - an unusual and contagious face cancer, wrecking the population. The first glimpse of this mysterious disease was given about two decades ago when people sighted large tumours on Tasmanian devils’ faces. They began to grow common. The news channels then started reporting that in the past twenty years; a third of their population had already died from this mysterious illness. The tumours were growing at a rapid and uncontrollable rate until they were noticed. The tumours were slowly covering their mouths and eyes and were giving indication that this could be cancerous. Neither the people living in Tasmania were able to figure nor were the scientists there able to determine the cause of such large tumours that were pervasive and growing fast. Usually, cancer starts as a result of a single mutation or a change to a section of DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid). Most mutations are safe but often; they can cause a cell to grow and divide in an uncontrollable manner. This unrestricted enlargement causes the rogue cells to amass, forming the masses that we recognise as cancerous tumors. As cancer cells continually grow and divide, they tend to get more and more mutations in their DNA, resulting in tumors that give birth to a broader landscape of mutations. However, as mutations are considered random events, cancer often looks different in each individual. For example, two people having breast cancer may have tumors with completely different armoury of mutations. This is what makes the case of the Tasmanian devil so puzzling. It is almost impossible for so many of these animals to independently develop similar type of cancer so quickly through the classical mutation technique. Even more intriguing is that every tumor sample has shown the same pattern of alterations in the Tasmanian devils’ chromosomes. This finding was quite odd, especially compared to how cancer has been generally shown to appear through a series of random mutations to DNA. The fact that all Tasmanian devil samples showed the same irregular chromosome patterns made researchers suspect that the devils were not suffering from a typical type of cancer as it would be nearly impossible for so many creatures to grow with the same exact mutations in their DNA. Instead, the lethal cancer spreading through their population might be infectious, spreading from one animal to another through bites to the face during sessions of fighting. Intriguingly, the cancer affecting the Tasmanian devils showed no sign of viral transmission and the similarity among tumors did not support the mutation model. How this is then spreading from one animal to another? The answer may lie in what is called the MHC or Major Histo-compatibility Complex. The immune system has various ways of protecting the body against invasion by viruses, bacteria and parasites and any intrusive or cancerous cells. The first line of defense is built up by an inborn immune response made up of barriers like skin, tears, saliva and mucus. This is followed by defensive mechanisms built up by adaptive immune reactions that are more specific for the intruder. Adaptive immunity includes both a humoral response (macro-molecules) produced by antibodies and a cell-mediated reaction produced by T-cells that have the ability to destroy other cells. The cell-mediated adaptive immune reaction is synchronised by the Major Histo-compatibility Complex (MHC). It is called that because it is responsible for the rejection of graft or tissue compatibility. As per reports, compared with the figures of Tasmanian devils in the past decade, almost sixty percent of their population has been destroyed by this disease. From the time of the initial discovery of DFT1, a second mutation has arisen as a variation in the form of DFT2 and has been devastating their population. There is a very fine article written by Sharon Guynup in Mongabay magazine, which will help throw up better light on this issue facing the Tasmanian devils. Here is the link: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/10/in-harms-way-our-actions- put-people-and-wildlife-at-risk-of-disease/ . This article elaborates on facts like how infectious diseases such as these pose a grave threat to not only Tasmanian devils but also chimpanzees, tigers, African wild dogs and Ethiopian wolves. Some viral diseases are being spread by humans, other domestic animals and livestock and this can culminate in giving a knockout punch to already endangered species that are bordering on extinction’s edge. Not many people realize that a collection of humans, pigs, cows, dogs or chickens into wild areas can bring in further risk of the already endangered species. Somewhere along the line, man has had a broken relationship with nature in its wild patches. Corporate greed has also proved that the rich are quite separate from the rest of the species on earth. Activity of rich corporate thinkers has altered natural systems on earth in a rapid way. It has been so dramatic in the last few decades that it has brought in a new geological eon. These changes include deforestation which has gone out of control, farming, ranching, international travel, global commerce and wildlife trade with the help of poachers has affected climate change and has also helped spread diseases. Why does this happen? It is because such activities bring livestock, people and wildlife into contact, exposing all concerned to viruses and bacteria. Often, the ones suffering lack immunity in a rapidly warming world. Ticks, mosquitoes and several other parasitic carriers of diseases have an expanded range now, bringing debilitating ailments along with them. These changes have also helped new diseases to appear and spread to newer areas. This may lead perhaps to outbreaks soaring in the future. We have already seen recently how a pandemic could impact the whole ecosystem of this planet. Paradoxically, the ecosystem benefits when the dark satanic mills run to less than their optimal range and people are not polluting the atmosphere with carbon monoxide. Here is the ominous part! Roughly around seventy per cent of all the growing and re-emerging pathogens are becoming zoonotic diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. We have no idea when the next threat or the next Disease X will strike and when. This is also the sentiment shared by the Director of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus when he voiced the same at a meeting concerned with global animal health. Most infectious viruses are emerging from tropical areas which are also home to a rich variety of species and the volume of pathogens they can host and these areas are China, parts of Southeast Asia, Africa and India. We simply have to face the fact that we have to live with diseases as they have become a part of this natural world. Bacteria and viruses have become interwoven into our ecosystems in a varied environment where indigenous residents have now evolved immune systems which prevent high rates of infection and subsequent deaths. Ecosystems have become intact and they maintain equilibrium. For example, as per Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, USA, the web of life is thriving in tropical forests and also keeping hosts of diseases like rodents in decent check. Coming back to our main focus, the Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease involves a couple of independent transmissible cancerous cells which have killed a majority of these species. These cells are originating from Schwann cells and spread between them as they bite each other as that is a common kind of behaviour during their mating season. DFT1 and DFT2 spread as a result of direct contact between them in situations involving fights over food and mates. It is a point to be noted that like most other cancer remedial care, there is no satisfactory treatment procedures for DFT1 and DFT2. Several chemotherapeutic medicines have been on trial for DFT1 but not even one has shown any real efficacy towards treating this disease. Preliminary trials of immunotherapy have shown better promise in case of DFT1. So, what is actually been done to save these Tasmanian devils. The government of Australia has started a funded initiative with the aim of saving this species. Research is being directed that will help understand the cause of these growing tumours. The main objective is to develop a vaccine; and if not, at least some form of intervention or therapy.

