Latest news with #Rhinoceros
India.com
05-07-2025
- India.com
From Jim Corbett To Sundarbans: 8 Best National Parks In India Every Wildlife Enthusiast Should Explore
photoDetails english 2926954 India offers a diverse range of national parks for wildlife enthusiasts, each with unique attractions. Jim Corbett National Park, known for its Bengal tigers, is a popular starting point. Other must-visit parks include Kaziranga (rhinos), Ranthambore (tigers), Sundarbans (mangroves and tigers), Bandhavgarh (tigers), Periyar (elephants), Gir (Asiatic lions), and Kanha (tigers). Updated:Jul 05, 2025, 11:36 AM IST 1 / 10 India's rich biodiversity and varied landscapes make it one of the top wildlife destinations in the world. From the majestic Bengal tiger to rare species like the snow leopard and the Indian one-horned rhinoceros, the country's national parks are a haven for nature and animal lovers. If you're passionate about the wild, these 8 national parks in India should be at the top of your travel list. Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand – India's Oldest and Most Iconic Tiger Reserve 2 / 10 Established in 1936, Jim Corbett is India's first national park and is globally renowned for its Bengal tiger population. Nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, it offers dense forests, river valleys, and open grasslands that create the perfect setting for wildlife sightings. Jeep safaris and eco-tourism zones make it accessible for responsible wildlife enthusiasts. Kaziranga National Park, Assam – Home to the One-Horned Rhinoceros 3 / 10 A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Kaziranga boasts the largest population of the endangered Indian one-horned rhinoceros. Situated on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, the park is a lush floodplain ecosystem teeming with elephants, wild water buffalo, swamp deer, and over 450 bird species. It's a must-visit for anyone fascinated by rare and majestic animals. Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan – Tigers Among Ancient Ruins 4 / 10 Ranthambore uniquely combines history with wilderness. Here, tigers roam freely among 10th-century ruins, making it one of the best places in the world to spot them in daylight. Its rugged terrain, dry forests, and scenic lakes are also home to leopards, hyenas, and crocodiles. Wildlife photography thrives in this dramatic and photogenic setting. Sundarbans National Park, West Bengal – Mystical Mangroves and Elusive Big Cats 5 / 10 The Sundarbans is the world's largest mangrove forest and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's famous for its population of Royal Bengal tigers known to be excellent swimmers. Navigating its dense waterways by boat is an adventure in itself, offering glimpses of saltwater crocodiles, spotted deer, and an abundance of birdlife. Bandhavgarh National Park, Madhya Pradesh – High Tiger Density and Ancient Legends 6 / 10 Bandhavgarh is known for having one of the highest densities of Bengal tigers in the country. Once a royal hunting ground, today it's a protected zone rich in biodiversity. Visitors can also explore Bandhavgarh Fort, ancient caves, and rock carvings that hint at a deep historical and mythological significance. Gir National Park, Gujarat – The Last Refuge of the Asiatic Lion 7 / 10 Gir is the only place in the world where you can spot the Asiatic lion in its natural habitat. Unlike the African lion, the Asiatic variety is slightly smaller and more elusive. The dry deciduous forest and grassland habitat support a wide range of other species, including leopards, antelope, and jackals. Conservation efforts here have been a global success story. Periyar National Park, Kerala – Elephants, Spice Trails, and Lush Greenery 8 / 10 Located in the Western Ghats, Periyar is best known for its elephant herds and serene lake cruises. The park offers a unique combination of wildlife viewing and cultural richness, with nearby spice plantations and eco-tourism activities. The tranquil setting makes it ideal for birdwatchers, nature lovers, and those looking to connect with India's biodiversity at a slower pace. Hemis National Park, Ladakh – The High-Altitude Haven of the Snow Leopard 9 / 10 Hemis is India's largest national park and one of the few places in the world where you can spot the elusive snow leopard. Located in the cold desert of Ladakh, it's a dream destination for serious wildlife trackers and high-altitude adventurers. Besides snow leopards, the park is also home to blue sheep, Himalayan marmots, and golden eagles. 10 / 10 India's national parks are more than just tourist attractions—they are vital ecosystems protecting some of the world's most endangered wildlife. Whether you're an avid wildlife photographer, a nature enthusiast, or just someone seeking solitude in the wilderness, these eight parks offer unforgettable experiences. Pack your binoculars, respect the wild, and prepare for an adventure like no other.
