He is gorgeous, hopefully he has many more years ahead of him.

While most of us certainly don't have Henry David Thoreau's sense or sensibility, I think even some of us who are most optimistic..... we have to admit we're truly born just in the NICK OF TIME to witness the tail end of most of the earth's majestic creatures.

During Thoreau's adult life, in the 1840s and 50s, for eample, America's great bison and majestic wolves were likely still in a bundance, although the real slaughtered had already begun for some years (and by the beginning of the 1900s, the bison's down from a estimated population of 60M to 3,000-5,000 and the mighty grey wolves were virtually extincted). And, yet, Thoreau said he was born just in the nick of time, to see the last of nature's greats.

Well, today, we truly are witnessing the very, very last of all of mother nature's majesties. The largest cat, the Siberian, is down to roughly 15-20 INDIVIDUAL genetic viability; the Southeast Asian's tiger's down to 30-50 (although less well documented) viable genetic individuals; ditto for the Sumatran tiger. The Indian Lions and Tigers also facing a bottleneck, of likely no more than a few hundred viable genetic individuals, if that.

I was born in Laos, and when it was founded by Fa Ngum over 700 years ago it had so many great herds of Asian elephants the kingdom was simply known as "Lanxang," or "the land of one million elephants." In the 1800's, there were still thousands, likely tens of thousands, in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and China.... Today, there are likely no more than a few hundred individual elephants left in Laos; there're about 2 dozen in some remote mountainous regions in southern China; probably a thousand or so in Thailand and a couple hundred, at most, left in Cambodia.

Today, in all ecosystems around the world, the tigers, lions, elephants, bears, wild dogs, wolves, cheetahs, and the largest creature to ever lived, the great whales --- creatures which took Mother Nature hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years for mother nature to cut, shape, and mold, one gene and one cell at a time, to their present unique shapes and forms --- virtually all of them are facing final extinction within the net 50 to 150 years...

Picture this:

At the end of the 1700s, the human population was around 1B. In a mere 200 years, the world's great creatures populations plummeted, on average, 70-95%, as homo sapiens population went from 1B to 7B. And while today we can freeze most sperms and eggs and other cells of these great animals for years, a few thousand pecimens in liquid nitrogen hardly look or act like thousands of 4,000 to 7,000 kilograms of free-roaming elephants with tusks weighing 100 pounds each (... or just a tiny 100 pound, pink bundle of joy, learning to stand up, to curl its trunk, to walk clumsily after its mother)... or 9-13 foot long tigers... or 30,000- 45,000 pound blue whales...

If this is not a picture of a tragedy of epochal proportions happening in real time, within the blink of an eye in a geologic time-frame, due MAINLY to ONE species (aggressiveness), I don't know what is...

has been quite handsome all along, has he not? What a gorgeous guy!

So precious and what a sight he will be one day, I so wish for him and others to have the chance to grow in to the next Dionysus (or something similar in size), to fully mature and be able to spread their magnificent genetics, Tim, Tolstoy, Little Male and all the other near age mates of Paolo... Thank you for posting these the photos, it must be so rewarding to see these old friends turning up now and again Cynthia…