The Plant Kingdom

Plant life gives us a picture that has a history older than animal life. Fossilised remains of one-celled and simple organisms that are plant-like have been found in rocks dating even before the animal kingdom came into being.. Plants are one of the foundations for animal life and they have the capacity to produce their own food by a process that we know as `photosynthesis’. Energy from sunlight is absorbed by the plants as they use the green colouring matter known as chlorophyll. They also absorb carbon dioxide from the air while they absorb water which is mineral laden from the soil. Using the sunlight’s energy, plants convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars and various other chemical substances. Animals are not able to do this and they have to eat plants or other animals that have fed on plants in order to be nourished. The select few plants that do not produce their own food are fungi. They depend on other sources. Plants include the oldest and the biggest living things on Planet Earth. Take for example, the giant sequoias of California USA; they are the heaviest living things and they weigh up to ten times as much the largest animals; an example being the blue whale. The oldest living sequoias are easily estimated to be four thousand years old. The bristlecone pines that grow in the eastern parts of Nevada are dated around five thousand years old. These trees live long, too if they have favourable conditions. In contrast, the lifespan of the oldest known animals such as the giant tortoises is under two-hundred years. Plants have evolved over the years to adapt to changing conditions on earth. Some species are living fossils and have changed very little with time. One plant , as an example, is the ginkgo which is also known as the maidenhair tree. Where the climate is cold and the winds are strong, plants are short in size like the lichens, dwarf shrubs and mosses and the Arctic tundra trees. In the humid conditions of the vegetation of the tropics, the trees are lush and tall. Plants that have to live in dry conditions have adapted ro store moisture and lose very little by evaporation amidst hot sunshine. An example could be the cacti that have succulent and a water-storing body and a waxy and thick outer covering. Some desert plants have the ability to survive even in a dead state when they survive months of drought. An example id the Rose of Jericho in the desert conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean region. It loses its leaves in dry weather and blows in the desert like loose and twiggy balls. When the weather is moist and it rains; the plant will open up and produces leaves with the help of its roots and stem. In the deserts, the trees will have root systems that are wide-spreading and they will grow well apart so that they are not competing directly for the scarce moisture that there may be in the soil. In the tropics with their lush forests, conversely, the plants will grow quite close to each other and they will also grow rapidly. Some bamboo plants are expected to grow almost up to three feet in a day. It is a known fact that plants usually compete with each other for the sunshine and water that is available to them. The lichen plant is unique as it cooperates with other plants for its survival. It consists of an alga and fungus that exist together. The fungus absorbs water but cannot make its own food by means of photosynthesis. It is the alga that makes its food but it needs water. In unity, they make the most of both moisture and sunshine available to them. You will find lichens surviving in places where many plants would find it difficult, like the surface of rocks, the intense heat of the deserts and the sharp cold of the tundra. Lichens are also among the longest living plants and can survive for more than four thousand years. The plants need nitrogen element and they absorb that from the soil. There are some flowering plants that have survived by supplementing inadequate supply of nitrogen by getting it from the bodies of insects under the ground. The carnivorous plants have a selection of lures and traps with which they catch their victims. An interesting plant is the Venus’ Flytrap that has leaves in halves of two that are hinged together. They are open but when an insect lands in the trap section gets trapped when it touches sensitive portions of the plant. The two halves snap shut when such a touch is triggered and the insect gets caught and digested over a period of many days. When this process gets completed, the trap opens again and the remains of the insects are blown away in the wind. In the plant kingdom, the largest living things in the world are the giant sequoia trees. In particular, General Sherman is the largest and the tallest. This tree is in Sequoia Park in California, USA. Besides being the tallest tree in the world, it also contains the largest volume of timber than any other tree. It is one of the oldest living entities on this planet. The top part of the General Sherman tree has been damaged when it was struck by lightning. Mangrove trees thrive in shallow and salty water and they gain their extra support in their habitat by putting down roots from their lower branches in the form of a series of stilts in the shape of flying buttresses. An example is a swamp of mangrove on the shores of River Tana in Kenya, Africa. The network of their root structures helps in trapping nourishing silt and vegetable debris. The plant that has the largest leaves is the Amazon giant water lily. It is called Victoria Regia. The leaves are tray-shaped and they can grow and spread up to six feet across. They are found in the backwaters of the Amazon River. They are covering the water surface for more than a mile. A deep vein network on the underside of these leaves creates a series of air pockets that help the leaves to float. They can support the weight of an infant. They were first found in British Guyana around 1837 and were named after Queen Victoria. The pink and rose coloured flowers of Victoria Regia are large and they can be as big as three feet in circumference. They later develop into fruit that could be as big as the size of a man’s head. Around the 1500s, a big flower called the passion flower was discovered by Christian priests in Latin America. This flower has a remarkable blossom and the flower got its name as it appeared to symbolise the suffering of Jesus and the five petals and five sepals were the ten apostles while the corona in the middle represented the crown of thorns.

The Definitive Ring of Wagner by Solti

For his Musik Drama, Richard Wagner had made it clear with his directives that more important than the singing was the acting and the orchestra accompaniment component. Wagner was concerned entirely with the outline of his musical leitmotifs that are woven in the fabric of this music drama. An Introduction to the Ring, the beautiful white box set presented by Derryck Cooke, still stays in my mind as the ideal introduction set for anyone visiting the Nibelungen Ring Drama for the first time. Cooke collaborated with Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic. These recordings were engineered by Mr. John Culshaw between 1958 and 1965. Das Rheingold has to be one of the most famous of Solti's recordings. I have heard many Rheingolds in the past thirty eight years from Masters like Furtwangler, Keilberth, Karajan, Boulez and Maazel. They do not come even close to Solti. Solti and Decca have created a miracle. The `Gramophone' magazine has voted it in 1997 as the greatest opera recording ever made. I will agree with it. An extract of a review of Siegfried’s performance by Solti and Vienna Philharmonic: Reviews of the 1962 Solti’s Siegfried recording with the Vienna Philharmonic are positively overwhelming, praising the recording as a landmark achievement in sound and musical interpretation. Critics highlighted the exceptional playing of the Vienna Philharmonic, the stellar cast led by Wolfgang Windgassen as Siegfried and Georg Solti's conducting as magnificent and powerful. The recording was described as revolutionary for its time, considered by many to be the greatest recording of Siegfried and a pinnacle of the Solti Ring Cycle. Orchestral performance: The Vienna Philharmonic's playing was described as exceptional and magisterial. Singing: The cast was considered unbeatable with Wolfgang Windgassen's Siegfried praised for being both lyrical and heroic. Hans Hotter was considered more impressive than ever on this recording and Joan Sutherland and Birgit Nilsson were singled out as having legendary interpretations of their roles. Solti's conducting was hailed as powerful and magnificent.

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Projects – How beneficial are they?

Many of the Liquefied Natural Gas projects like the Driftwood, Magnolia, Cameron and Lake Charles terminals are going to have a negative impact on communities that inhabit these areas as they already have air quality and breathing difficulty issues. There are close to nine projects currently where the Air Quality Index is clearly indicating at cancer risk due to air toxicity along with respiratory problems. Take, for example, the `Cancer Alley’ that exists along the route of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It has seriously elevated cancer risk as a result of petrochemical plants and other dangerous projects. The sad part of the population break up in these regions is that there are Hispanic and Black Africans, representing a low-income community. The greedy corporations are able to get away with murder as they are not going to be touched by environmental racism which is at work here. Big banks lending big money are least bothered about the value of life and the impact on the climate of this region. This is a disgraceful offense to human rights. The banks are equally guilty along with their partners, the fossil fuel clients. The banks hold the key to the future of this region. If they have no moral ethics, then the people living in these regions are doomed. Just like you need insurance to drive a car, fossil fuel facilities need insurance to operate. Calcasieu Pass LNG and Cameron LNG are sinking Louisiana fishing families. For generations, people sustained their families and community from the bayou. But ever since these terminals showed up in their backyards, their livelihood, safety and way of life have been forever changed. By insuring these terminals, insurance companies like Chubb are equally responsible for the harm they cause to communities and our climate. It also means that they also have the power to stop it. Chubb big shots claim that they are climate protection leaders. So far, they have not used their opportunity to prove this as a fact. Elsewhere, a new report brings out into the open the impact on human rights and climate destruction of two planned LNG terminals in the Gulf Coast. Rio Grande LNG and Texas LNG are two NEW LNG export terminals slated for Brownsville, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. These two projects will have enormous, damaging impacts on community health, Indigenous rights, endangered species and shared climate. While other banks have stepped away from these projects due to community opposition and an unstable global LNG market, Macquarie Capital, Société Générale, and Credit Suisse are still financing them. We have to stop believing the corporate lies: LNG (liquefied “natural” gas) is NOT a solution — it’s a HUGE part of the climate emergency we’re facing. That’s because LNG’s main component is methane, which has eighty times more climate-warming power than carbon. Plus, LNG is the FASTEST GROWING fossil fuel sector, at a time where our climate can’t handle a single additional project. Both of these projects would cover more than 1,600 acres of land, including sacred Indigenous sites and ecologically essential wetlands. They would pollute Indigenous communities already facing the brunt of climate chaos and severe health impacts from fossil fuels. These projects are happening WITHOUT consent from local communities — directly violating human rights.

Decline of Vulture Population in India and Africa

What is the mystery behind so many vultures dying off in India and Africa? Not many people are aware of this fact but vultures, particularly in India, are now driven to the brink of extinction. This has happened very fast; in a matter of just a couple of decades. Another fact that people are not cognizant of is that the loss of vultures and cockroaches actually threatens the well-being of the human population. For cultural and religious reasons, most people in India avoid eating beef. Cows are considered sacred and hence not slaughtered so easily in abattoirs. Cows are actually revered; they are mostly employed in pulling carts and ploughs, giving milk and producing dung that is used for fuel and fertilisers. Slaughtering cattle is considered taboo in India but it is fast changing in the past few decades. Aged cattle are usually allowed to die their natural deaths and their carcasses are generally left in open fields or taken to dump locations for vultures and several other scavengers to feed on them and consume them. Everyone knows that India’s population has soared to the skies during the last century; its herds of goats, cows, water buffaloes and other livestock have also gone up. The number of vultures also went up by the nineteen eighties and was close to forty million. Airports started complaining the vultures were creating a nuisance to the flights taking off, quoting that almost thirty per cent of planes that were hit by birds; which were all vultures. The civil aviation departments even thought of hiring people to shoot down vultures hovering around the aerodromes. So, how did the number of vultures decline? Some of the theories include death on account of electrocution on power lines, being hunted and dying from radiation generated from the mobile towers emitting 3G-5G waves. Some vultures have died for feeding on lead bullets within the flesh of the carrion. The habitats of vultures have also been shrinking for these past couple of decades. The major factor that filters out is the advent of cell phone towers. There has been concern about the reduction of forests where the vultures bred and made their nests. Today, forget about the forty million figure; not only the vultures, even the black crows and sparrows have disappeared and you can find them once in a blue moon. As per research done, there has been a rapid decline in the population of vultures in India between 1986 and 1999. It has been noted that the white-backed vulture has suffered mostly with adult mortality along with breeding failure. The source of the research report is the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Another variety that has declined sharply is the long-billed vulture. This rapid decline is somewhat of a mystery as there has been no scarcity of food in parks; abandoned cows have continued to wander the grounds and died. Healthy cows have also sometimes died after getting stuck in the marshes, providing access to food for vultures. It was observed that against the scenario prior to 1985, now out of hundred carcasses, only eight had vultures on them. Theoretically, disease or poisoning could be the culprit but evidence is lacking. Vultures produce highly corrosive stomach acids, allowing them to happily consume highly toxic bacteria such as anthrax. It has been seen that they seemed fine after eating the carcasses of cows that had been poisoned with a rodenticide. There are reports of vultures dying in South Africa after eating strychnine-laced cow or sheep carcasses. Such incidents are few and far between and cannot be the cause of population crash in vultures. Environmental pesticides could conceivably be killing birds or disrupting reproduction but tissue samples from dead vultures did not show significant pesticide loads. A team of investigators assembled by the Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit conservation organisation, arrived across the border in Pakistan in 2000 A.D. to investigate the deaths of vultures. What they would discover, after years of frustrating research, is that the very reverence for cows that had allowed vultures to flourish in India had subsequently led to their near-extinction across the region. A weird confluence of cultural practices, technological advancement and unique avian vulnerability caused a crisis that ranks among the worst human-caused wildlife die-offs in history. While the vulture deaths were inexplicable at first, they bring to mind past bird population declines whose causes were at least well understood. The dodo had succumbed to habitat destruction and predators introduced to its native island of Mauritius in the seventeenth century and its story later sustained a new understanding that animals actually