Welcome to Jennie of the Jungle!

After a brief hiatus while traveling without internet in Thailand (blog coming soon!) and then getting my laptop stolen, I am back with a new blog! Now I believe I know about A LOT of animals - ALLLL the animals, to be exact (or so I like to think)! But I'm humbled and brought back down to Earth when someone tells me about a species that I wasn't aware existed. You can bet I go right to a computer and look it up in order to learn everything I can about it (and pretend I knew about it the whole time). This blog is dedicated to some of these unusual creatures - and count yourself lucky if you've heard of any of them! Serow "I don't even bother looking in the mirror anymore." ("Serow Capricornis sumatraensis" by Melanochromis)  The serow ranges throughout parts of Asia, India, and the Himalayas. They are basically temperamental, solitary, and sometimes fuzzy, goat-antelopes. Both males and females have beards and small horns, which I imagi...

Mmmm...nothing like a warm cup of coffee to get you going in the morning. But does your coffee come at an enormous cost? We're not just talking pocketbook here, we're talking environment. The beginnings of coffee-growing were quaint and quite non-destructive. For over 150 years, coffee was grown under the shade of canopy trees in the rainforest. In the 1970's a new, high-output method of growing coffee was introduced, in which the shade trees and everything else around was cut and cleared so that coffee plants could be planted densely and doused with pesticides and other agrochemicals. This produced more product for the growers, but has sacrificed generations of wildlife that have suffered at the hands of habitat-loss. Sustainable methods of coffee-growing, in which canopy trees and original forest is kept intact and coffee is planted in their midst, is actually beneficial to the environment and to wildlife. Biodiversity is maintained and therefore so is the wildlife that i...