A mahout in traditional costume gets his elephant to stand on its hind legs for tourists at the Surin Elephant Round-up Festival in northeast Thailand.

Sucking up sugarcane with their trunks and circling busy traffic roundabouts, the elephants that roam Thai towns at festival time seem as much at home in the city as in the forest.
Shows that feature elephants painting pictures, playing polo and whirling hoola hoops on their trunks have become an economic lifeline for more than a thousand domesticated elephants, who lost their incomes when Thailand banned logging in 1989, reported Reuters.
But entertaining locals and tourists has become a life or death business for elephants and their keepers, explained Sam Fang, author of Thai Elephants: ÒTourism Ambassadors of ThailandÓ.
"They had to cope with the ban on logging, and deforestation," Fang said. "First jobless, second no food. Wham!"
"The better elephants got themselves a job as taxis. The intelligent elephants got themselves jobs as show elephants. The smarter ones became artists," he said jokingly.
Unlike larger African elephants, which have never been domesticated in large numbers, Asian elephants have worked closely with humans for millennia.
But this proximity has not helped protect Asia's pachyderms, who are endangered throughout their 13 range states, and ten times less numerous than their African cousins.
"A lot of the attention has tended to go to Africa," said Simon Hedges, co-chair of the World Conservation Union (IUCN)'s Asian Elephant Specialist Group.
Simon added, "Asian elephants are somewhat the poor relation ... We really don't know how many elephants there are in Asia. In some countries we don't even know where the elephants are."
Estimates put the total wild Asian elephant population at 30,000 to 50,000 and captives at 12,000 to 15,000, he said.
In Thailand, where elephants have been domesticated for more than 4,000 years, there are probably 1,000 domesticated or captive elephants, compared to 3,000 left in the wild.
Elephant conservationists such as Sangduen "Lek" Chailert worry that captive elephants, considered beasts of burden in Thailand, have little protection from abuse if their owners work them all day to bring in more tourist dollars.
"Elephants used to be transport for the king, they were very important in history. Today they've just become subservient," said Chailert.
"They turned from a holy animal to work like slaves all day. And at night they're chained," she said. "They've made elephants into machines for making money."
While tourism has become the only game in town for most of Asia's captive elephants, the industry's growth could also be a threat to dwindling wild populations, conservationists fear.
"There are suggestions that elephants are being illegally caught or even being smuggled into Thailand to replace the ones that are dying," said Hedges, referring to elephants dying in camps in the north where they are used for tourist jungle treks.

Farmers who lost their homes and crops when a devastating cyclone battered Bangladesh's low-lying coasts about six weeks ago face a new problem from migratory birds that swarm into the country by the thousands every winter.
"They are welcome guests and we do usually enjoy their presence," said Mohammad Shahabuddin, a local council chairman in the Bhola district on the coast.
"But this year the birds are making our struggle to survive following the cyclone more difficult," he told Reuters.
Shahabuddin added, "The birds are destroying our seedbeds by eating the soft and tender saplings before we can replant them in the croplands."
As the winter that started late last month gets chillier by the day, the number of migratory fowl is increasing.
"We really don't know what to do and how to drive them away," Shahabuddin said.
Tens of thousands of birds of various species fly from as far as Siberia to escape bitter cold and bask in a warmer climate in Bangladesh.
Species include hawks, swallows, shrikes, loons, ducks and geese.
They take temporary refuge in the country's vast rivers, lakes and marshes, and feed on fish, green leaves and grasses.
But Cyclone Sidr, which struck Bangladesh coasts on November 15 with winds of 255 kph (150 mph) and a 5-meter (yard) surge, had washed away almost everything, including rice and other crops in the fields.
It also killed more than 3,300 people, made millions homeless and left a trail of devastation that officials and aid agencies say will need months or a year to be healed.
Cyclone survivors on the islands and in riverside villages said they faced an immediate problem of food and were losing hope for an early harvest as the migratory birds were eating their seedbeds. Fishermen said fish were depleted in the waters along the coasts following the cyclone and surge, forcing many fish-eating fowl to change their diets for survival.
The farmers say they cannot kill the birds as Bangladesh law prohibits killing or capturing "guest birds".
Mohammad Dastagir, a local council official in the district, said farmers try to scare away the birds by shouting and beating tin-containers, and sometimes by making fires.

A 55-year-old Sumatran orangutan, believed to be the world's oldest, has died, a Miami zoo spokesman said.
Nonja, who was born on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and lived in Miami since 1983, was found dead Saturday morning, said Ron Magill, spokesman for the Miami Metro Zoo, AP reported.
"Everybody's very sad, especially with an animal like an orangutan," Magill said. "You see a lot of yourself in these animals. The great apes are our closest relatives."
A necropsy is to be performed in the next few days. A typical life span for Sumatran orangutans is 40 to 50 years, Magill said.
Nonja had slowed down in recent years because of her age, Magill said. "She was really a grand old dame," Magill said.