could go extinct in clear defiance of God’s natural order. More recently, the passenger pigeon of North America numbered in the billions until humans wiped it out through massive hunting and deforestation. The species’ numbers faded gradually at first and then more rapidly until the last one perished in a zoo in 1914 A.D. In most cases, unintentional poisoning has played an important role in reducing the population of these birds. The condors consumed lead bullets in dead carcasses and this has shortened their livelihood by several years. It has been known in Africa that farmers have set out poisoned carcasses to kill leopards, lions and hyenas that hunted their cattle. In the same way, vultures have also fed on the tainted meat and died in great numbers. Even in Israel, the Druze and Bedouin farmers have also poisoned jackals, wolves and wild boars with destructive results. This has been confirmed by an avian ecologist with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Vultures actually aggregate in large numbers as they like to forage together and they nest in colonies. Hence, when there is a poisoning incidence, it usually takes out several hundreds of birds. Humans have not realised that such incidents will drive their numbers close to extinction. Conservationists who are working to protect vultures have to contend with not only a variety of environmental threats but also with public indifference laced with hostility and fear. Hostility has been a result of watching them circle above a wanderer in dry lands who is parched with thirst as he or she struggles. The vultures tend to settle near him or her as he or she weakens. On the first sign of collapse, the vultures will tend to converge on that person and attack by means of pecking at the flesh and even the eyes. These birds are symbolic of gluttony and take delight in consuming weak cattle and humans. Hostility has also arisen from the fact that vultures, with their featherless and bare heads, tend to look gross and ugly. Charles Darwin wrote once after seeing a turkey buzzard in 1835 in Chile that `it is a disgusting bird with its bald and scarlet head bent to wallow in putridity.’ It is known to man that vultures are specialists in finding dead bodies and carcasses that could be decomposed remains of even a few days. They emerge away from the carcasses with their beaks and mouths smeared with bacteria and blood. They have been found to defecate on to their legs. When they are threatened, turkey vultures take out stinky and acidic vomit to drive way other predators. Charles Darwin wrote about vultures, “When the condors are wheeling in a flock round and round any spot, their flight is beautiful; it is truly wonderful and beautiful to see these birds, hour after hour, without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and river.” Vultures are on a constant search for carrion, swiftly stripping it bare before the decaying flesh can become a breeding ground for disease. For centuries, a Zoroastrian community in India called the Parsis, as well as Vajrayana Buddhists in Tibet, disposed of their dead through `sky burials’, setting them out in high places where vultures and other birds quickly turned the bodies into bare skeletons. The health impact of the vulture decline, including treatment costs, loss of life and lost income, has been estimated at $34 billion just for the period from 1993 to 2006, which does not include spending for carcass management and disposal, loss of tourism dollars and environmental impact. Findings to determine cause of decline in population of vultures Most investigators had thought the reason could perhaps be an infectious disease, but it soon became clear to the research team that vultures were dying in clusters; this suggested exposure to a lethal toxin. In one of the first birds they examined, the internal organs were covered with a chalky paste - indicating visceral gout, a result of kidney failure. People and animals develop gout when they don’t properly metabolise purines, which are nitrogen-containing compounds that are commonly found in meat products. The body turns purines into uric acid, which birds normally excrete in their white poop, which is also the avian kind of urine. The researchers soon found many more dead vultures with gout and tested them for a long list of toxins, including heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and commonly used insecticides. They looked for unusual bacteria and viruses, conducting DNA tests. Yet after two years of intense and expensive study, they identified nothing that could be causing such deaths, except for a common culprit. The Culprit – Painkillers - An innovation that turned fatal Diclofenac is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) which is used vastly to treat inflammation and pain, especially from rheumatoid and other kinds of arthritis. The investigators found Diclofenac in the dead vultures with kidney failure they had tested. This pain killer was present in the buffalo meat the birds had fed on before they died. To make sure of what they were arriving at, they injected diclofenac into few buffaloes and fed the meat to four captive birds, three of whom died of visceral gout within three days. The mystery was finally solved. The drug had been introduced in 1973 by Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss company that later became part of Novartis. There is an irony to the role of diclofenac in the vulture catastrophe; it had been specifically created to provide a less toxic alternative to aspirin and synthetic NSAIDs available at that time. In 1964, Alfred Sallmann and other chemists at Ciba-Geigy began studying existing NSAIDs, measuring their acidity, chemical structure and ability to dissolve in fat; all qualities that prove how well a substance is absorbed, binds with body receptors and is excreted. Scientists who studied Diclofenac’s safety and its effectiveness were aware that NSAIDs affect purine metabolism and they knew that interfering with those biological pathways could cause overproduction of uric acid and result in dangerous gout. However, in laboratory tests, Diclofenac or Voltaren, as Ciba-Geigy tagged the drug, seemed to have little effect on the enzymes involved in purine metabolism. For decades, Diclofenac was used mainly for arthritis in humans, but around 1994 in India and 1998 in Pakistan, veterinarians began using it to treat sick domestic water buffalo and cattle, usually by injection. It was cheap and effective; its patent had expired and it was manufactured by more than fifty companies in India. Diclofenac allowed rural families to treat their domestic animals’ pains so that they could continue working. People were happy with the results they were seeing. In Hindu culture, cow is treated as a mother, for it gives milk. Cows are of great value and they also plow the fields and provide milk. In case of cows, when they are given Diclofenac, the drug tends to break down fast and it becomes undetectable in the body after several days. It was an unfortunate reaction that the vultures developed severe gout as they became sensitive to Diclofenac as blood flow in their kidneys got reduced. Their organs malfunctioned and they could not get the uric acid removed from the blood, leading to gout and death. The vultures, being scavengers, fly high and spot carcasses of cows and buffaloes over large distances and dozens of them may descend on a body and strip it clean in very less time. They would also die within days as a result of infected cows. Deaths in vulture colonies are outpacing births. Mostly, vultures do not breed until they are five or six years old and the females will lay an egg a year and that also may or may not hatch. Mathematical models suggest that even one contaminated carcass can bring down the vulture population by about ten percent in a year. What action could be taken? Governments of India and Nepal convened a summit concerned by the rapidly declining vulture population. The summit was organised by the Peregrine Fund and various other groups to discuss damage control and recovery strategies. The government agencies were directed to stop veterinary Diclofenac in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Researchers