Wednesday, May 2, 2007

I am safe :)


Shading her eye with an ear, an elephant rests lying down, a sign that she feels safe. Once called the Valley of Elephants, Luangwa suffered a poaching onslaught during the 1970s and '80s, when nearly 100,000 animals were killed. Today they number perhaps 10,000 and are generally holding their own. In a few game management areas outside the parks, trophy hunting resumed in 2005, raising fears that the last few mature bulls in the valley could be shot.

Source: The National Geographic (Photograph by Frans Lanting).

Nature's art or ...



Image: The underside of a skate shimmers off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. Related to rays, skates look similar but don’t have the ray’s barbed tail and are harmless to humans.

SOURCE : Kaleidoscopic Cousin, From Visions of Earth, National Geographic, May 2007.