The frozen carcass of a 37,000-year-old baby mammoth unearthed this summer in Siberia arrived in Japan on Saturday for tests that researchers hope will shed new light on the internal structure of the ancient beasts, an official said.
The 1.2-meter (4-foot) gray-and-brown carcass arrived at Tokyo International Airport on Saturday afternoon, said Mitsuyoshi Uno, an official with the joint Russo-Japanese mammoth-study project that is overseeing the research, AP said.
Discovered in May by a reindeer herder in northern Siberia's remote Yamal-Nenets region, the frozen mammoth's trunk and eyes are virtually intact and it even has some fur, but its tail and ear were apparently bitten off, Russian officials said.
The mammoth, which was initially thought to be about 10,000-years-old, is bound for Tokyo's Jikei Medical University, where it will undergo a computed tomography scan, Uno said. CT scans allow scientists to get 3-D pictures so detailed they allow an almost surgical view into the body.
Researchers hope the scan will provide more information about the animal's organs and internal structure.
The mammoth carcass and scan images are slated to go on public display Jan. 4 at an office building in central Tokyo, Uno said.
Scientists believe mammoths lived from 4.8 million years ago to about 4,000 years ago. Studies suggest climate change or overkill by human hunters as possible causes for their extinction.

A flamingo near Orumieh Lake in IranÕs West Azarbaijan province.

An analysis of 124 of Europe's common bird species found that 56 (45 percent) had declined across 20 countries over 26 years,

Some of the most celebrated birds of Christmas, the partridge and turtle dove, are heading for extinction across Europe, a report claims.
The wild birds of the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" ,a popular Christmas song, are among the farmland birds showing the steepest declines, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said.
An analysis of 124 of Europe's common bird species found that 56 (45 percent) had declined across 20 countries over 26 years, reported Telegraph.co.uk.
The conservation charity said only large populations in Asia were keeping the grey partridge from becoming globally threatened.
The State of Europe's Common Birds 2007 report showed that of the 10 species that have declined the most between 1980 and 2005, seven regularly nest in Britain.
They include the grey partridge and lapwing, whose numbers have halved, as well as the lesser spotted woodpecker, whose numbers have dropped by 81 percent, and the turtle dove, which has seen a 62 percent fall in numbers.
Mark Avery, the RSPB's, the UK charity working to secure a healthy environment for birds, conservation director said: "Seeing a countryside increasingly bereft of familiar birds like the grey partridge is deeply worrying."

Number of African giraffes dropped by 30 percent over the past decade.

At least six distinct species of giraffe, the world's tallest land animal, may be in existence and some of them are critically endangered, scientists in the United States and Kenya have found.
It had previously been thought that there was only one species of giraffe ranging across Africa's golden savannahs, Reuters said.
"Some of these giraffe populations number only a few hundred individuals and need immediate protection," said the study's lead author, geneticist David Brown of the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
"Lumping all giraffes into one species obscures the reality that some kinds of giraffe are on the very brink."
The most threatened potential species include the reticulated giraffe (currently Giraffa camelopardalis reticulate) in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Its population was estimated at around 27,000 until the 1990s, when poaching and conflicts slashed numbers to just 3,000 individuals.
In west and central Africa, there are thought to be only 160 Nigerian giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis peralta) left.
But all giraffes--which can grow up to 19ft tall and weigh 4,400lbs (2,000kg)-- were under threat, Brown said, citing an estimated 30 percent drop in numbers over the past decade.
Classifying what are currently called sub-species as fully-fledged species would force governments and experts to re-examine steps to conserve the most at risk animals, he said.

ChinaÕs worst drought in a decade has left millions of people short of drinking water and shrunk reservoirs and rivers.
Hardest hit are large swathes of the usually humid south, where water levels on several major rivers have plunged to historic lows in recent months, reported Alertnet.org.
The surface area of the country's largest fresh water lake, Poyang, in the southern province of Jiangxi, had fallen to a record 50 sq km (19 sq miles) from several thousand sq km at its peak.
About 30 million Chinese in the countryside and more than 20 million in urban areas face drinking water shortages every year despite huge government investment to address the problem.

Natural catastrophes in 2007 were more frequent and costlier than a year earlier and climate change will make them more expensive still, the world's second-biggest re-insurer, Munich Re, said.
There were 950 natural catastrophes in 2007 compared with 850 in 2006, the highest number since the group started compiling its closely watched annual report in 1974, reported AFP.
The total cost of disasters in 2007 was $75 billion (51.5 billion euros), while the bill for 2006 was $50 billion.
The most damaging event of 2007 was an earthquake in Japan in July which caused $12.5 billion of damage, while insurers took the biggest hit from the Kyrill storm which ripped through Europe in January, costing $5.8 billion.
Catastrophes in developing and emerging countries caused most of the 20,000 deaths in 2007, with 3,300 people losing their lives in Cyclone Sidr alone, which struck Bangladesh in November.
Floods in Britain were the second costliest event to insurers and Munich Re said the high incidence of floods and storms in 2007 was a sign of things to come if global warming continued unchecked.
"These events cannot, of course, be attributed solely to climate change, but they are in line with the pattern that we can expect in the long term: severe storms, more heavy rainfall and a greater tendency towards flooding," said Peter Hoeppe, head of the company's Research Department.