Do you know that many animals in the world are being destroyed by man?Those of you who watch Discovery for kids would have seen how much of the wild we are losing. Elephants too are becoming extinct by man killing them for their tusks,while tigers are shot for their skin.

Sri Lanka was once a place where there were many elephants. But now sad to say there are only a couple of thousands left for us to see. When you visit Yala, Udawalawe or Wasgamuwa, you would see elephants roaming freely without any fear for their lives because they are protected. Before these parks were reserved for the wild, elephants roamed the jungles freely but were in danger for poachers would kill them. It still does happen.

So we now must in our small way try and stop all kinds of poaching. If we don't the next generation would not know what it is to see an elephant in the wild.

Until next time

Aunty Sunshine

• Elephants and their value
• Happy birthday grandmother!
• Coral reefs
• Life of a pair of shoes
• Face
• My school
• Communications visionary honoured
• Breeding in the sea

Elephants and their value

An elephant is a useful animal. It's the largest animal on earth. Elephants face extinction now. The problem is the vanishing forests and many hunters who kill it for its tusks. It lives over hundred years. Its favourite foods are pumpkin, manioc, sweet potato, okra and the lush sugar cane.

Sri Lanka's national animal is the elephant. At the Dalada Maligawa we can see some elephants that are used for the Dalada Perahera. The place where orphaned elephants are taken care of is Pinnawala. We have to save our other animals like elephants by enforcing rules and making places like Pinnawala.

Sharmilla Rajani Sundaram
St Clare's College Wellawatte

Happy birthday grandmother!

Your golden touch,
Your golden smile,
Your golden kiss,
Makes living worthwhile.
Your golden hug,
Your graceful walk,
Your charming voice,
Makes you adorable when you talk.
You favour my sister,
But I don't mind,
Well maybe I get
Mad sometimes.
Thank you for being so loving
And so caring too.
I wish you a perfect Birthday
And remember I love You!

Thamali Jayasinghe
Lyceum International School

Coral reefs

Coral reefs are very beautiful and fascinating. Millions of different creatures live on these reefs. Sri Lanka is lucky to have miles of coral reefs close to the shore.

Tourists come from all over the world to swim under water to see the coral and the thousands of fish, many of them brightly coloured in patterns of great variety.

The reefs also protect the beaches and coast from the pounding waves. Unfortunately not every one looks after these coral reefs. Tons of coral are broken off every year by shore dwellers.

Coral can be destroyed in seconds. But it takes hundreds of years to grow again. Coral reefs make Sri Lanka a beautiful country.

M. Ruham Hamza
St. Mary's College - Nawalapitya

Life of a pair of shoes

I was born in a factory and made of velvet. There were many different kinds of shoes like me. Soon I found my own friends and stayed with them. I'm glad to hear that every one says I am pretty. I am red in colour and have a small bow on my nose.

A few days later I was packed in a large box and taken away. This made me very sad. Later on I was taken out of the box and laid out on a shelf. There was a glass so I could see the road clearly.

One day a small girl was looking at me for a few minutes. I was a bit scared when she first looked at me because I didn't know whether she was good or not. But I think that she was a kind girl. Later the same girl bought me for Rs.75.

She was very kind to me and she wore me wherever she went. I think she liked me very much. But now she can't wear me because I'm very tight on her feet.

But she didn't forget me. She gave me to a poor small girl and now I belong to her and she wears me every time she goes out.

Himashi Alwis
Holy Family Convent - Bambalapitiya

Face

I know a face, a lovely face,
As full of beauty as of grace,
A face of pleasure, ever bright,
In utter darkness it gives us light
A face that is itself like joy,
To have seen it I'm a lucky boy
But I've a joy that have few others
This lovely woman is my mother

By M. Hazir

My school

My school is Swarnapali Balika Maha Vidyalaya. It is in Anuradhapura. It is a big school. There are many students in my school. The principal of my school is Mrs. Prema Karunarathne.

We have many classes. Our class rooms are neat and tidy. We play games .We learn good manners. We have a library, a play ground and two laboratories. So we can play and study. I love my school very much.

