Rare Animals

Traders in the Indian-held portion of Kashmir handed over truckloads of animal skins and fur garments to wildlife officials. The skins belonged to tigers, leopards, snow leopards and other rare animals. A 1997 law provides for up to six years in prison for killing the animals. More than 200 traders are expected to hand over more than 800,000 skins and fur garments, stocks they held when the ban was imposed, officials said. It took nearly 10 years to get $2.3 million in payments approved.

MOSCOW -- A hunter in the Russian Far East was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months of community service and fined about $18,500 for killing a tiger, a rare case in this country of punishment for poaching the animal. Khasan District Court found Alexander Belyayev guilty of killing one of the remaining 500 tigers in the Maritime Territory and the Khabarovsk Territory. Ecologists hailed the verdict as a success in the struggle to protect the rare species. An estimated 30 to 50 tigers are killed each year by poachers and local residents, said Vladimir Krever, head of the World Wildlife Fund's Russian Biodiversity Program.

Rare Arabian oryx roam nonchalantly across a forest clearing with their magnificent spiral horns held high, while a herd of Grevy zebras kicks up some dust in the next meadow. Not far away, playful lemurs scamper through the trees. For someone to stumble unwittingly into this setting, it looks for all the world like a child's dream of Africa, where strange and wonderful creatures--not humans--run the land. But this is not even another continent.

When Mara Baygulova first laid eyes on the "zonkey" 13 years ago in Shadow Hills, she knew she had to have the rare equine — a zebra-donkey hybrid. Lucky for her, the owner did not know what he had, Baygulova said, and she ended up getting for free what could have cost thousands of dollars. "He didn't know her value," she said. Baygulova grew up with a donkey named Mona Lisa and had promised her son, Andreas, one just like hers. On his 5th birthday, she presented him with the zonkey instead.

Human error may have contributed to the deaths of at least six rare animals within the last three years at the National Zoo and its research facility in Virginia, in addition to those of two red pandas accidentally poisoned by pesticide and two zebras killed by hypothermia and malnutrition, according to interviews and zoo records.

The smuggling and illegal sale of a wide range of rare animals in Mexico to U.S. and European buyers, along with the destruction of jungle areas and pollution, is bringing many species to the point of extinction, ecology groups say. The howler monkey, the Tamazate deer, the tapir, wolves and felines like the ocelot and the jaguar, along with 50 species of tropical birds, could soon disappear in Mexico.

Mark Cartland's long-held dream was to build a zoo for endangered species in eastern Ventura County. But it looks as though he will not be able to raise enough money to keep his dream alive. Cartland's nonprofit organization, the Endangered Species Zoological Society, has a five-year lease-option for its zoo on 115 acres of county-owned land south of the 118 Freeway between Moorpark and Simi Valley.

MOSCOW -- A hunter in the Russian Far East was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months of community service and fined about $18,500 for killing a tiger, a rare case in this country of punishment for poaching the animal. Khasan District Court found Alexander Belyayev guilty of killing one of the remaining 500 tigers in the Maritime Territory and the Khabarovsk Territory. Ecologists hailed the verdict as a success in the struggle to protect the rare species. An estimated 30 to 50 tigers are killed each year by poachers and local residents, said Vladimir Krever, head of the World Wildlife Fund's Russian Biodiversity Program.

This trial is for the birds. That's the reason jurors have spent a week in Los Angeles Federal Court learning about secret egg compartments, collisions with kangaroos and hidden contraband suddenly hatching and chirping in front of customs agents. Those are ingredients of a $1-million Australian cockatoo smuggling ring that authorities say Teddy Swanson helped run from her Malibu home.

Two pairs of China's popular giant pandas are being sent abroad in an effort to raise funds for a research program on breeding of the rare animals. One pair, from the Chengdu Zoo in central China's Sichuan province, will arrive in Holland in May for a three-month visit, the official China Daily newspaper said Tuesday. The second pair, which usually lives at the Beijing Zoo, will leave on May 1 for New York, where they are scheduled to spend six months.