IOL News
03-07-2025
- General
- IOL News
How to move a rhino
Kenya Wildlife Services veterinarians and rangers rush to aid a sedated female black Rhinoceros that has been selected for translocation to the Segera Rhino Sanctuary from the Lake Nakuru National Park. Kenya announced the translocation of 21 critically endangered eastern black rhinos from the congested conservation areas to the Segera sanctuary where black Rhinoceros were once endemic but died out due to human encroachment and poaching. Image: Tony KARUMBA / AFP Barely feeling the tranquiliser shot, the panic-stricken female rhinoceros ran to take shelter in a wooded area, eluding the low-flying helicopter trying to prevent her escape. The rhino was supposed to be transferred to another park in Kenya, but outsmarted the humans. A few minutes later, rangers in 4x4 vehicles searched through thickets too dense for the crane truck that was meant to carry her away. A decision was quickly made to administer the antidote to the tranquiliser to prevent her from collapsing. If she fell the wrong way, she could suffocate. The young female will therefore remain where she was born. "The rhino is the worst one to translocate," said Taru Sheldrick, who was piloting the helicopter in Nakuru National Park in northwest Kenya, an oasis of greenery surrounding a deep blue lake. "When you dart them, if you don't have long enough, they're running straight for thick bush, which is their security," he said. "Whenever you're darting a rhino, you have a little bit of fear. Because it's a species in danger. Every animal is just so important." Rhinos, which can weigh up to two tonnes, were once abundant in sub-Saharan Africa. But hunting by European colonisers and later large-scale poaching pushed them to the brink of extinction. The International Rhino Foundation (IRF) says there are about 28 000 left in the world, nearly 24 000 in Africa. Kenya is home to more than 2 000 of them. Rhinos reproduce less efficiently if too many of its kin live in the same location, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), which manages the country's parks. Moving them is therefore important, but rhinos are vulnerable to tranquilisers that slow their breathing, increase their body temperature and affect their heart rate, said Dominic Mijele from KWS. So it is a race against time as soon as a veterinarian, aboard a helicopter, administers the drug using a dart gun. Five to seven minutes after injection, the rhino begins to feel groggy. Then it collapses, as AFP observed on a recent trip: after the first female retreated into the bush, three other black rhinos were anaesthetised within the span of a few hours in Nakuru. A rescue team arrived on-site within two minutes of each shot, moving like a well-oiled machine. About a dozen caregivers surrounded the animals, spraying them with water to cool their body temperature, rolling them onto their sides to ensure their respiration was not obstructed, administering oxygen and monitoring their vital signs. Simultaneously, several other rangers secured the animals with straps threaded through the transport cage and attached to the front bumper of a jeep. Fifteen minutes after the rescue team's arrival, the antidote was administered. The animal then jolted to its feet and was promptly guided into a cage, which a crane loaded onto the flatbed of a truck. Mijele boasted of Kenya's unmatched expertise. "We are number one in the world. We have done so many rhino translocations successfully," he said. Jochen Zeitz, the owner of the private Segera Reserve, where about 20 rhinos have been relocated in the past two weeks, could not hide his relief after the latest operation. On his 200 square kilometres of land, elephants, buffalos, lions, leopards, cheetahs and more roam freely, said the former Puma CEO and current Harley-Davidson executive. But the reserve lacked "this iconic species" which were present up until 60 years ago in Segera, but have since disappeared. Welcoming rhinos back is "completing the conservation work that we've done as a foundation over the last 22 years" since acquiring the land, he told AFP. Due to the high risk of poaching for their horns, security measures had to be significantly enhanced with 100-150 new security staff, Zeitz said. Later in the day, a small group witnessed the release of the three rhinos from Nakuru, who had arrived in Segera after a six-hour drive. In the dense night darkness, they listened as the metal bars of the transport cages were removed, doors creaked open, and heavy stomping accompanied by guttural growls rang out. The rhinos had finally arrived at their new home. | AFP
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Wallace & Gromit' Studio Aardman Partners With France's Foliascope On Cross-Border Stop-Motion Training Program
Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep animation studio Aardman is joining forces with France's Foliascope and training expert Rhinoceros to launch a cross-studio training initiative in France and the UK to advance the skills of professional stop-motion animators. Oscar-winning Bristol-based studio Aardman and Foliascope, the credits of which include features such as Leonardo da Vinci biopic The Inventor, host some of the largest and most advanced stop-motion sets in Europe and are currently expanding their production slates. More from Deadline Annecy Revs Up For 2025 Edition; Kicking Off With Michel Gondry & Matt Groening Honors & Shorts Selection Featuring New 'Stars Wars: Visions' Title Gkids Takes North America For Cannes & Annecy Title 'Little Amélie Or The Character Of Rain' Nickelodeon Acquires Animated Kids' Show 'Mr. Crocodile' From Joann Sfar's Magical Society & Mediawan Per a release announcing the program, the partners recognizing their need for highly skilled animators, decided to work with Rhinoceros to offer the cross-border program. The four-week intensive course will begin with two weeks at Foliascope Studio in France, followed by two weeks at Aardman's training facility, the Aardman Academy in the UK. The training will focus on enhancing animation technique, speed, character performance, and expressivity—preparing participants to contribute to upcoming stop-motion feature productions. Applications for the training program open in September 2025, with the course scheduled to take place in March 2026. The training is fully funded for eight selected animators, with support from AFDAS, France Travail Scène et Image, and the participating studios. 'The Aardman Academy has existed for over 20 years training, nurturing and inspiring new talent,' said Rachel Plant, producer at the Aardman Academy. 'We are delighted to be partnering with Foliascope and Rhinoceros with this new course to inspire the next generation of animators Interested animators can apply via the Rhinoceros website.' The partners will be presenting the new program in a session a the upcoming Annecy International Film Festival next week. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 'Stick' Soundtrack: All The Songs You'll Hear In The Apple TV+ Golf Series 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Rhinoceros; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical
Who would have thought that Rhinoceros, written in the 1950s, would prove to be a stage-shaker today? Sometimes taken as a satire on the rise of the Nazis or the lack of resistance to East European authoritarianism, but surely more accurately described as a general attack on unreflecting conformism, Eugène Ionesco's play is a hard thing to pull off. At least in Britain, where the expectation of naturalism runs deep. After all, the plot turns on the entire human population of a European village – bar one – turning into rhinoceroses. There are touches of Kafka, without the black force. There are Beckettian gleams of despair without Beckett's lyrical intensity – or brevity. Insisting on the one theme without ever quite making an argument, Rhinoceros can easily become both heavy-footed and elusive: a pachyderm peeping flirtatiously from behind a fan. And yet. Here is Omar Elerian's production, making the play seem weirdly true. Current parallels are not underlined but they are unmissable, in the conjuring of a galumphing horror and a miasmic atmosphere: contradictions need only be proclaimed for them to be evidently the case. Of course, even this is morally equivocal: after all, the theatre does dare the audience to believe the impossible. On Ana Inés Jabares-Pita's clinically white set, stage directions are read out – and disobeyed. The inert and the animate are merged. A woman takes her pet cat to the market. The part of the cat is performed by a water melon: first tucked, mewing, under its mistress's arm; the great green fruit is later seen as the victim of a street accident, its red flesh gaping. Catherine Gibbons, head of wigs, hair and makeup, deserves an award: Hayley Carmichael's barnet is an explosion – a wire-wool extravaganza. Joshua McGuire sports a strange jutting curl over his forehead, like – could it be? – the beginnings of a horn? Sophie Steer's postwar victory-roll fringe is as solid as a sausage roll. Elon Musk in his cheesehead hat might pass unremarked. Paul Hunter (the narrator) and Carmichael move with the ease of their clown training: Carmichael seems to have no gap between feeling and gesture. , po-faced but intricate, is compelling, even when wrestling with a tight grey rhino suit. As the sole resister to the spread of rhinoceritis, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù's unvarying sincerity pays off in the closing moment. There is another participant. Some audience members are issued with kazoos and instructed by Hunter when to blow, so that the theatre is filled with the trumpeting of rhinos, the baying of a bamboozled public. It could have been wince-making: it is apt. There is, though, no record of kazoos in the play's first British performance at the Royal Court in 1960, when Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. At pretty much the same time that Ionesco was throwing up his pen in despair at the lack of sense in European existence, Alfred Hitchcock was taking a sceptical look at life in the prospering United States. In 1955, mid-career, he embarked on Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 268 episodes of television chillers based on short stories. Jay Dyer (book) and the late Steven Lutvak (score) have made a musical out of slivers of these plots. A frail old lady serves poisoned lemonade to the fellow who murdered her son. A man threatens to jump from a bridge in order