suggested a safe alternative in Meloxicam after testing on vultures. Armed with the evidence that diclofenac had ravaged South Asian vulture populations, the Peregrine Fund and other groups convened summits in Nepal and India to prepare recovery plans. Conservation organisations educated government agencies, leading to bans on manufacturing of veterinary diclofenac in India, Nepal, and Pakistan in 2006. To encourage vets not to simply turn to other potentially dangerous NSAIDs, such as flunixin or ibuprofen, researchers identified a safe alternative, meloxicam, which they successfully tested in vultures. At first, the number of birds continued to fall every year. India did not ban actual sales of veterinary Diclofenac until 2008 and even allowed human Diclofenac products, which could be easily diverted for use in livestock. Large vials of Diclofenac remained available in pharmacies for several more years. While vets did begin to prescribe Meloxicam, its higher cost and lesser effectiveness slowed adoption. Other veterinary NSAIDs that kill vultures, such as ketoprofen, remain available in most of South Asia to this day. Finally, around 2011, the population of white-backed vultures stabilised, according to a study by Vibhu Prakash, the biologist who first documented the birds’ decline in Keoladeo Park, two decades earlier. Of the nine species of vultures that live in or visit India during migration, four are classified as critically endangered across their ranges: the white-backed, the Indian or long-billed, the red-headed and the slender-billed vultures. In the early 1990s, at least forty million vultures and possibly more lived in India; by 2015, the combined number of Indian, white-backed and slender-billed species has plummeted to somewhere about nineteen thousand in the country. To boost the chances of survival of these vultures, a captive breeding program was established and India now has five centres like these, holding more than six-hundred birds. The process is expensive, labor intensive and painfully slow. Success is not guaranteed as the vultures could still go extinct although breeding programs in California and Europe have been able to preserve threatened populations. A centre in Nepal released eight captive-bred vultures in September 2018 and it was the first such effort in South Asia. The Indian centres released their first captive-bred birds later. Diclofenac bans are now strictly enforced around the breeding centres and in safe zones that have been established in several locations across the region. In Nepal, six `Jatayu’ restaurants offer Diclofenac-free meals for the vultures. These programs buy old cattle or receive donated animals, allow them to die naturally, skin them for the leather and leave the carcasses out for vultures to safely consume. While it is difficult to ensure the meat is completely free of toxins, similar centres operate in India, Pakistan and Cambodia. The Long Battle Ahead India is not the only country where conservationists are labouring to protect minuscule bird populations. Israel, which about a hundred years ago had several thousand vultures, now has about one hundred and eighty resident Eurasian griffons along with hundred Egyptian vultures that migrate there in the summer, according to Hatzofe, the avian ecologist who oversees the country’s vulture protection programs. Israel’s wildlife agency now breeds vultures and releases them. It imports birds that are rehabilitated from places like Spain, tracks their whereabouts with GPS, stocks about thirty feeding sites with drug-free carcasses and protects individual nests that have eggs, subsequently chicks. Over and above these efforts, the agency also works to prevent aircraft collisions, researches emerging threats and supports public-education programs, as per Hatzofe. Staff members use helicopters to locate dead cows and have four trucks that clear almost three hundred tons of dead animals every year that include camels, sheep and cattle. This helps stem the overabundance of jackals, foxes, feral dogs and wild boars that feed on them. The government collects the carcasses and works with Druze and Bedouin shepherds to discourage them from involving poisons to protect their herds. Every bunch of unintentional vulture poisonings is a serious blow in a country that has so few of these birds; without the process of captive breeding and release, Israel’s vulture population would certainly decline further, Hatzofe said. Adaptation is the key here. With such a brittle population and varied collection of threats, there is no guarantee that numbers will increase steadily. Traditionally, they have fluctuated radically. Israel had at least a thousand pairs of Eurasian griffons in the early part of the twentieth century, which declined to just about eighty pairs in the early 1980s, as a result of food shortage, poisoning, electrocution on power lines, nest disturbances and poaching, as per the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. By the 1990s, with the help of conservation programs, the population has recovered to one hundred and fifty breeding pairs. Mathematical modeling has suggested that as few as one in every seven hundred and sixty, contaminated carcasses could drive down the vulture population by thirty per cent every year. Things are up and down in India The news from the Indian pharmaceutical scene is that companies are manufacturing diclofenac on a large scale for human use in vials and they are so large that part of it is being conserved still to treat livestock. This has been reported by Toby Galligan, a conservation scientist from Royal Society for Protection of Birds. Many veterinarians and livestock owners persist on choosing diclofenac over the other drug, meloxicam, which is not so dangerous for vultures. The suggestion given by Galligan is sensible when he instructs that diclofenac be allowed to be sold for use for human use but with limit to vials that are not bigger than four milliliters, making it harder to use in veterinary settings. This suggestion needs to be put into immediate practice if the vulture population is expected to survive in India. Pessimists do not give much hope as they feel that the vultures would disappear within a generation from India. As per an ornithologist, Prakash Javadekar, the vulture population in India has declined in a matter of three decades from 40,000,000 to just over 19,000. The breakup of this figure as per the Union Environment Minister is as follows – there are six thousand white-backed vultures left, twelve thousand long-billed vultures and one thousand slender-billed vultures left. The efforts of the vulture breeding centres that have been established for their conservation in various states have been in vain, mostly. The respective government heads of these states have released money in excess of 125 million Rupees towards vulture conservation. Vulture Population Prospects in Africa Prospects for vultures are also calamitous in Africa. A 2015 survey of ninety-five vulture populations in twenty-two African countries found that eighty-nine per cent of the population had suffered major decline or disappeared entirely over the last few decades. Sixty-one percent of recorded deaths were due to poisoning, twenty-nine to capture for trade in traditional medicine, nine to electrocution or collision with electrical infrastructure and one per cent to killing for food. Many countries are short of vigorous programs to fight these problems, some of which are degenerating. Trade in vulture parts appears to be rising and an American aid program is bringing electrical lines to more of sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, the main reasons for the decline in population has been attributed to poisoning of vultures, urbanization, a rise in demand for vultures in witchcraft apart from electrocution by power lines and getting crushed by wind turbines. Vultures such as Ruppell’s Griffon are being threatened everyday by poaching, urban development and poisoning. At the current rate of decline, vultures are collapsing towards total extinction in Africa. There are eight vulture species in Africa and they have declined in number by about