A Riau (Sumatra), la tigresse Bonita, qui a probablement tuée deux personnes, ces derniers mois dans le secteur, a été repérée cette semaine dans une plantation d'huile de palme. Une prière collective Sema Kampung a été organisée pour la protection des riverains. The Jakarta Post, hier. Rizal Harahap.
A female tiger, believed to have mauled to death two people in Riau's Indragiri Hilir regency in recent months, was reportedly spotted this week in an oil palm plantation, causing panic among locals and prompting them to hold a ritual to pray for their safety.
The endangered Sumatran tiger, known as Bonita, reportedly killed a man named Yusri Efendi last month and oil palm farmer Jumiati in January in Tanjung Simpang village in Indragiri Hilir’s Pelangiran district.
The ritual, calledSema Kampung, was held in the village on Tuesday to ensure harmony between humans and wildlife.
“A goat was sacrificed. The meat was cooked and we ate together, while the goat's head was buried in the middle of the oil palm plantation,” Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) Riau head Mulyo Hutomo said on Wednesday.
It is believed that the absence of such a ritual was among the reasons for human-animal conflict in the area.
On Monday, a tiger, suspected to be Bonita, roamed around the oil palm plantation in the village and chased a farmer named Iwan, who at that time was harvesting oil palm fruit, BKSDA Riau spokesperson Dian Indriati said.
Iwan jumped into a ditch to save himself before a joint team led by BKSDA rescued him.
Other than intensifying their patrols and installing camera traps in several spots, the team urged plantation workers to work in groups, bring wooden sticks and items that could create sounds to scare the tiger, and even wear human face masks on the back of their heads.
“It creates an illusion of having two faces [to fool tigers], as predators usually attack from behind,” Dian said.
SENDAI. Japanese ships left a port in northeastern Japan on Thursday to conduct what the government calls research whaling off the coast in the Pacific Ocean through late April, a whaling group said.
The vessels plan to catch minke whales in the sea within a radius of 90 kilometers from the port in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, so they can analyze their stomach contents and use the gathered data to manage marine resources, according to the Association for Community-Based Whaling.
In addition to those vessels, whaling ships will also hunt the mammal in the sea off Aomori Prefecture, northeastern Japan, in May and off Kushiro in Hokkaido in the fall, together catching up to 80 minke whales in the three sea areas.
Voir aussi, sur le blog de Pierre Olivier Combelles, ce jour.
La pêche industrielle japonaise qui a commencé en 1906 avait principalement des équipages puis un encadrement norvégien. AUTOMNE 1945 : VENGEANCE FANTOME (parce qu'impensée). La chasse exterminatrice pratiquée à partir de la fin de la 2ème guerre mondiale a été lancée à l'initiative du Proconsul américain Mc Arthur ("Guerre et Paix", mis en ligne le 26 juillet 2015, "Une révolution bleue" mis en ligne le 13 février 2017). Pour les Américains, il s'agit d'une guerre par procuration après la défaite de Nantucket contre le clan des cachalots du Pacifique occidental et central (première guerre du Pacifique 1800 - 1860). Les Japonais, après avoir été "pulvérisés, bouillis, cuits" (selon la formule du général Curtis LeMay) sont utilisés comme auxiliaires effectifs (puis comme repoussoirs commodes après le basculement complet de sensibilité à l'égard des cétacés aux Etats - Unis dans le courant des années 60), comme le furent les polonais par les allemands contre les russes, après le Drang Nach Osten des 11ème - 13 ème siècles, ou les premiers avaient d'abord quasi exterminé les seconds, mais avaient été brisés dans leur progression par les troisièmes...
Après la découverte d'une population de baleines bleues à Mirissa (à la toute fin des années 2000, à la pointe sud de l'île de Ceylan), une vaste population de cachalots a été découverte l'an dernier au large de la partie Nord - Ouest de l'île... Un troupeau observé l'an dernier abritait 150 individus.
Voir l'article détaillé et illustré de Andrew Sutton et Philip Hoare dans "The Guardian", hier.
Allons nous savoir leur parler? De la façon dont nous allons le faire, dépend ce que vont se dire cachalots et baleines bleues... ("Savoir se parler" mis en ligne avant - hier 4 avril).
MOSCOU CAPITALE. Lors de l’hiver 1526, particulièrement rude, des ours affamés seraient entrés dans Moscou et dans les maisons, en quête de nourriture ; affolés, les habitants leur auraient abandonné la ville et seraient eux-mêmes morts de froid à l’extérieur. C’est le diplomate Sigismund von Herberstein qui relate cet épisode dans sesNotes sur les affaires moscovites(Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii) ; repris par plusieurs chroniqueurs comme un fait habituel, il est devenu une légende selon laquelle les ours partageaient les rues des villes russes avec leurs habitants humains.
Ceci, et bien d'autres choses, dans le bel article de Marguerite Sacco "L'ours, un russe comme les autres" publié dans "Le Courrier de Russie", hier.
Voir aussi le lien : entre ours et "paléanthropes reliques" dans "La lutte pour les troglodytes" par Boris Porchnev, dernière édition en langue française dans "L'Homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant" B. Heuvelmans & B.F. Porchnev, éditions de l'oeil du Sphinx, 2011 ("La lutte pour les troglodytes" pages 29 - 181).
Entre ours et "hommes" sensu lato dans "L'ours. Histoire d'un roi déchu", par Michel Pastoureau, éditions du Seuil, 2007. Page 42 : "Faut -il de ce fait conclure que les ours préhistoriques enterraient leurs morts? Qu'ils connaissaient une certaine forme de sentiment religieux? Qu'ils pratiquaient au fond des grottes différents cultes que les hommes, plus tard, bien plus tard, ont fini par imiter? Faut -il aller jusqu'à imaginer que ce sont les ours qui ont transmis aux hommes l'idée de religion, ainsi que toutes les croyances et tous les rites qui s'y rattachent?...un chercheur russe semble avoir retrouvé des vestiges d'un tel culte - celui des purs par les ours eux - mêmes dans des cavernes sibériennes du Paléolithique, là ou l'homme n'a jamais pénétré à cette période, ni même n'a jamais été présent jusqu'à l'âge du fer (Cité par N. Jadrincev, "O kulte medvedja preimuscestvenno u severnyx inododcev" dans Etnograficeskoe Obozrenie (Moscou) 13, 101 - 113, 1980.)
Le vétéran de guerre "Pépé Jo" de Dimitri Bortnikov dans "Face au Styx" n'est -il pas le plus ursin et le plus humain de ses personnages?...
Étang salé (Solionaïa Protoka), banlieue de Vladivostok
Les canards mandarins, qui passent le plus souvent l’hiver au sud de la Chine et au Japon où la température n’est jamais inférieure à 5°, reviennent au printemps en Russie. Les sites de nidification des canards mandarins sont concentrés dans les régions de l’Amour et de Sakhaline, ainsi que dans la région de Khabarovsk...
Certains touristes qui visitent Amreli (sanctuaire de Girnar) n'y vont pas par quatre chemins pour se donner toutes les chances de filmer des lions asiatiques. Ils rétribuent des riverains, selon toute vraisemblance, pour attirer les félins avec une vache comme appât "comme à la Grande Epoque". Une vidéo ainsi réalisée montre trois lionnes tuant et dévorant leur proie... The Times of India, ce jour. Himanshu Kaushik, TNN.
Si les baleines à bosse s'expriment comme en Musique Classique, les baleines franches du Groenland sont beaucoup plus sur la manière d'être des jazzmen. Elles sont d'ailleurs appelées les "Louis Armstrong" des océans... The Independent, ce jour. Harry Cockburn.
Les communautés humaines de l'Arctique et les baleines se parlent depuis des siècles. Les scientifiques commencent à prendre en compte cette réalité. Voir le magnifique article de Krista Langlois, dans "Hakai Magazine", hier, et dont voici de larges extraits. Et à la fin de l'article, un témoignage e Pierre Olivier Combelles sur cette dimension fondamentale des relations.
Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.
Although Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf’s mother...
Brower lived six years after the episode, dying in 1992 at the age of 67. In his final years, he discussed what he had witnessed with Christian ministers and Utqiaġvik’s whaling captains. The conversations ultimately led him to hand down new rules to govern hunting female whales with offspring, meant to communicate respect to whales and signal that people were aware of their feelings and needs. “[The whale] talked to me,” Brower recalls in a collection of his stories,The Whales, They Give Themselves...
Not long ago, non-Indigenous scientists might have dismissed Brower’s experience as a dream or the inchoate ramblings of a sick man. But he and other Iñupiat are part of a deep history of Arctic and subarctic peoples who believe humans and whales can talk and share a reciprocal relationship that goes far beyond that of predator and prey. Today, as Western scientists try to better understand Indigenous peoples’ relationships with animals—as well as animals’ own capacity for thoughts and feelings—such beliefs are gaining wider recognition, giving archaeologists a better understanding of ancient northern cultures.
“If you start looking at the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective that Indigenous people themselves may have had, it reveals a rich new universe,” says Matthew Betts, an archaeologist with the Canadian Museum of History who studies Paleo-Eskimo cultures in the Canadian Arctic. “What a beautiful way to view the world.”...
[SAPIENS AND NEANDERTALIS, INUIT AND TUNIT]. The Dorset—known in Inuit oral tradition as the Tunit—were rumored to have been so strong the men could outrun caribou and drag a 1,700-kilogram walrus across the ice. The women were said to have fermented raw seal meat against the warmth of their skin, leaving it in their pants for days at a time. But despite their legendary survival skills, the Tunit died out 1,000 years ago... Carvings left behind by the Tunit suggest a belief that polar bears possessed a kind of personhood allowing them to communicate with humans; while some Inuit believedwalrusescould listen to humans talking about them and react accordingly.
[THE WHALE AS SOCIAL AXIS]. The advent of whaling changed the North. For the first time, hunters could bring in enough meat to feed an entire village. Permanent settlements began springing up in places like Utqiaġvik that were reliably visited by bowheads—places still inhabited today. Social organizations shifted as successful whale hunters amassed wealth, became captains, and positioned themselves at the top of a developing social hierarchy. Before long, the whale hunt became the center of cultural, spiritual, and day-to-day life, and whales the cornerstone of many Arctic and subarctic cosmologies.
When agricultural Europeans began visiting and writing about the North in the 10th century, they were mesmerized by Aboriginal peoples’ relationships with whales. Medieval literature depicted the Arctic as a land of malevolent “monstrous fishes” and people who could summon them to shore through magical powers and mumbled spells. Even as explorers and missionaries brought back straightforward accounts of how individual whaling cultures went about hunting, butchering, and sharing a whale, it was hard to shake the sense of mysticism. In 1938, American anthropologist Margaret Lantis analyzed these scattered ethnographic accounts and concluded that Iñupiat, Inuit, and other northern peoples belonged to a circumpolar “whale cult.”
Erica Hill, a zooarchaeologist with the University of Alaska Southeast, is part of a burgeoning branch of archaeology that uses ethnographic accounts and oral histories to re-examine animal artifacts with fresh eyes—and interpret the past in new, non-Western ways. “I’m interested in this as part of our prehistory as humans,” Hill says, “but also in what it tells us about alternative ways of being.”Few archaeologists have examined the record of human history with the perspective that animals feel emotions and can express those emotions to humans.
Hill’s interest in doing so was piqued in 2007, when she was excavating in Chukotka, Russia, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The site was estimated to be 1,000 to 2,000 years old, predating the dawn of whaling in the region, and was situated at the top of a large hill. As her team dug through the tundra, they uncovered six or seven intact walrus skulls deliberately arranged in a circle.
Like many archaeologists, Hill had been taught that ancient humans in harsh northern climates conserved calories and rarely expended energy doing things with no direct physical benefit. That people were hauling walrus skulls to a hilltop where there were plenty of similar-sized rocks for building seemed strange. “If you’ve ever picked up a walrus skull, they’re really, really heavy,” Hill says. So she started wondering: did the skulls serve a purpose that wasn’t strictly practical that justified the effort of carrying them uphill?
When Hill returned home, she began looking for other cases of “people doing funky stuff” with animal remains. There was no shortage of examples: shrines packed with sheep skulls, ceremonial burials of wolves and dogs, walrus-skull rings on both sides of the Bering Strait. To Hill, though, some of the most compelling artifacts came from whaling cultures.
One in particular stands out. Hill was looking for Alaskan artifacts in a massive climate-controlled warehouse belonging to Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The artifacts were housed in hundreds of floor-to-ceiling drawers, row after row of them, with little indication of what was inside. She pulled open one drawer and there it was—the perfect likeness of a bowhead whale staring back at her.
The seat, likely from the late 19th century, was hewn from a hunk of driftwood into a crescent shape, just large enough for a grown man to sit on. Carved on one side was a bowhead, looking as it would look if you were gazing down on a whale from above, perhaps from a raven’s-eye perspective. A precious bead of obsidian was embedded in the blowhole. “It’s so elegant and simple but so completely whale,” Hill says. “It’s this perfect balance of minimalism and form.”
Using Iñupiat oral histories and ethnographies recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hill now knows that this and other iktuġat were meant to be placed in a boat with the likeness of the whale facing down, toward the ocean. The meticulously rendered art was thus meant not for humans, but for whales—to flatter them, Hill says, and call them to the hunters. “The idea is that the whale will be attracted to its own likeness, so obviously you want to depict the whale in the most positive way possible,” she explains.
