CFZ ANIMAL RESCUE TIME

As I write we are just taking receipt of an injured corvid, so forgive me that the posts are a little odd this evening.....

THE DECLINE OF BRITISH BUTTERFLIES

http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/environment/2009/apr/27/butterfly-decline-conservation-endangered-species

A very well written article about the decline of British Butterflies from the Guardian Online. I highly recommend it to everyone...

RICHARD FREEMAN: The Howick Falls Monster Hoax

There are many legends of dragon like creatures in Africa. I have investigated the Ninki-Nanka of The Gambia, a crested, giant serpent associated with rainfall. It is much feared and blamed for death and accidents even to this day. The beast is supposedly able to strike a man dead just by looking at him. Bridges swept away by rainfall and road accidents have been blamed on the Ninki-Nanka. I even heard of a whole village that was abandoned after one such creature was seen.

In lake Kariba we have Nyaminyami. This serpentine dragon god was known to natives of Rhodesia and Zambia since time in memorial. It was seen as a guardian spirit of the waters. During the construction of the Kariba dam that formed Lake Kariba, workmen were warned of he water god’s wrath. In 1958 the Nyaminyami was blamed the destruction of a large portion of the dam wall. A female supposedly ventured up the Zambezi River during a particularly bad dry season. Whilst upstream she was cut off by the construction of the dam. Workers reported seeing a large, dark object beneath the surface of the river just before the dam shuddered with a massive impact.

Huge cracks ran up the walls of the dam and part of it collapsed sending workers to their deaths in the water.

When the rainy season arrived a male was supposed to have smashed a hole in the dam freeing the female and a brood of young. Some however, allegedly remained in the lake.

One of he best know of these African dragons is he Inkanyamba of South Africa. This creature has a horse like head and a long serpentine body. Legends say that when looking for a mate an Inkanyamba will fly into he clouds. When angry they can create storms much like Asian dragons. The storms that ravaged Greytown, Ingwavuma and Pongola were blamed on Inkanyamba. The storms had tennis ball sized hailstones and 52 mile per hour winds. It made 2000 people homeless. There are even cave paintings of he horse headed serpent hat archeologists have dubbed ‘the rain animal’. It has horns on its head and a crest on its back. It is often depicted as spewing water from its mouth.

Local Zulus and hair Sangomas (witch doctors) sacrifice goats and chickens to the water god. I is also said to eat the bodies of those who drown in the falls. Over thirty years ago he Inkanyamba was blamed for the death of a Zulu girl further up river at another falls. She was playing with her friends beside the river when she was pulled under and vanished. Of course this may have been a crocodile.

Sightings of these creatures still occur from time to time.

In 1962 a Conservation Services Ranger, Mr. Buthelezi saw one on a sand bank whilst walking along the Umgein River near the Midmar Dam. It slithered off the bank as he and a friend approached.

Johannes Hlongwane was the caretaker of a caravan park near Howick Falls between 1969 and 1985. He saw the Inkanyamba twice, once in 1971 and again in 1981. It raised its head and neck thirty feet out of the water. It had a crest running along its back.

In April 2000 reports began to circulate of a monstrous snake like beast in the community of Ezitapile in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Captain Mpofana Skwatsha of the Aliwal North police reported hat livestock became agitated when the creature was at large. It was described as yellow, with a horse like head and a body as thick as a twenty quart barrel.

The only known photograph hat purports to show Inkanyamba was taken in the wake of a sighting local man Bob Teeny in September 1995. Whilst on a viewing platform beside the falls he claimed to have seen a snake like head and neck rear up out of the water. He had no camera at the time but put up a reward for anyone who could take a snapshot of the monster. A resulting picture showed a long necked animal, apparently rising from the water. It appears to be holding waterweed in its mouth and has a distinctive banding of the skin. As soon as I saw the picture I knew it was a hoax. How? I recognized the ‘monster’ as an illustration of an Apatosaurus from a children’s book of dinosaurs published in the 1970s. I had the book myself; in fact the same picture had been used in two children’s books. Whilst recently rummaging around in a pile of old books in my grandparent’s house in came upon one of the books.

He tome in question is called ‘Know Our World; Prehistoric Life’ published by Holywell House Press in 1977 and printed and bound in Italy by New Interlitho, Milan. The picture in question appears at the bottom of page 14 and shows the dinosaur (then erroneously known as brontosaurus) wallowing in water and eating water weed (also erroneous as these creatures lived on land).
Posted above are two versions of the Howick Fall photo. One darker, one lighter. And on the left is the illustration from the book. Though the picture has been reversed you can clearly see it is the same image. The head and neck have been superimposed on to the water. Look closely and you will see the waterweed in the ‘monster’s’ mouth and the banding on the neck (meant to be rings on muscle in the original illustration).

Inkanyamba and its ilk my well exist but this is not a photograph of one.

GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: The continuing saga of the "Water Blackfella"

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

I used to collect piles of magazines pertaining to cryptozoology, and have stacked in my study around ten boxes of hundreds, if not thousands of crypto-related documentaries. Among the stack of magazines I’ve found several mentions of the recently revived ‘Bigfoot’ photo as mentioned in several blog posts. Originally I could have sworn I’d seen mention of the photo in an old Strange Magazine, but have since located it in Fate and the lesser known World Explorer.