sixty-two per cent during the last three decades. This has been announced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Assistant Director of African Programs for the Peregrine Fund, an Idaho-based no-profit organisation that is dedicated to saving birds of prey, mentioned that vultures have to be treated as one of the most important scavengers in nature. He was disturbed when he proclaimed that such natural recyclers that breed slowly and who require many years to mature are at the point of extinction in the next five decades. When a large predator in Africa such as a lion kills livestock, the respective farmer will often coat the carcass with poison to take revenge on that predator. This is a practice which is illegal but it is rarely prosecuted. Instead of the predator, it is the vultures that usually get to the corpse before anyone else and eventually to the poison. Pesticides are abused and poorly regulated in Africa. They are sometimes sold as `lion killers’ in many African countries. Many farmers use these pesticides, intentionally. This is the principal reason as per David Allan, curator of birds at the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa why vultures have mainly disappeared from the commercial farming regions in the African continent where pesticides are routinely used. Rapid urbanisation is also affecting the population of vultures in Africa as they are being displaced from their habitat. A sharp increase in wind farming across this continent has become a cause for concern as the vultures are often colliding with these turbines. The poachers are another danger as they are busy selling body parts of vultures to people dabbling in witchcraft. These idiots feel that through the vulture’s eyes, they are able to see into the future. In Africa, keeping a check on the vulture population is not an easy task as it may be in India perhaps because in the former, different countries are involved with various cultures. The vultures are facing different threats. Take, for example, the vulture population in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, Africa. The vultures there get much less attention than the apex predators and the wild game. Also, they are all threatened by the poison which is set out for them as a result of their attacks on livestock. However, there are several organisations connected with wild game reserve monitoring that train game scouts to respond to reports of carcasses which are poisoned before too many vultures feed on them and die. When a poisoning does get reported, the trained conservationists who are mostly Masai themselves approach the aggrieved farmer and listen to their complaints. Then, they discuss options. A particular group called the `Big Life Foundation’ keeps a fund to compensate such farmers. Complete cessation of poisoning is not possible but it can be checked and reduced so that the vulture population can grow gradually. It is going to take time as well as effort and it is not so easy. The slow but sure signs of the population growth in vultures in India show that societies could change if they wanted to and in ways that will allow these birds a possibility of a brighter future. A recent study done on vultures and cattle carcasses since 2010 has shown that the treatment with diclofenac has dropped by forty-nine per cent and researchers have extrapolated this information to conclude that there has been a corresponding decline on vulture deaths based on their feeding behaviour and that number is by almost sixty-five per cent. It is not something to dance about but it is certainly a step in the correct direction. The Race to save African Vultures A dozen species of African vultures are in the category of population freefall, meaning they are hunted for cultural uses or felled by poisons meant for lions. Conservationists and local people are moving quickly to stop the damage. While they may not have the same intrinsic majesty of say a pride of lions or a racing cheetah, a kettle of vultures feeding at a carcass on the African savanna is every bit as symbolic of that continent as the graceful, credible gait of a giraffe. What’s more, vultures play a significantly important ecological role and hence, the reason for grave alarm among conservationists about the growing decline of Africa’s once-flourishing vulture populations. Already, the vultures are the most threatened group of raptors in the world, which is why, in some respects, the related crisis in Africa feels like the repeat of a nightmare that played out in South Asia in the 1990s. There, vulture populations, especially in India, Pakistan, and Nepal rapidly disintegrated after farmers began treating their livestock with a cheap non-ste¬roidal anti-inflammatory pain reliever (NSAID) called diclofenac, which eases aches and increases milk yields. It has also, however, astonishingly toxic to many vultures that feed on the carcasses of livestock treated with it. By 2007, vulture populations in India had dropped by as much as 99.9%, and by only slightly less apocalyptic rates else¬where in the region. Frantic, last-ditch efforts like cap¬tive-breeding programs and campaigns to stop the veterinary use of NSAIDs have stabilised the vulture population in Asia today, at least somewhat. A similar collapse is playing out across Africa with different driving forces that make the situation challenging and perhaps more hopeful for those trying to stave off another vulture disaster. Seventy Per Cent of African Vulture Species are endangered Seven of Africa’s ten vulture species are now listed as endangered or critically endangered, with some populations falling by as much as 97% in the last few years. The steepest declines have occurred in West and East Africa and have even hit protected areas such as parks, with White-headed and Egyptian Vultures and Rüppell’s and Cape Griffon populations dropping the fastest. The list of threats to vultures in Africa is long and complex: NSAID poi¬soning, habitat loss, electrocution and collision with a rap¬idly growing power grid infrastructure, ingestion of lead ammunition from feeding on animals killed by hunters and human disturbance at breeding col¬onies, including egg-collecting and rec¬reational rock-climbing. Food scarcity is also a problem for vultures, especially in West Africa, where large-mammal populations have fallen 60% since 1970. Vultures are frequently the unintended victims of livestock growers who illegally use pesticide-laced car¬casses to kill off predators that threaten their herds, such as lions, jackals, and hyenas. Poisoning accounts for more than 60% of the vulture deaths in Africa, every year. “A lot of the things that affect vultures are not aimed at vultures,” said Darcy Ogada, Assistant Director of Africa Pro¬grams for the Peregrine Fund and lead author of a 2016 paper in the Journal Conservation Letters that pushed Africa’s vulture problem into the global limelight. Ogada says that the biggest threats to African vultures come when poisons are aimed directly at them. In particular, a growing trade in vulture body parts for traditional belief-based use (mostly as good-luck charms) uses poisons like carbamate pesticides as the preferred method of killing. “In southern Africa and parts of West Africa, people believe the use of vulture parts provides you with a degree of clairvoyance,” explains André Botha, the Vultures for Africa Program Man¬ager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust. The myth that vultures use clairvoyance to find faraway carcasses has led to the belief that consuming vulture parts can con¬vey extra sensory perception to humans. “People tend to use it for betting and gambling, but we also know examples where people used it to predict the outcome of exams,” he says. Although there is a modest food market for smoked vulture meat, most buyers simply want to possess part of a vulture, especially the head, believing it will improve success in business, raise the intelligence quotient of children, cure a variety of illnesses and generally bring good luck and ward off evil. The decline of White-backed Vultures from Nigeria has been blamed on belief-based trade in that country. The most shocking examples of poisoning