Darshika Prasadi Rajapakse,
Swarnapali Balika Maha Vidyalaya - Anuradhapura

Stamp News 57

Communications visionary honoured

By Uncle D. C. R

The name Arthur C. Clarke is synonymous with Communications. A great visionary of our time, he predicted the advent of communications satellites as early as 1945. Of course, it took 20 years for the first one to be launched - by America.. Today several hundreds are in orbit and every year at least a dozen new ones are launched.

The recent issue of two Rs 3.50 stamps to mark 50 years of communications in Sri Lanka featured this great science fiction writer and communications specialist who has been very much a part of Sri Lanka's communications scene during this period. Arthur C. Clarke hailing from England, has made Sri Lanka his home since 1956. He has had the rare honour of being accepted as a Resident Guest since 1975. He is now Sir Arthur Clarke having been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II last year.

Sir Arthur is delighted by the latest honour of having two of his portraits on the stamps. "I certainly never imagined when I sorted the mail in Bishops Lydeard Post Office (his home town) 65 years ago that there would someday be stamps bearing my portrait," he said after the release of the stamps at Galle Face Hotel. Incidentally, the choice of the hotel for the launch of the stamps too had its own significance. One of Sir Arthur's favourite locations in Sri Lanka, he wrote his latest best seller '3001:The Final Odyssey' there. (It's the fourth in the Odyssey series, the earlier ones being 2001, 2010 & 2061).

In addition to Sir Arthur's portraits, the stamps carry an outline of the Geostationary (Clarke) Orbit, imagery related to communications satellites and spacecraft, and a symbol depicting the universality of communications. The designer is W K Sarath Rohana, one of Sri Lanka's leading stamp designers having nearly a 100 designs to his credit and an engineering diplomate of the University of Moratuwa where Sir Arthur has been Chancellor for the past 20 years.

To go back to what Sir Arthur wrote in 1945, he showed how a network of cosmats placed in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres above the earth could provide total telecommunications coverage for the whole world. Today dozens of cosmats in the 'Clarke Orbit' have made the Global Village possible.

The opening of the Satellite Earth Station in Padukka in 1976 was a landmark in the development of communications in Sri Lanka. The occasion was marked by the issue of a Re 1 stamp on May 6, 1976. At that time the fourth generation of satellites (Intelsat IV) was in orbit. The earth station set up at a cost of Rs 60 million satisfied a long felt need for a viable system of international communications thus strengthening the economic infrastructure of the country providing an impetus for further development of overseas trade and commerce, industry, shipping, aviation and tourism.

The fifty years since Independence have seen a significant development in the field of communications in Sri Lanka. Both in the areas of telecommunications and mass media, we have achieved much progress.

Breeding in the sea

Continued from last week

Seals come ashore to breed, unlike whales and sea cows which produce their young at sea. For most of the year seals live at sea, occasionally coming on to land to bask and rest. Then, as the breeding season approaches they form into herds, and make for certain beaches, called rookeries, in order to produce their young. Some seals migrate long distances to reach the shore.

Males first

The males or bulls arrive first, to establish their territories. The smaller cows arrive later. Within days each female gives birth to a single pup from a previous mating. Shortly after giving birth, they mate again, to produce another baby the next year.

The pup is suckled by its mother, who keeps going back into the sea in order to feed, and so keep up her strength. The bulls stay on shore guarding their territories.

There may be serious fighting at the rookery. The bulls rear up, roaring and slashing with their large canine teeth, sometimes inflicting severe injuries. The bull elephant seal looks very fierce, blowing up his huge snout and using it as a sound-box.

This is a general description of the way seals breed. In some kinds of seal the mother may produce her pup not in a rookery, but on her own. The ringed seal, for example, which lives in polar regions, gives birth in a cave in an ice-floe. In other cases the seals gather in large colonies. The cows are herded into "harems", each with one bull in charge. When the pups are strong enough they are gathered into a separate nursery. The mothers are able to find their own young among the hundreds of others. They can probably do this by recognising the particular scent of their baby.

