California condor
One of the most expensive reintroduction programs of all time, costing some US$35 million, brought North America’s largest land bird back from the brink of extinction. After a century of poaching, lead poisoning and habitat destruction, only 22 wild California condors remained in 1987. At first, captive-bred condors died by flying into power lines but they have since been trained to avoid them. A 2009 survey put the number of these condors living in the wild at 172.
Photo: Bloomberg
Golden lion tamarin
There were fewer than 200 of these distinctive orange-maned monkeys in the 1970s because of destruction of their habitat, the Atlantic rainforests of Brazil. However, a vigorous reintroduction drive by the Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program has restored numbers so that the population in the wild now stands at more than 1,600.
PHOTO : AFP
Pygmy hog
The smallest member of the pig family, standing just 20cm to 30cm, this reclusive hog was believed to be extinct until 1971, when four individuals were recovered from a market in the northeast Indian state of Assam. As a result of intensive conservation efforts, their numbers in Assam and neighboring Bhutan are now back in the hundreds.
Arabian Oryx
This elegant antelope had been hunted to extinction in the wild by the early 1970s but thanks to organizations such as the Phoenix Zoo, numbers roaming the Arabian peninsula now stand at around 1,100. Reintroduction was fraught with difficulties, particularly in Oman where poaching reduced the population to 50 by 2008, but a new breeding program in the United Arab Emirates give hope for the species.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby