Postcard from Bishkek

I was takjen aboack the other day when I came across a book review in The Berkeley Daily Planet.  It may not rank with the famous Daily Planet of Metropolis in the Superman sagas … but the masthead tells us that it is “The East Bay’s Independent Newspaper”. The book concerned was, The Atlas of Birds: Diversity, […]

  Last week, the results of a census of wild animals in the 76 hunting zones in the country, (which occupy about fourteen and a half million hectares of land), were announced and it was claimed that there 18,959 Marco Polo Sheep in these areas. That surprised me a lot because it seemed to be […]

The “Red Book” is a phrase used for a list of endangered species. The Red Data Book of the USSR (also known as the Krasnaya Kniga) was the Soviet Union’s contribution to the IUCN Red List maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural resources (IUCN – www.redlist.org).  The book took […]

The wolf has a bad reputation throughout the world.  In modern times, this is probably due in part to the prevalence of Werewolf stories and films.

There are several different types of birds of prey found in the Kyrgyz Republic: eagles, vultures, hawks, bustards and so forth. The largest is the Golden Eagle – Berkut. The wings of a young Golden Eagle tend to be light coloured with a dark line along the edge – an older eagle will have a white […]