Jim Corbett: Naturalist. Tiger Hunter.

Inside Hunter Jim Corbett’s Legendary Showdowns With History’s Scariest Man-Eating Big Cats


British tracker and naturalist Edward James Corbett was commissioned by the Indian government to kill some 30 leopards, panthers, and tigers in the early 20th century.

Jim Corbett

Wikimedia CommonsJim Corbett and the slain “Bachelor of Powalgarh” in 1930.

Jim Corbett was a man of many talents. Born in British India in the late 1800s, his versatility was seemingly a prerequisite for survival. A child of the Kumaon region, its forests inspired his lifelong effort to protect animals and people alike.

As a boy, Corbett learned to identify birds by their calls. By adulthood, he was an esteemed hunter and tracker. In 1911, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh enlisted his help eradicating ferocious leopards and tigers that had been killing men, women, and children in the region’s villages.Corbett would track and kill 19 tigers and 14 leopards responsible for tearing some 1,200 people to shreds. He would also serve as a British military commander during both World Wars, eventually attaining the rank of colonel.

Corbett dedicated his later life to preserving India’s dwindling tiger population. As a recreational photographer, naturalist, and author, he would help found India’s first National Park.

Jim Corbett’s Early Life    

Jim Corbett was 

born

 Edward James Corbett on July 25, 1875, in the Indian town of Nainital, in the wilderness and expanse of the Himalayan foothills. As the eighth of 12 children, Corbett would spend much of his time outside, exploring the region’s natural beauty.

“I have used the word ‘absorbed,’ in preference to ‘learnt,’ for jungle lore is not a science that can be learnt from textbooks,” he wrote in his later life.

His Irish parents, Christopher and Mary Jane Corbett, had moved their family to Nainital in 1862, years before the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh became the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Corbett’s father worked as the town’s postmaster.

Portrait Of Jim Corbett In Old Age

Wikimedia CommonsCorbett killed 33 predators and wrote six books.

Corbett was only 6 when his father died of a heart attack on April 21, 1881. While his mother busied herself tending to European settlers, his brother took over as postmaster. Corbett himself took to the forests of Kaladhungi, where his family wintered in a cottage they named “Arundel.”

As a student of Oak Openings School, Corbett had participated in only a few nature excursions. However, at Arundel, he rapidly grew adept at hunting and tracking. Quitting school at 18, he went to work for the Bengal and North Western Railway as a fuel inspector. Word of his hunting prowess grew, and before long, and the government soon asked him to eradicate the Champawat Tiger.

Jim Corbett Hunts The Man-Eaters Of Kumaon

The Champawat Tiger started killing in Nepal. She had chalked up over 200 victims before being driven into the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. Two hundred and thirty more people would die on her claws and jaws there before Corbett intervened.

After besting the Champawat Tiger, Corbett began documenting the human casualties of the predatory cats he hunted. His books chronicling the 33 predators he eradicated would revolve around the details of the estimated 1,200 people the beasts had killed.

In 1910, Corbett tracked and killed the Panar Leopard, which had reportedly eaten about 400 people. He killed his second man-eating leopard, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, in 1926. The latter had preyed upon pilgrims venturing to the Hindu holy sites of Kedarnath and Badrinath for nearly a decade.

Jim Corbett In Military Uniform

Safari BooksCorbett volunteered in both World Wars and became an honorary colonel.

Examination of the Panar Leopard revealed tooth decay and advanced gum disease. Experts believed this drove it to kill people rather than challenge itself with wild game. Most of Corbett’s kills were cats with similar debilities. Porcupine quills or old bullets created aggravating wounds, driving the beasts from the forests in a man-killing madness.

“The wound that has caused a particular tiger to take to man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired shot and failure to follow up and recover the wounded animal, or be the result of the tiger having lost his temper while killing a porcupine,” wrote Corbett in Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

Like a pre-war Batman, Corbett would work alone, haunting the jungles with only a faithful dog named Robin at his side. He grew famous for killing village-destroying villains like the Thak man-eater, the Talla-Des, and the Chowgarh tigress without suffering even a scratch.

Jim Corbett Moves To Africa — And Cements His Legacy:         Despite his role dispatching some of the subcontinent’s most famous predators, Corbett determined he must protect India’s wildlife. In 1936 he helped establish Hailey National Park, the country’s first nationalpark,nearthe hills of his childhood home.Corbett moved to Nyeri, Kenya, after India gained independence in 1947. He wrote The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag there and lectured at universities. As fate would have it, he would be staying in the country’s renowned Treetops Hotel at the same time as Princess Elizabeth — the week her father died.
“For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen,” Corbett famously wrote on a page in the hotel’s visitor log in February 1952.
Bengal Tiger In Corbett National Park

Wikimedia CommonsA Bengal tiger in Corbett National Park.