Grey seals and common seals

Grey seals breed in late autumn along the rocky shores and islands of the north Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. Many of the pups are drowned in the wintery gales.

The common seal, on the other hand, chooses flat, sandy shores. As soon as a pup is born the mother deserts it and swims out to a sandy bank. The hungry pup soon follows to a safe place offshore.

Whales

Whales and dolphins give birth at sea. Mating between two large whales is spectacular. They rear up out of the water, and fall back. Apart from a tremendous splash, they make no sound. However whales do communicate. One whale can signal to another many kilometres away, by giving off very high-pitched notes. When these sounds were first recorded on ships' instruments during the World War Two they were thought to be signals from sumarines. Since then, further recordings have been made of whales "talking", but as yet, scientists do not understand the meaning of the sounds.

The blue whale travels to Antarctic every year to mate; feeding on the small animals called krill which it can find there in spring. Later in the year, blue whales travel north to warmer seas to have their young. The calf is born up to 18 months later. It can be eight metres long, and weigh well over a tonne. No mother on land could carry such a huge weight inside her. But the sea can support the weight of the whale, just as it can support a ship.

The whale calf's first problem is to find air, because it is born under water. Sometimes, the calves can find enough energy to swim up to the surface by themselves, but usually, the adults have to help them by nudging them upwards. At the surface, the calves take their first breaths through their nostrils.

When it is strong enough to travel for longer distances the calf accompanies its mother back to the Antarctic, to feed and grow.

Many whales make similar journeys between feeding areas and a place to have their young.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to a group of mammals called Cetacea. They are built for a life entirely in water. If they are stranded on land they are crushed by their own weight.

Sizes vary from the small porpoises, less than 1.5 metres long to the world's largest animal, the 35-metre blue whale, which can weigh up to 120 tonnes.

Streamlined

A whale's body is streamlined and hairless, apart from a few whiskers. It has a thick layer of fat called blubber to keep it warm. The front limbs, or flippers, act as paddles, as does the tail. There are no back limbs apart from two small bones inside the body, the last traces of the legs the whale's ancestor had.

All cetaceans must surface to breathe. The nostril, or blow hole, is on the top of the head. When the whale breathes out the breath condenses in the air, making a cloud of moisture or a spout. Toothed whales have a single spout, but baleen whales have two nostrils and make a double spout.

Toothed whales

Toothed whales have rows of curved teeth used to grasp prey such as fishes and squids. Most are small, apart from the sperm whale, which can be 30 metres long. It has a square head, with teeth in the lower jaw. There is a waxy substance called spermaceti in its head. This is used to make soap.

Sperm whales travel in schools, hunting squids and cuttlefish. They can dive to 3,000 metres and stay below for more than an hour. Their undigested food, called ambergris, is used to make perfume.

The pygmy sperm whale is only three metres long.

Dolphins

Among the smaller whales are a number of dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins have sleek bodies, beak-like jaws and a large fin on their back. The common dolphin, the best known, is about two metres long. It goes about in schools, and often follows ships. It can swim up to 32 km/h and can leap out of the water.

Dolphins have been studied in captivity. They are very intelligent, and can learn tricks and play with their keeper. Like bats, they find their way using echo location or sonar.

The pilot whale owes its name to the fact that the members of a school will all follow the leader. If the leader gets stranded on the beach the others will follow it there and may all die.

The largest member of the dolphin family is the killer whale. It can grow to nine metres. Packs of killer whales hunt seals and penguins. They hunt mainly in cold polar seas, and will sometimes attack a larger whale. In captivity the killer whale is quite docile.

Porpoises are more thick set than dolphins and have blunt noses. They travel in schools, hunting fish such as herrings. The common porpoise tends to keep to northern seas, and even rivers.

The narwhal

The narwhal is unusual. The female has no teeth, but the male has two. One of these, on the left side, grows into a long spiral tusk. Whalers used to sell this tusk as the horn of the legendary unicorn.

Baleen whales

The baleen whales are usually gigantic. They have no teeth, but a row of ''baleen" or "whalebone" plates hanging from the upper jaw. These work as a strainer, for catching food such as krill.

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