Yupik stories from St. Lawrence Island tell of whales who might spend an hour swimming directly under an umiak, positioning themselves so they could check out the seats and the men occupying them. If the boat was clean, the carvings beautiful, and the men respectful, the whale might reposition itself to be harpooned. If the art portrayed the whale in an unflattering light or the boat was dirty, it indicated that the hunters were lazy and wouldn’t treat the whale’s body properly. Then the whale might swim away.
The belief that whales have agency and can communicate their needs to people isn’t unique to the Arctic. Farther south, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth whalers observed eight months of rituals meant to communicate respect in the mysterious language of whales.
According to Hill, many of the objects aiding this reciprocity—vessels used to offer whales a drink of fresh water, amulets that hunters used to negotiate relationships with animal spirits—weren’t just reserved for shamanistic ceremonies. They were part of everyday life; the physical manifestation of an ongoing, daily dialogue between the human and animal worlds.
Arctic cultures saw whale hunting as a match between equals. Bipedal humans with rudimentary technology faced off against animals as much as 1,000 times their size that were emotional, thoughtful, and influenced by the same social expectations that governed human communities.
Today, as archaeologists like Hill and Matthew Betts shift their interpretation of the past to better reflect Indigenous worldviews, biologists too are shedding new light on whale behavior and biology that seems to confirm the traits Indigenous people have attributed to whales for more than 1,000 years. Among them is Hal Whitehead, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who argues that cetaceans have their ownculture—a word typically reservedto human societies.
By this definition, culture is social learning that’s passed down from one generation to the next. Whitehead finds evidence for his theory in numerous recent studies, including one that shows bowhead whales in the North Pacific, off the Alaskan coast, and in the Atlantic Ocean near Greenland sing different songs, the way human groups might have different styles of music or linguistic dialects. Similarly, pods of resident killer whales living in the waters off south Vancouver Island greet each other with different behaviors than killer whales living off north Vancouver Island, despite the fact that the groups are genetically almost identical and have overlapping territories.
Plus, calves spend years with their mothers, developing the strong mother-offspring bonds that serve to transfer cultural information, and bowhead whales live long enough to accumulate the kind of environmental knowledge that would be beneficial to pass on to younger generations.
Unlike other whaling cultures, Iñupiat whalers had the means to fight back, thanks to taxes they had collected from a nearby oil boom. With the money, communities hired Western-trained scientists to corroborate traditional knowledge. The scientists developed a new methodology that used hydrophones to count bowhead whales beneath the ice, rather than extrapolating the population based on a count of the visible bowheads passing by a single, ice-free locale. Their findings proved bowheads were far more numerous than the government had previously thought, and subsistence whaling was allowed to continue.
Brower had other ways of communicating with whales. He believed that whales listened, and that if a whaler was selfish or disrespectful, whales would avoid him. He believed that the natural world was alive with animals’ spirits, and that the inexplicable connection he’d felt with whales could only be explained by the presence of such spirits.
And he believed that in 1986, a baby whale visited him in an Anchorage hospital to show him how future generations could maintain the centuries-long relationship between humans and whales. Before he died, he told his biographer Karen Brewster that although he believed in a Christian heaven, he personally thought he would go elsewhere. “I’m going to go join the whales,” he said. “That’s the best place, I think. … You could feed all the people for the last time.”
Le témoignage de Pierre Olivier Combelles: Ce que j'ai appris avec mes amis Amérindiens du Québec-Labrador, c'est le dialogue, par la voix, l'oreille et l'esprit, avec les animaux sauvages. Il y avait la tente tremblante où l'on s'adressait à eux, où on les invoquait par l'intermédiaire de l'ours... la connaissance du langage des animaux pendant la chasse (identification des animaux, oiseaux etc, toutes les espèces, par leur voix)..; et ce que me racontaient mes amis, la connaissance du langage des hommes par les animaux sauvages (loups en particulier), de la langue montagnaise-innue, par eux, depuis le temps qu'ils vivent ensemble.... de la langue innue, pas du français ou de l'anglais évidemment... une connaissance multimillénaire... il en était de même avec les baleines.
