Bonobos - our unknown cousins
A young female in Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a siesta after a big meal. Its lips are orange from clay it ate to compensate for toxins in unripe fruit.
Despite being humans’ closest living relatives, little is known about Bonobos and their behavior in the wild in remote parts of the Congo basin. Bonobos are threatened by habitat loss and bush meat trade.
Photographer, Germany
Christian Ziegler was born in
Germany in 1972. He studied tropical biology at the University of Würzburg (Germany). Several research projects and his fascination for nature-photography brought him to the tropical forests of Asia, Africa and Central America during his studies.
In 1994/95 Christian lived in Thailand where he worked as a free lance photographer for the WWF (World Wide Found for Nature). The year after Christian spent four months in the Ivory Cost of West Africa visiting both the Savannah and the rain forest.
Since 1998, Christian has been working primarily in Panama, on Barro Colorado Island, a field station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). After finishing his graduate work in 2000, his focus changed solely to the field of nature photography and journalism. He spent 15 month of fieldwork doing the photography for his picture book on the ecology of tropical rain forest “A magic Web”, which was published by Oxford University Press in November 2002.
In April 2002 Christian was appointed ‘associate for communication’ by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Over the years Christian won several internation recognized awards, such as the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year (category 'behvior of all other animals' in 2005).
Christians work is published internationally in magazines such as the National Geographic Magazine, GEO, Smithsonian Magazine, BBC Wildlife Magazine and Natural History. Next to his magazine work, he thinks it important to work with conservation groups, such as WWF and others. Christian is a founding fellow of the I
nternational League of Conservation Photographers .