to entrap and kill the cop who comes to rescue him. A housewife (no other word for her) bumps off her husband by hitting him over the head with a leg of lamb, then invites the policeman investigating the murder to eat the evidence. These tales tilt one against each other with a similar murderous theme and droll outlook. The music is buoyant, with something of an Ink Spots swing, echoes of the Hitchcock signature tune, and the entire cast coming together to chorus 'Everybody wants to kill someone'. Scarlett Strallen and Sally Ann Triplett almost burst out of their skins with vivacity and top notes. The evening drifts sweetly, without suspense or propulsion. John Doyle directs with traces of the stripped-down style he deployed so memorably in his Sondheim productions 20 years ago. His cunning design is the best aspect of the show. Behind a proscenium arch in the shape of an early TV set (with bevelled edges), the cast caper around flimsy props: doors have no supporting walls, a ladder stands in for the suicide's bridge. The stage is overhung by an outsize camera and an extra-long phallic mic. Monochrome dress is made for black-and-white telly: a spectacular New Look frock with heart-shaped patch pockets; a pair of snazzy check pedal-pushers. The pattern of a knitted pullover suggests the cross-hatching on a slightly blurred grainy screen. It's a decorative pastiche of fictions that, as satires on conventional morality, merit something sharper. Not for the birds, but no frenzy. Star ratings (out of five) Rhinoceros ★★★★Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical ★★ Rhinoceros is at the Almeida, London until 26 April Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical is at the Theatre Royal, Bath until Saturday 12 April
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rhinoceros: Clever and playful –but not quite a piece for our times
Ingeniously introducing us to a provincial French town whose inhabitants morph into indomitable rhinos, when Ionesco's Rhinoceros – an allegory of individual defiance in the face of stampeding conformism – premiered in Dusseldorf in 1959, it was met with a widely reported 10-minute ovation. It valuably spoke to a Europe shaken by totalitarian horror, on the Left as well as the Right. At the 1960 London premiere, Laurence Olivier starred as the refusenik clerk Berenger, directed by Orson Welles. The Romanian-French playwright inspired Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and others. Yet where Rhinoceros once roamed the cultural landscape, eliciting awe, along with the rest of its author's Absurdist oeuvre, these days it can seem a museum piece, a taxidermied classic. At the Royal Court in 2007, Benedict Cumberbatch earned raves playing Berenger but one reviewer noted the play had 'not survived its own occasion'. Has the critic Kenneth Tynan, who accused the 'anarchic wag' of steering drama up a 'blind alley', had the last laugh? Tynan's erudite critique of Ionesco's 'anti-theatre' is actually referenced in this archly self-aware Almeida revival which often has the dependably buffoonish Paul Hunter adopting a wry narratorial role, intoning stage-directions into a microphone and even exhorting some audience participation. Given that the liberty-taking adaptation is by director Omar Elerian, who triumphed here three years ago with a revelatory production of Ionesco's The Chairs, starring the late Marcello Magni and his wife Kathryn Hunter, the production comes armed with a persuasive confidence in its artistic mission. Presented on a minimal, mainly white set (with a raised central platform, rear-curtains, and a lot of lab coats and comically mad hair), the evening has a light, on-its-feet, deconstructed quality, the accent on multi-roling ensemble virtuosity. You don't see rhino-heads and horns sprouting, or even papier-mâché pachyderms. Instead, much is capably conveyed by sound effects (denoting the stampedes) and body language conjures the grim dehumanisation process. Joshua McGuire (big since the BBC sitcom Cheaters) memorably goes to town, contorting and bowing low, with three other cast members following suit to suggest a bestial immensity. Given how apposite the message of the play is – take your pick from the current contagions of group-think – it should straightforwardly map onto today's nightmares and tap lasting truths about human nature. But much as this version punctures the fourth-wall, for me it still lacks real punch. We are rendered complicit by larky stealth: we're asked to practice a convoluted clap that later becomes a slap of domestic violence, and, in a rather I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue flourish, selected audience-members sound on kazoos to evoke rhino roars. But it's too cosy to cause discomfort while a lot of the honoured original text comes over as plutôt wittery. As the odd man Berenger, a gentle, ruminative Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù (of Gangs of London fame) comes into his own at the end, appalled as his beloved Daisy (Anoushka Lucas) starts to follow the herd before standing his ground and repeatedly bellowing 'I will not surrender' despite an attempted curtain-call around him. Still, it's the stuff of appreciative applause, and ticked-off checklists, not headline-making ovations.