Corbett died on April 19, 1955, days after he finished his sixth book, Tree Tops. He suffered a heart attack, as his father had before him. One year later, the state of Uttarakhand renamed the national park he helped found Jim Corbett National Park — one of few instances of a Brit receiving such an honor post-independence.

Publishers translated his books into 27 languages and adapted several into feature films. In addition to the national park that bears his name, there’s a species of endangered Indochinese Tiger — Panthera tigris corbetti — that bears his name. In the end, there was little he loved more than his home.“My friends, the poor of India,” he wrote in My India, “it is of these people, who are admittedly poor, and who are often described as ‘India’s starving millions,’ among whom I have lived and whom I love, that I shall endeavor to all in the pages of this book, which I humbly dedicate to my friends, the poor of India.”

Hidden Costs of Batteries

Lithium stocks ASX

                                                  A Lithium Mine

Some amusing language with some good information on the subject.

 

Anonymous (couldn’t locate the author)

 

When I saw the title of this lecture, especially with the picture of the scantily clad model, I couldn’t resist attending.  The packed auditorium was abuzz with questions about the address; nobody seemed to know what to expect. The only hint was a large aluminum block sitting on a sturdy table on the stage.

 

When the crowd settled down, a scholarly-looking man walked out and put his hand on the shiny block, “Good evening,” he said, “I am here to introduce NMC532-X,” and he patted the block, “we call him NM for short,” and the man smiled proudly. “NM is a typical electric vehicle (EV) car battery in every way except one; we programmed him to send signals of the internal movements of his electrons when charging, discharging, and in several other conditions. We wanted to know what it feels like to be a battery. We don’t know how it happened, but NM began to talk after we downloaded the program.

 

Despite this ability, we put him in a car for a year and then asked him if he’d like to do presentations about batteries. He readily agreed on the condition he could say whatever he wanted. We thought that was fine, and so, without further ado, I’ll turn the floor over to NM,” the man turned and walked off the stage.

 

“Good evening,” NM said. He had a slightly affected accent, and when he spoke, he lit up in different colors. “That cheeky woman on the marquee was my idea,” he said. “Were she not there, along with ‘naked’ in the title, I’d likely be speaking to an empty auditorium! I also had them add ‘shocking’ because it’s a favorite word amongst us batteries.” He flashed a light blue color as he laughed.

 

“Sorry,” NM chuckled, then continued, “Three days ago, at the start of my last lecture, three people walked out. I suppose they were disappointed there would be no dancing girls. But here is what I noticed about them. One was wearing a battery-powered hearing aid, one tapped on his battery-powered cell phone as he left, and a third got into his car, which would not start without a battery. So, I’d like you to think about your day for a moment; how many batteries do you rely on?”

 

He paused for a full minute which gave us time to count our batteries.  Then he went on, “Now, it is not elementary to ask, ‘what is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called us Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. We do not make electricity – we store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?”

 

He flashed blue again. “Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.”

 

He lit up red when he said that, and I sensed he was smiling. Then he continued in blue and orange. “Mr. Elkay introduced me as NMC532. If I were the battery from your computer mouse, Elkay would introduce me as double-A, if from your cell phone as CR2032, and so on. We batteries all have the same name depending on our design. By the way, the ‘X’ in my name stands for ‘experimental.’ 

 

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.

 

Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.

 

The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.

 

All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

 

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle batteries like me or care to dispose of single-use ones properly.

 

But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.”

 

NM got redder as he spoke. “Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.

 

In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.

 

The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.

 

Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the  workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.

 

But wait - can you guess one of the highest but rarely acknowledged embedded costs?” NM said, then gave us about thirty seconds to make our guesses. Then he flashed his lights and said, “It’s the depreciation on the 5000 pound car you used to transport one pound of canned beans!”

 

NM took on a golden glow, and I thought he might have winked. He said, “But that  can of beans is nothing compared to me! I am hundreds of times more complicated. My embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labor, and the inability to be recycled.”

 

He paused, “I weigh one thousand pounds, and as you see, I am about the size of a travel trunk.” NM’s lights showed he was serious. “I contain twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside me are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.

 

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery like me, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just - one - battery.”

 

He let that one sink in, then added, “I mentioned disease and child labor a moment ago. Here’s why. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”

 

NM’s red and orange light made it look like he was on fire. “Finally,” he said, “I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.

 

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

 

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

 

NM lights dimmed, and he quietly said, “There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.

 

I’m trying to do my part with these lectures.  As you can see, if I had entitled this talk “The Embedded Costs of Going Green,” who would have come?  But thank you for your attention, good night, and good luck.”

 

NM’s lights went out, and he was quiet, like a regular battery.