for trade, though, have occurred in Guinea-Bissau, where more than 2,000 Hooded Vultures, a species already listed as critically endangered, have been killed since 2019. Hundreds of poisoned vultures have been found at a single site, many without their heads. Given that this small West African country holds about 43,000 Hooded Vultures, more than a fifth of the world’s population, the losses have seriously worried conser¬vationists, who see trade connections to larger and more populous countries like Nigeria as driving the demand. Botha notes that the use of vulture parts as charms has a long history, with hunters using traditional means to kill vultures. “But now, using modern pesticides, single incidents can kill hundreds and, as in the case of Guinea-Bissau, even thousands of birds,” he says. While belief uses are strongest in West Africa, the practice has a sizable foothold in southern Africa, Botha says. Experts see a disturbing rise in East Africa as well. “The sort of good vulture pop¬ulations remaining in West Africa probably won’t stay that way for very long,” Ogada warns, with the economic turmoil and job losses of the COVID-19 pandemic adding fresh incentives for people to monetise vulture populations. Ogada says that African vultures are being targeted in a type of sentinel poisoning, a common practice in which elephant or rhino poachers dose a carcass with toxins to preemptively kill off vultures so there are no gathering flocks of birds circling above an illegal kill. The increase in elephant poaching in the early 2000s drew international attention but no one notices that ele¬phant poachers also killed enormous numbers of vultures. Most notable among several incidents is that as many as five hundred vultures died at a single poisoned carcass at a national park in Namibia. More than one hundred and fifty vultures were killed at a dosed elephant body at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In most cases, swift decomposition meant that conservationists were unable to conclude exactly which species of vultures were involved. Sentinel poisoning is an issue that is much beyond the control of vulture conservationists as Per Mr. Ogada of the Peregrine Fund. Whereas sentinel poisoning accounted for about a third of the vultures killed in Africa each year in the early 2010s, Ogada says sentinel poisoning has decreased significantly in some countries, thanks to international pressure and stronger enforcement on elephant poaching. A Reason for Hope For all the bad news, conservationists have taken heart from the fact that the decline in African vultures has been slower than the extraordinarily rapid collapse that occurred in Asia, which has given them time to rally around and respond. They recognise the task of saving the great scavengers of their continent will not be that easy. Some Africans view vultures with superstitious fear and very few understand their ecological importance; which is why, vulture specialists are fighting back with their education and training. Through the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s poisoning intervention pro¬gram that was started by Botha, his colleagues along with him have trained more than two thousand conservation rangers, law enforcement officers and veterinarians in southern Africa to detect and prevent wildlife poisoning events. Botha has worked with Ogada to begin similar training in Kenya, where the Peregrine Fund has started collaborating with a non-profit group called `Lion Landscapes’ to offer a two-part education program for communities. Participants spend one day learning about the dangers of poisons and the importance of vultures; on the second day, they learn about how to build better livestock corrals, known as `bomas’, out of chain-link fences and sturdy gates. Better bomas leads to lesser instances of wandering livestock being lost to predators. This will motivate lesser incentive for communi¬ties to poison lions, hyenas and vultures that feed on poisoned bait or poisoned predators. Since 2019, this collaboration has facilitated the building of three hundred such corrals. There have been other important signs of progress. In 2020, a multi-species action plan was drafted under the sponsorship of the United Nations’ Convention on Migratory Species, covering all sixteen species of African and Eurasian vultures. It was endorsed by one hundred and twenty-eight 128 countries in the world from Europe, Asia and Africa. Botha was serving as the coordinator for that plan. It sets targets for reducing and eliminating several kinds of poisoning, focusing on protected areas and buffers. The plan also focused on international efforts to eliminate the veterinary use of NSAIDs and called for the identification of areas where electrical infrastructure, including proposed wind farms, posed the highest risk to vultures. This Convention on Migratory Species and Wild Animals came to an agreement for testing of all NSAIDs for vulture toxicity, the withdrawal from veterinary use of NSAIDs that are toxic and vulture-safety testing for new drugs. Another approach that has shown promise is the creation of Vulture Safe Zones, or VSZs. This is a technique that was pioneered in Asia in which a buffer was created around a vulture population strong¬hold. Within VSZs, use of diclofenac was aggressively fought against and drug-free carcasses were provided at vulture- feeding stations. Botha felt that many African vulture species are actively mobile over large areas every day. With more than fifty countries on the African conti¬nent, a single vulture may cross three or four international boundaries on a single daily foraging flight. For that reason, African conserva¬tionists are turning to the creation of multinational VSZs, overlapping the borders of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana. In this area, the largest breeding colony of Cape Griffons could be found. Sometimes, you will find about one thousand four hundred birds nesting in a single colony in some of these zones. There are also considerable populations of vultures that are tree-nesting. About three hundred pairs of whte-backed vultures nest in the riparian vegetation along the Limpopo River that forms the border between three countries. The safe zones encompass close to twelve thousand square miles area. About eighty per cent of that is private land and that includes many private game reserves. Conservationists are working with private landowners within these Vulture Safe Zones and they include companies like DeBeers Diamond Company. National, local and provincial governments are working together to boost the existing legal protection for these vultures. Energy companies are also making sure that they reduce the risks of electrocution and power-line collisions. Some conservationists are also looking to explore anti-poisoning interventions and use of supplementary feeding stations to offer vultures with a food supply that is safe. They are likely to be successful to serve as models for trans-national zones alike in most parts of the African Continent like the Masai Mara in Kenya where the vultures follow the migrating game herds across the boundaries. The scale of the challenge is huge. There is a lot more of work that needs to be done but the way the things are being done looks promising. Summary Vultures are nature's most successful scavengers and they provide a vast collection of ecological and cultural services. Vultures are the only known coercive birds that have uniquely adapted to a scavenging lifestyle. Vultures' unique adaptations include soaring flight, keen eyesight and extremely low pH levels in their stomachs. Presently, about seven vulture species worldwide are threatened with extinction and the most rapid declines have occurred in the vulture-rich regions of Asia and Africa. The reasons for the decline in their population are varied, but poisoning or human persecution, or both, feature in the list of nearly every declining species. Deliberate poisoning of carnivores is likely the most widespread cause of vulture poisoning. In Asia, Gyps vultures have declined by more than almost ninety-five per cent due to poisoning by the diclofenac, which was banned for veterinary use by