Word: amur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...confined to small, shrinking pockets of their forest habitat. The Caspian subspecies became extinct more than a decade ago. So did the Balinese and Javan cats. The survivors are impossible to count with any precision, but fewer than 650 Sumatran tigers remain and maybe 200 of Siberia's Amur, the world's largest cat. China has a few dozen left, and these isolated individuals will soon...
...There is no end to our effrontery. In Arizona a mutant Chinese grass carp, the sterile triploid amur, has been released into the ponds and water hazards of golf courses to keep the water free of entangling weeds lest golf balls be lost or the scenery spoiled. An African fish, the tilapia, cruises irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish. Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader of Shakespeare bent...
...following the movements of a complex underground network of hunters, smugglers, black marketeers, thugs and fishermen. While she never bought any animals, she found it necessary to hand out small bribes of $20, called red envelopes, just to meet the people with the wares, which included the nearly extinct Amur leopard as well as gibbons, golden monkeys and even eagles. TIME's Tad Stoner was permitted, on an exclusive basis, to accompany her during one week of her startling sojourn...
That, however, was only a small taste of what was available through clandestine channels. At a village near Quanzhou, the WWF agent was treated to the sickening sight of 28 leopard skins, including six identified as the critically endangered Amur, believed to number only 40 in the world. The price: $380 apiece. Two taxidermy shops in Fuzhou offered more extravagant horror shows. "One had egrets, leopard cats, pangolins, slow lorises and eagles." The other shop contained "at least 100 animal specimens and must have had 500 birds -- kingfishers, hummingbirds, everything." The owner, she speculates, "may have connections in the local...
This new crusade began with the seizure of the east bank of the Amur valley as far south as Vladivostok, which a now enfeebled China ceded in 1860. On the enormous Pacific island of Sakhalin, the Russians first established a joint "condominium" with the Japanese in 1855, then took over the whole place in 1875. In the rugged and thinly settled borderlands of Central Asia, the Russians simply invaded. They stormed legendary Tashkent in 1864 and turned the whole of Turkistan into a Russian province. They besieged the sacred city of Samarkand, site of the tomb of the medieval chieftain...