Word: fauna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least that's the advice of the jungle- hardened rangers who patrol just one corner of this 1.9 million - acre (7,700 sq km) wilderness. They are trained by the London-based conservation group Fauna and Flora International (FFI) to protect Ulu Masen from illegal loggers and poachers, who greedily eye its valuable hardwoods and teeming wildlife: elephants, gibbons, tigers, leopards, bears, pythons and scaly anteaters. The rangers' work might seem remote from the modern world, but it has implications far beyond Ulu Masen's frontiers - from Africa and the Amazon, which along with Indonesia are home to what...
...vacation in Honduras can conjure up visions of spectacular destinations: the Mayan ruins of Copán, cloud forest after cloud forest filled with exotic flora and fauna, the gorgeous beaches and the dolphin-filled waters off the island of Roatán. But that's not what tourist-industry reporters saw when the country's Minister of Tourism, Ricardo Martínez, presented a video at a recent convention in neighboring El Salvador. With a sound track of revolutionary music, it showed supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya clashing with riot police in the streets of the capital...
...Along the way Langdon bags all kinds of exotic symbological fauna, decoding his specimens on the fly with an inexhaustible sense of wonderment (No, it can't be! Oh, but it can, Professor Langdon). His inner struggle is between his own native academic skepticism and the ever mounting evidence that the world contains something miraculous that said skepticism can't account for. "You, like many educated people, live trapped between worlds," a wise priest (he's also a Mason!) tells him. "One foot in the spiritual, one foot in the physical. Your heart yearns to believe ... but your intellect refuses...
...diplomatic sojourn, Zhou's patchy account reads at times like an official dossier instead of an exotic travelogue about a perfumed and misty land. He lists Cambodia's trade goods (kingfisher feathers, rosewood and beeswax in return for Chinese pewter, celadon and combs), stripping its flora and fauna of the romance of place in a manner more reminiscent of a CIA Factbook entry than Polo's Il Milione. "For vegetables," he writes, "they have onions, mustard, chives, eggplants, watermelons, winter gourds, snake gourds, and amaranth. They do not have radishes, lettuce, chicory, or spinach...
...changes in scenery, from savanna to kopjes (small hills) and rocky ridges, were one of the highlights of the journey, the landscapes all the more forbidding and arid because of the late arrival of the rainy season. Even though wildlife was relatively scarce, we still saw a wealth of fauna including greater kudu, the agile klipspringer antelope, fish eagles, the voracious ant lion and shy pancake tortoises. Added drama came from following elephant tracks, hearing a leopard grunt across a riverbank, speculating as to the whereabouts of a lone crocodile near our camp and scrambling up the rocky...