In the annals of smuggling, Los Angeles International Airport has seen it all ? lizards in luggage, songbirds strapped to a passenger's legs, boxes of tarantulas and two pygmy monkeys hidden in a traveler's pants.                    Now, officials said, they have recorded another milestone in the animal kingdom ? smuggled turtles. Authorities said two Japanese men were arrested with more than 50 live rare turtles, from Chinese big-headed turtles to Indian Star tortoises, packed neatly inside snack food boxes.

She was the spy who was undone by a furry little creature with huge, hypnotic eyes. It was the early 1980s, and a young Madagascan scientist named Hanta Rasamimanana had been dispatched by her pro-Soviet government to spy on a group of Americans working in the private Berenty Reserve in the southern part of the country. Instead of finding out what the Americans were really up to, she fell in love with the creatures they were studying: lemurs. Rasamimanana remembers how, on her first mission as a researcher-cum-spy, she paid more attention to American primatologist Alison Jolly and her comments about the primates than to her bosses' orders.

The monkey, shackled to an iron stake, paced a narrow strip of dirt filled with its own excrement. As people laughed and pointed, the creature bared its teeth and lunged at the end of its line. "He gets angry," said one trader at the teeming animal market here. "Like a little person." Irma Hermawati gets angry too. The 31-year-old Javanese native is an investigator for the nonprofit group ProFauna, which lobbies on behalf of what she believes is Indonesia's most precious resource: its indigenous wildlife.

Traders in the Indian-held portion of Kashmir handed over truckloads of animal skins and fur garments to wildlife officials. The skins belonged to tigers, leopards, snow leopards and other rare animals. A 1997 law provides for up to six years in prison for killing the animals. More than 200 traders are expected to hand over more than 800,000 skins and fur garments, stocks they held when the ban was imposed, officials said. It took nearly 10 years to get $2.3 million in payments approved.

Like any good bird-lover, Gabriel Gottfried knew what to do when he spied the huge creature perched on a tree branch outside his Topanga Canyon home. He grabbed his camera to document what experts say may be the first California condor to fly the canyon's skies in more than 100 years. His action photo of the elusive bird taking wing was remarkable enough. But perhaps not as remarkable as the fact that Gabriel is 5 years old. "I'm five-and-a-half!"

If you don't believe in sea monsters, consider yourself warned: They are among us. Exhibit A lies in a freezer at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, soon to go on display as it appeared before being pulled from the ocean: a serpent-like denizen, 15 feet long and sinuous, with a hatchet-shaped head and a silver body adorned by a flowing crimson mane.

Peering out from a filthy cage filled with animal droppings and rotting food, the siamang gibbon stretches out a long black hairy arm to grab a banana offered by one of the four men who keep it imprisoned while they search for a buyer. These animal traders are part of an illegal multimillion-dollar business in Indonesia, which has more endangered primates, including the siamang gibbon, than any other country.

A cougar in an Irvine bedroom. A tiger on a Santa Ana porch. Sharks in a back-yard pool in Orange. Pot-bellied pigs in Costa Mesa. Whether owned by humans who hanker for the exotic side of Mother Nature or by yuppies seeking a new status symbol, pets in Orange County have included the wild, rare and weird. But under an ordinance upheld in the city of Orange last week, trendy pets such as miniature farm animals and boa constrictors more than 6 feet long had better run, or slither, for cover.

An expedition found evidence of at least 13 Sumatran rhinos deep in the jungles of northern Borneo, giving hope to conservationists that a species thought to be nearly extinct could flourish. The rhinos were tracked into the dense jungles of Sabah state on Borneo last year by a team of 120 government wildlife officials, academics and members of WWF-Malaysia, the World Wildlife Fund said. The survey team did not see any rhinos but found clear tracks of 13 individuals.

In one of the world's most isolated jungles, the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea, naturalists have discovered a vast unexplored preserve of exotic species new to science. During a 15-day expedition in December, the researchers found hundreds of rare birds, more than 20 new species of frogs, five kinds of previously unknown palms, four new breeds of butterflies, and giant rhododendrons with white blossoms the size of bread plates -- believed to be the largest on record.