regional governments in 2006. It is still used for humans as a painkiller. Human persecution of vultures has occurred for centuries and shooting and deliberate poisoning are the most widely practiced activities. Ecological effects of vulture decline include changes in community composition of scavengers at carcasses and an increased potential for disease transmission between mammalian scavengers at carcasses. There have been cultural and economic costs of vulture decline also, particularly in Asia. As a result of disastrous vulture decline in Asia, regional governments, the international scientific and donor communities and the media have given the crisis considerable attention. Even though the Asian vulture crisis focused also on the plight of vultures worldwide, the situation for African vultures has received relatively little attention, especially given the similar levels of population decline. While the Asian crisis has been largely linked to poisoning by diclofenac, vulture population declines in Africa have numerous causes, which have made protecting existing populations more difficult. In Africa, there has been little government support to conserve vultures in spite of increasing evidence of major threats. In other regions with successful vulture protection programs, a common result is a large investment of financial resources and highly skilled personnel as well as political agenda and community support. Citations 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22175274/ 2. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/the-race-to-save-african-vultures/# 3. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/poison-pill-the-mysterious-die-off-of-indias-vultures/ 4. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150731-vultures-africa-birds-animals-science 5. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/indian-vultures-are-dying-for-some-good-news/ 6. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/sharp-decline-in-vulture-population-from-40-million-to-19000-prakash-javadekar/article61590972.ece/amp/ ***********

Life in the Animal Kingdom

Scientists have been studying, probing and contemplating but they have not been able to prove that there is human and animal kingdom life elsewhere in the Solar System except on Planet Earth. When meteorites have fallen on Earth, we have learnt that they contain fossilised kinds of organisms. Few astronomers have been able to detect chemicals in the outer space that could be described as amino acids or the building blocks of ice. Let us learn a bit about animal life. The smallest forms of animal life could be found in the one-celled protozoans. They are very small for the naked eye and have to be probed through the microscopes. When you look at them, you will find they reveal themselves as miracles of symmetry and design. That is the glory of God, the Creator! The cell is really one of the truest wonders of nature. Each cell has a wall around it and a nucleus as the control centre. This nucleus will hold the chemical code that determines the forms of the cells and the physical features of a particular animal. All animals apart from the protozoans will have many millions of these cells. Mammals Among animals, we will come across mammals with mammary glands whose hallmark is hair, warm blood and glands that produce milk. The largest mammals are the great whales. The blue whale is the biggest animal in the kingdom. The whales are found in the sea where they breathe air when they come up. Mostly, they swim and live like fish. Animals of this size find it easy to survive under water as that is the only medium that can support their heavy weight. Each animal has developed physical features that help it to find food and defend itself. The elephant has been given four legs like pillars to support its vast and huge body and it has a trunk with strongest muscles as an extension of its nose to serve diverse functions which are similar to how humans use their hands. With such an adaptable organ, an elephant can squirt water over its body to keep itself cool or even pick up things from the ground to eat, like grass. The giraffe, being very tall, can feed on the leaves of a tree with its long neck that allows it to browse and feed without much effort among the tree branches. The mole that burrows in the ground, looking for worms to eat has been given paws that function as spades. Another great example of a termite hunter is the aardvark. Vertebrates, Amphibians and Reptiles There is greater diversity, outside of the mammals. Vertebrates such as birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles are suited to life in a special kind of environment. When we explore the invertebrates, those animals who do not have backbones offer us a remarkable diversity. The insects are the most found among invertebrates and for that matter; among all animals. They have the largest number of the different types of species. If we start counting, the number is more than a million that have also been classified. There is possibility that more are yet to be discovered. They occupy almost every kind of land and freshwater habitats. They can live high up in the mountains and could be found deep in the caves; in the tropics and even in frozen lands of the Antarctica. Many species even migrate like the birds and they can travel hundreds of miles. Some of the frailest creatures like the butterflies are frequent migrants, specially the monarch butterflies of North America and the painted ladies of Europe and Africa who are capable of travelling huge distances. The ability among some animals to find their way is a wonder of nature which has not been fully understood by man, yet. Recent research has shown us that the homing pigeons have tissues in their heads that contain traces of highly magnetic mineral called magnetite that acts as a built-in compass and allows them to respond to the magnetism available on Earth. This substance is also found in bees who also display great navigational skills. Some birds have been found to navigate by the stars or the direction of the Sun with the help of a kind of a built-in clock. Some birds and animals use landmarks. For example, a pigeon can easily identify its home loft. As an exercise, eighteen albatrosses making Midway Island their home were taken in an aeroplane to dispersed places in a range of three thousand miles away but they all managed to find their way back to Midway island within a reasonable time. Such experiments give us evidence that animals have highly developed senses, which are found lacking in Man, without the aid of a compass oor GPS tools. The sense of smell is an important means of communication to wild animals. Insects give off few chemical substances such as pheromones and they serve as identification signals to others of the same kind of species. These pheromones also come in handy when they mate and during their courtship. The hint of a right scent will attract a male insect to a female one over considerable distances. Another interesting animal is a horsefly. Its eye consists of several separate lens units that are called ommatidia. The lens receive light from a very small field of view. The sight is a result of a build up of a series of dots that form an image like a mosaic, in a similar way to a photograph in a newspaper which is made up of a number of dots of ink or like an image on a colour television screen that is made up of a series of dots of light. Horseflies have iridescent eyes that glow with shades of green and tinged with dark brown or purple. Another good example is the Monarch Butterfly which is native to North America and it is one of the most remarkable travellers in nature. These butterflies are seen all over Canada and the United States of America during summer and they breed as far north as the shores of Hudson Bay. In the autumn season, they migrate southwards in large swarms and their migration ends when they reach the Gulf of Mexico. During winter, they hang from trees and do not fly. They are in a semi-torpid state. As son as the spring arrives, they wake up and fly back northwards. It has been observed that they are capable of flying over two thousand five hundred miles in their round trip.