Veronika Wild

The Golden Lion Tamarin - Leontopicuthus rosalia is one of the Atlantic Forest's many unique and highly endangered inhabitants  -Thank you to Guppiecat for this photo The Atlantic Forest  I must confess I hadn't even heard of the Atlantic Forest  before I started writing about rainforests. This could be because it had almost ceased to exist. After decades of logging, land clearing for agriculture and urban expansion, there was only around 12% of it left, with the remainder being highly fragmented. This is a shame because after the Amazon it is the world's second richest biodiversity hotspot. It runs along the east coast of South America from Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina and covers approximately 15 different eco -regions including tropical rainforests. Having evolved separately and earlier than the Amazon, it contains thousands of unique species - one in fourteen plants and one in twenty of our known animals, including the golden lion tamarin and the brown throate...

  A magnificent Tiger of Banhavgarh -Image by Wikimedia Commons There are now two recognised subspecies of Tiger. The Continental Tiger (Panthera Tigris Tigris) which weighs in at around 300 Kg (660lbs) and the Sunda Tiger ( Panthera Tigris Sonacia) which weighs about half as much. Mostly they are solitary hunters and can eat up to 36 Kgs (80 lbs) of meat a day.      A hundred years ago there were around 100,000 Tigers in the wild, but today there are only around 3,900. Now found in only 6% of their range, they live throughout Asia – in Cambodia, in China, in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia , Myanmar, Russia and Thailand with the largest population in India and the second largest in Russia. In Indonesia they are extinct in Java and Bali and only exist on the island of Sumatra where less than 400 remain. and are Critically Endangered in both Sumatra and Malaysia. The Caspian Tiger is extinct in the wild and with only five Tigers left at last count  in 2018), it ...