The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Lar Gibbon - Issue Thirty-Seven
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The Lar Gibbon  from Christiano Artuso The Lar Gibbon is found in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand, although their range historically extended from southwest China to Thailand and Burma south to the whole Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. They are usually found in dipterocarp forest, including primary lowland and submontane rainforest, mixed deciduous bamboo forest, and seasonal evergreen forest. They are mostly frugivorous with fruit constituting fifty percent of their diet, but leaves, insects and flowers form the remainder. Their fur varies from black and dark-brown to light-brown, sandy colors. The hands and feet are white-colored, likewise a ring of white hair surrounds the black face. They are usually active for an average of eight hours per day, leaving their sleeping sites right around sunrise and entering sleeping trees an average of three hours before sunset. They spend their days feeding, resting, traveling, in social activities, vocalizing, and in intergroup encounters. True brachiators, they propel themselves through the forest by swinging under the branches using their arms. With their hooked hands, they can move swiftly with great momentum, swinging from the branches. Although they rarely come to the ground naturally, while there, they walk bipedally with arms raised above their heads for balance. Their social organization is dominated by monogamous family pairs, with one breeding male and one female along with their offspring. Family groups inhabit a firm territory, and each morning, the family gathers on the edge of its territory and begins a "great call", a duet between the breeding pair. Each species has a typified call and each breeding pair has unique variations on that theme. Recent studies indicate that gibbon song have evolved to communicate conflict in terms of predation. In the presence of Asiatic tiger, clouded leopard, crested serpent eagle and reticulated python songs were more likely to contain sharp wow elements than normal duets. Sexually, they are similar to other gibbons. Mating occurs in every month of the year, but most conceptions occur during the dry season in March, with a peak in births during the late rainy season, in October. On average, females reproduce for the first time at about eleven years of age. Gestation is six months long on average, and pregnancies are usually of a single young. Young are nursed for approximately two years, and full maturity comes at about eight years. On average they live to be twenty-five years old. They are threatened in various ways: they are sometimes hunted for their meat, sometimes a parent is killed to capture young animals for pets, but perhaps the most pervasive is the loss of habitat. Their habitats are threatened by forest clearance for the construction of roads, agriculture, ecotourism, domesticated cattle and elephants, forest fires, subsistence logging, illegal logging, new village settlement, and palm oil plantations.

   


White Lies

by

Iftekhar Sayeed

 

"We are blessed to be living in a democracy like Bangladesh...," US Ambassador Harry K. Thomas said in an interview
The Bangladesh Observer, June 25, 2005

from a black
ambassador
we expected
truth

he now
does the
white man's
bidding
forgetting
our ancestry
of bondage

for his
grandfather
individual
captivity
for mine
collective

for black
and brown
people
lies are
murderous

the white man
has
the truth of power
but we have
the power of truth

go home
black friend
to your
white masters
and tell them
they lie

tell our black
brothers
the truth

they will nod
and shake
their curly
heads for
they know
the white man's
weapon and
weakness

he lies



Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English. He was born and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has contributed to The Danforth Review, Axis of Logic, Enter Text, Postcolonial Text, Southern Cross Review, Opednews.com, Left Curve, Mobius, Erbacce, Down In The Dirt and other publications. He is also a freelance journalist. He and his wife love to travel. You may find him at http://www.iftekharsayeed.weebly.com/
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