Relâchés tous deux en 2014 en République autonome du Birobidjan, le tigre Boris et la tigresse Svetlana, dont on supposait depuis l'été 2016 qu'il s'étaient unis, vivent en pleine santé avec trois jeunes d'1 an et demi, non répertoriés jusqu'alors, selon des observations toutes récentes. Ces derniers pourraient commencer à vivre en autonomie dans des territoires distincts dès cet été. Par ailleurs, une autre tigresse, relâchée au printemps dernier, montre tous les signes d'une vie active épanouie, mais, du fait de l'absence de caméras pièges dans son secteur, on ignore si elle vit seule ou accompagnée. De plus, l'inspection de printemps a permis de définir une "zone idéale" au nord de la rivière Bijan pour le lâcher de nouveaux tigres. Le territoire de cette petite République était vide de tigres des années 70 du siècle dernier au début des années 2010. Les grands félins y seront vraisemblablement près d'une vingtaine avant la fin de cette année. Amur Tiger Center, ce jour.
http://amur-tiger.ru/ru/press_center/news/1034/
ГРУППИРОВКА ТИГРОВ В ЕАО СТАБИЛЬНА
Actualisation au 12 Avril. Deux jeunes tigres présents actuellement au Centre de Réhabilitation et de Réintroduction du Tigre de l'Amour, le mâle Saikhan et la femelle Lazovka, seront relâchés dans la "zone idéale" mentionnée plus haut vers la mi - mai 2018.
Scientists have decided to return two young tigers, Saikhan and Lazovka, to the wild in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The release will take place in mid-May.
“The Jewish Autonomous Region was chosen to reinforce the tiger group that has formed there thanks to previous releases of these predators. The exact location has not yet been disclosed for security reasons. Saikhan and Lazovka will be released at the same place,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Center.
... ET RAJASTHANI. Premier transfert d'un tigre de Ranthambore à Mukundra. Celui ci a été effectué aujourd'hui. The Hindustan Times, ce jour. Aabshar H Quazi.
Ceci intervient quelques semaines après l'article de Moses Ompusunggu, publié par le Jakarta Post le 3 mars dernier : "New study opens way for tiger reintroduction", concernant Java et Bali, notamment.
Des habitants de Wonogiri (district de Nguntoronadi, au centre de l'ïle de Java) affirment avoir observé des tigres sur le mont Pegat, dont une tigresse jouant avec ses trois petits. Ces animaux sont officiellement déclarés éteints depuis les années 1980. Des témoignages sur leur présence dans les zones montagneuses de la partie centrale de l'île éclosent régulièrement depuis lors. Des scientifiques ont réagi en automates en affirmant spontanément qu'il s'agissait probablement de léopards... The Jakarta Post, ce jour.
A number of residents in Nguntoronadi district, Wonogiri regency, Central Java, claim to have seen tigers that have been declared extinct in the Mount Pegat area. The local office of the Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA), however, was quick to dismiss the sightings as Javan leopards.
“I have seen Javan tigers on Mt. Pegat and forests around the mountain. I saw a tiger playing with her three cubs,” Mt. Pegatjuru kunci(mountain attendant) Suratno, 58, said on Sunday.
Javanese culture recognizes the role ofjuru kunci, the literal translation of which is the one who holds the key.Juru kunciare tasked with watching over places such as mountains, cemeteries or rivers.
Suratno said Mt. Pegat had an area called Song Gogor, where locals believed tigers and their cubs dwelled. The species was believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s.
“Javan tigers are not extinct. They have stripes. There has also been sightings of tigers leaving sugarcane fields, usually in the afternoon,” Suratno said.
Harjanto, 56, a resident of Kepuh Kulon, Bumiharjo in Wonogiri, said he had seen large striped cats in Mt. Pegat. However, he could not confirm whether they were Javan tigers. “What I saw had a big body, with stripes. I don’t know whether it was a tiger,” he said.
Sagimin, a resident of Bumiharjo village, claims to have seen a tiger near his house
“The body was the size of a calf and it had stripes. During the dry season, tigers usually find water in the river near our kampung. I don’t believe the tigers are extinct. I’ve seen them four times,” Sagimin said.
However, Central Java’s BKSDA head, Suharman, believed the sightings were not of Javan tigers but that of leopards. Leopards have spots. “Javan tigers were declared extinct by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the 1980s. Tigers have not been seen since the 1960s,” Suharman said.
He said he not received any official reports from the residents about Javan tiger sightings. However, should his side receive any official reports, the BKSDA would investigate the claims, he said.
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Le retour du tigre en Europe: le blog d'Alain Sennepin
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Les tigres et autres grands félins sauvages ont vécu en Europe pendant la période historique.Leur retour prochain est une nécessité politique et civilisationnelle.