The photo is also mentioned in the December 1996 issue of Fortean Times (No. 93). As far as Fate goes, (September 1996), they feature the picture in A4 colour, on page 28, although only refer to the photo in a snippet on page 57, as the rest of the main story (written by researcher Daniel Perez) concerns a piece of Sasquatch footage shot in 1995 in California, and witnessed by a handful of people including Playboy model Anna-Marie Goddard. It’s strange that the ‘Water Blackfella’ photo has been connected to so many countries, but the facts are that the creature was allegedly photographed in July 1995 near Ashford, Washington, in the Snoqualmle National Forest. A month after the photo’s were snapped, there were several sightings of a hairy hominid at Mill Creek Road, in the Blue Mountains area of south-eastern Washington. The case became known as the Walla Walla Bigfoot.

World Explorer featured a full-length colour picture on their front cover of Volume 1, No. 9. Although the article (written by David Hatcher Childress – on page 15) pertains to the legend of the Yeti, on page 25 (page 24 has a small black and white photo of the creature) there is mention of the case, the author writes:

‘…a forest patrol officer from Tacoma, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job, had an encounter with a giant ape-like creature and was able to take a series of 35 mm photos. The ranger then called Cliff Crook at the Sasquatch-monitoring group named Bigfoot Central.

Bigfoot Central is located in Cliff Crook’s living room in Bothell, Washington. Crook held a news conference on December 9th, 1995 to satisfy the mounting interest over the photos. Crook told the conference that the ranger had taken 14 photographs of the Sasquatch, but eight of them were dark because fleeting clouds blocked the sun on his 50 mm telephoto lens. The ranger said that he heard a splashing noise to his left while hiking along a ridge in Washington State’s Snoqualmle National Forest. He went to investigate the noise. Then, from a high bank, he observed the eight foot creature just 30 yards away in a swampy lagoon. He then short the rest of his film.

The photos are sensational, clearly depicting a hairy Bigfoot creature with its head low on a pair of massive shoulders. Not the sort of creature one wants to tangle with in a back alley or backwoods swamp. The photos have a certain Frank Frazetta-look to them that makes their authenticity seem doubtful. One photography analyst declared that he had found tiny diamond-shapes in the image indicating that it was a digitally created image. Cliff Crook countered that the analyst was examining a laser-copied print and not an original. Analysts at the World Explorer Club digital labs concluded that bright colours and “unnatural digital fracturing” led them to believe that the photo had been digitally created, probably in Photoshop. The verdict is still out and actual analysis of the original prints has yet to be released.’

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this fascinating case.

Yesterday's "water blackfella" pictures revealed

I thought they were more convincing than the original, with the possible exception being that the fern tendrils were pretty obviously not from a tree fern. However they were of course the ones that Glen Vaudrey wrote about a few weeks back.

He writes:

Jon, I sent you an email a couple of weeks ago bragging that i could produce some made at home Blackfella pictures, well here are the pictures. Sorry no great cryptozoological breakthrough involved just two quids worth of plasticene, a peice of thick wire and plenty of spare hair left after my last haircut. Maybe not the most convincing images but near enought for a quick glance".

Far more convincing than many mystery animal pictures we are sent.

OLL LEWIS: Yesterday’s News Today

http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/


It is time, once more, for your daily dose of cryptozoology news, followed by the bitter pill of a bad pun. I apologise in advance for the pun, it’s a real stinker today.

Hunting mythical creatures
Rare species birds freed at everglade sanctuary
Grain-eater species hit Cape Town
New Study Shows Widespread And Substantial Declines In Wildlife In Kenya
Alan Rodgers: conservator of the forests of East Africa
Mahouts tame rogue elephant
Cromford paw print sparks new Derbyshire big cat claims
Cat missing since 2005 is back home
And
Giraffe, the new star at city zoo
Keepers say, the new giraffe is head and shoulders above their other animals.

TIM MATTHEWS: Environmental Concerns

Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes.

Everybody's bothered about the environment, right? You sit there in a massive queue of holiday traffic bemoaning car drivers and how there are too many of them (wrong type of drivers in the wrong type of cars) and then you visit some rare, ancient or historical site and further damage it for years to come. We want clean water but shove tonnes of pollutants down our sinks not to mention using a host of cleaning products that certainly damage our planet over a period of years.

Harsh? I should say so and we're all guilty of it.

Sometimes, to ease our consciences, we join one of the "make you feel better about it" organisations like Greenpeace or the WWF. And, sometimes, these organsations actually do some good. For example, as I write, pressure from the WWF and allied conservation groups has managed to get Russian oil and gas engineers to stop seismic testing underwater as it affects the gray whale, a critically endangered species.

The Sakhalin Energy company, backed by Shell and Gazprom, has agreed to stop working for a brief time, to give the remaining 35 females a chance to breed, in an area just off the Sakhalin shelf by Piltun bay. Mind you, BP and Exxon still want their workers to operate in the area and they have not agreed any deal with environmentalists yet.

Recently, I was in a bookshop with a friend of mine and she said, "I love looking in old natural history books but the shame of it is when you look at the listing they're often full of animals that are extinct or serious danger."

We often sit idly by, wondering what we can do. Surely we can do more than send twenty quid to some campaigning group? Wouldn't we prefer to do something by ourselves? Imagine all the energy and effort required to make a small impact on big business. The first thing surely must be to get our children and immediate families a little more interested in natural history. What is happening in their own gardens, what can be done to encourage insects and other animals into them, what easy steps can be taken to limit their own impact on the world around them. Some of it is easy and can be done today in the house you live and some of it is down to politicians and big companies in whom we can only have marginal trust.

It is up to you to decide what to do but the best ever slogan, and call to action, must surely be, think globally, act locally. How the CFZ fits into this remains to be seen but I suspect that we all know what we should do.