The local Bedouin knew about them for thousands of years but in the 1920s, pilots of the Royal Air Force flying over the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt saw mysterious line shapes in the ground that they named “Desert Kites”. Because their outlines, as seen from the air in their planes, reminded them of airborne kites.
It’s easy for us to think of modern humans as the sole destroyers of all things living, but ancient humans also competed with other predators, using traps. This includes nomadic people from what is now Israel’s Negev Desert. A 5,000 year-old leopard trap, made from piles of stone, was just identified in Israel.
It is a little known fact outside of conservation and hunting circles, Sherif Baha el Din from Nature Conservation Egypt told The Guardian, but Egyptian hunters will destroy thousands of migratory birds in the coming weeks as they make their way from Europe back to Africa for the winter.
With the advent of modern agriculture and technology, it is no longer necessary for most people to shoot their dinner. Yet the taste for the sport of tracking and shooting an animal has persisted, and in some countries, hunting is carefully regulated to maintain a sound balance between predator and prey. Working with the local […]
A man in Israel has been sentenced to spend seven months in prison for possessing a porcupine. Dubbed by locals as a “serial porcupine hunter,” Rami Fahmawhi has a longstanding track record of hunting porcupines, which are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a protected species of least concern. The […]
Wild Boars are hunted illegally as well. Photo:Haaretz/Nir Kafri Wildlife in Israel have always been under threat from economic over-development and hunting, including poaching by migrant farm workers. Illegal poaching and outdoor hunting in the country has now reached levels that could soon result in some animal species becoming extinct or unable to naturally sustain […]
In the video below the jump, Maltese hunters are depicted shooting Eagles, Falcons, Vultures and other protected bird species. The Avian Influenza outbreak had at least one positive outcome in Egypt: it kept both local and migratory birds safe from hunters. But last year in December the government re-opened the country to what seems to be […]
Join the debate: is the world’s first all-women falconry association in Qatar a bad idea? Falconry is a time-honored tradition in the Gulf, but like more recent sports such as race-car driving and rugby, it is a male-dominated sport. So when the Katara cultural village in Qatar recently announced the launch of the world’s first female […]
Experiencing the incredible bond between game warden Tonie Joubert and Jessica the Hippo, it’s easy to forget that this is Africa’s most fearsome animal. Having grown up to fear hippos more than any other creature on the African continent, it was with great hesitation that I approached Jessica’s giant canine teeth and powerful gaping jaw. […]
Some people make collages of family pictures, but a group of friends in Kuwait compiled these images after killing a wolf with a shotgun. In response to yesterday’s post about the only two countries in the Middle East that offer wolves any kind of legal protection, a Kuwaiti reader forwarded a link to a story […]