Jun 10 2009
The Whoosh of Rain Forests, the Rustle of Savannas
No one should miss the purring cheetah cubs (below), the curious marmosets and the Amazonian shaman preparing curatives with rain forest botanica on The Natural World Around Us, website of Miles Reed, a U.S. naturalist-filmmaker-musician much in demand as a researcher and speaker. 
The site features common, rare and disappearing species on video pulled from Reed’s far-flung travels to Africa and South America as well as from the woods of Ohio, his home state.
“I don’t do [wildlife] parks,” he says, and instead spends weeks in remote hinterlands recording habitats and animal behavior in their natural state, unaffected by tourists.
Check out his site, and click on “Services” to see A Day on the Savanna: East Africa, from August 2007. You’ll witness the tranquil grasslands on the border of Kenya and Tanzania, where zebras, antelope, hippos, families of big cats and elephants graze, lounge and play at their leisure. Learn more about African savanna animals here.
Press “Contact Me” to view his Jungle Serenade video, shot in the wilds of the Amazon rain forest during six weeks of spring 2004. To the soft, jazzy sounds of Reed’s band and his own narration, enjoy slow-moving sloths, cuddly pygmy marmosets who aren’t afraid to 
stare back (right), shy monkey foragers, brilliantly colored flowers and birds, an enormous anaconda and a poisonous aquatic coral snake. Learn more about the Amazon’s animals here.
A shaman on this video prepares an herbal medicine on the rain forest floor. While in the Amazon, Reed says he ate local foods such as piranha and ingested parasites that made him so ill he lost 60 pounds. A shaman gave him a potion to help. When Reed returned home, he went to the Cleveland Clinic for tests. The doctor concluded there were signs that, yes, he had been ill, but there was no longer evidence of parasites. Reed wonders: Did the shaman’s potion cure him?
Naturalists and botanists widely consider the Amazon rain forest the world’s largest natural pharmacy, abounding in “compounds that can be derived from plants for countless uses: cures for headaches, snakebites, epilepsy; poison for hunting; and spiritual communication. The list goes on,” according to World Wildlife Fund International. Learn more about the Amazon’s medicinal treasures here.
Click on “Portfolio” for video of diverse Ohio bird and plant life, including an unforgettable 
hooded warbler female feeding her young, their little open beaks thrust straight up and out of their nest (right). An inquisitive scarlet tanager alights at the top of the home page. The images in Ohio were recorded over the last three springs.
Up next: video this summer from Reed’s travels in the equatorial African rain forest in western Kenya and eastern Uganda. The African rain forest, though possessing a canopy and dense vegetation, as in South America, is “not as much a tangle…less chaotic,” says Reed. Learn more about its biodiversity here.
Expect scenes of gorgeous black-and-white colobus monkeys with a white capelike back, and the flying black-and-white-casqued Hornbill, which grows nearly as large as a turkey. This oversize bird is still abundant, thanks in part to the fortresslike, mud-enclosed nest the mother and her young inhabit during the first, vulnerable weeks, Reed says.
A trip to distant Borneo may be in the offing later this year, he says, and video Reed takes there would go up on his site.
