Dr Graham Harrington from Birds Australia says it is believed to be the biggest survey of grasswrens undertaken in the country.
“They will walk for two kilometres playing the calls on an MP3 player every 200 metres and watching like a hawk for the birds to show themselves,” he said.
“We’ll stir them up hopefully and get them to show themselves.
“The Carpentarian grasswren is extremely difficult to see, it’s a very secretive bird.”
The Defense Department, the nation’s [and the world’s] biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose “imminent and substantial” dangers to public health and the environment.
The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.
June 2008. A rare dragonfly has moved into the turning ponds at the Caen Hill locks on the Kennet and Avon canal in Devizes. It is the first time that the scarce chaser dragonfly (Libellula fulva) a British Red Data Book species, has been recorded at this spot.
According to Steve Covey, the County Recorder for dragonflies and damselflies, it is likely that climate change is behind its appearance, because as temperatures warm up dragonflies are using habitats they previously considered to be unsuitable.
“A well-used canal like the Kennet and Avon makes good hunting but poor breeding grounds for dragonflies because there is so much turbulence. But at Caen Hill I found young newly emerged scarce chasers, which indicates they are actually breeding there. The ponds provide a suitable habitat for them as they receive flowing water but are much quieter than the main stretch.” …
The Cotswold Water Park (CWP) in the north of the county is also creating its own Atlas and results from both will feed into a five-year programme run by the British Dragonfly Society to map dragonfly distribution around the UK. …
In 2006 both he and Steve recorded a new species for the CWP and for Wiltshire, the lesser emperor, which comes from the Continent, and in 2007 were able to confirm that it was actually breeding on one of the lakes. “We are finding that some species are responding to climate change by becoming less fussy about where they live,” says Gareth.
Recently, the Bush administration announced it would build an additional 670 miles of border fence by the end of the year. But the fence would “slice through” the University of Texas, Brownsville, which borders Mexico, cutting off the school’s golf course from the rest of the campus. The AP reports that school officials are saying the fence would undermine the university’s mission of fostering cooperation with Mexico:
“The university — built close to the Rio Grande on land where the United States and Mexico traded cannon blasts during the Mexican-American War 160 years ago — recruits Mexican students, offers government and business classes in English and Spanish and turns out sorely needed bilingual teachers. […]
“To slice off and fence off the `bi’ part of `binational’ violates the essence of this university,” said university President Juliet V. Garcia, whose office is situated in what was once the thick-walled, tan-brick hospital at Fort Brown, built shortly after the Civil War.”
Ecological wasteland to be cleared of rat infestation
Within the next 12 months, an island that has been an ecological wasteland for over 200 years will be put on the road to recovery. In 1780, a Japanese ship ran aground on what is today called Rat Island, and many rats jumped ship to find a rat paradise, thousands of ground nesting seabirds. In 1922, Arctic foxes were stocked on the island by fur ranchers, further adding to the devastation.
Prior to these two introduced predators, the island held thousands of nesting seabirds, including Fork-tailed Storm Petrels, Whiskered Auklets, and both Horned and Tufted Puffins. These birds were easy prey because their nests or nesting burrows remain unguarded while the parents forage at sea. The rats ate the eggs, killed the chicks, and harassed the parents until almost no seabirds returned to nest on the island.
1964 - Foxes eradicated
Island restoration began in 1964, when the foxes were eradicated, and now, a solution to the rat problem seems to be at hand. The Nature Conservancy is collaborating with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Island Conservation to remove all the rats from the island. Rodent eradications have proven incredibly successful at other sites, especially in New Zealand and Scotland.
The endangered Xantus’s Murrelet saw an astounding 80% increase in nesting success when introduced rats were removed from Anacapa Island. However, the process is not easy. It takes years of evaluation and planning to select a target island and plan the removal effort. Removing rats from the island using controlled poison applications is expensive; however in this case, funding will come from public sources and dozens of private donors.
Rat Island
Rat Island is one of the Aleutian Islands, which are collectively designated as a Globally Important Bird Area because of their importance to seabird populations. Three of the Aleutians support more than one million birds each. There are several other islands in the chain with infestations of rats, but the next target has yet to be selected. Each island presents its own potential rewards and challenges. The size, the value to nesting birds, the presence of other invasive creatures, the cost and the risk of reintroduction are just some of the factors to be considered.
Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to mark the 20th anniversary of his initial appearance before Congress in 1988. He generated the first significant public awareness of the issue of global warming by telling the Senate at that time that manmade greenhouse gasses were raising global temperatures.
Since then climate scientists have reached a virtually unanimous consensus that the burning of oil and other fossil fuels results in additional atmospheric carbon dioxide, trapping heat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased greatly over the last century, and global temperatures are rising as a result.
“We have reached a point of planetary emergency,” Hansen told the Congressional panel Monday, saying the world was near a “tipping point” where climate change “would spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.”
SANTIAGO - Latin America’s whale-watching industry is flourishing, with revenues up four-fold in 15 years and the region’s whale tourists are set to exceed 1 million this year, a conservation group said on Tuesday.
Several Latin American countries, including Chile, which is hosting the annual International Whaling Commission meeting this week, are championing whale watching as an alternative to whale culls by the likes of Japan, Norway and Iceland.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare said on the sidelines of the IWC meeting that the whale-watching industry in Latin America had seen ticket sales worth nearly $80 million in 2006 alone, with overall related tourist expenditure of nearly $280 million.
By comparison, the global whale-watching industry brings in around $1 billion a year in revenues across some 90 countries.
“This is a sustainable industry that benefits coastal communities socioeconomically, educationally and environmentally for years to come,” said Beatriz Bugeda, the fund’s director for Latin America.
There are 64 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises in Latin America’s waters, which represent around 75 percent of the world’s 86 known cetacean species.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Martinez, Writing by Simon Gardner, Editing by Sandra Maler)
The government of Kenya, through the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), has approved a proposal to turn 20,000 hectares of the pristine Tana Delta into irrigated sugarcane plantations. Conservationists and villagers living in the Delta, which provides refuge for 350 species of bird, lions, elephants, rare sharks and reptiles [see also here] including the Tana writhing skink, believe the decision is illegal and are determined to block the development. The groups are considering what action they might take.
WASHINGTON - A Bella Vista man who worked as a contractor in Iraq says he lost his job after warning workers they were being exposed to a cancer-causing chemical there.
Ed Blacke, a former safety inspector for contracting giant KBR, told a congressional panel yesterday that his exposure to sodium dichromate in 2003 gave him chronic thyroid problems and early signs of cancer.
He said supervisors initially ignored his warnings about contamination at the Qarmat Ali water injection plant near Basra, Iraq. A spokeswoman for KBR, formerly a subsidiary of oil giant Halliburton later said safety and security of its employees is a top priority.
Nine workers have sued the company because of exposure to the toxic dust at Qarmat Ali. Information from: The Morning News, http://www.nwaonline.net/
Of course, Halliburton is the corporation of George W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney.
United States and British-based conservation groups are backing a campaign spearheaded by Iran’s Department of Environment (DoE) and the United Nations Development Programme to prevent the endangered Asiatic cheetah from dying out.
Iran is believed to host the only 60 to 100 Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild. Some eke out a living in a forbidding terrain of jagged peaks, deep gorges and bone-dry plains in the Kuh-e Bafgh protected area in Yazd province in central Iran.
The sleek and spotted cats once roamed between the Arabian peninsula and India, but their number in Iran is estimated to have been halved in the past three decades.
“This is a wonderful case of the urgent conservation needs of the cheetah transcending political differences,” said executive director Luke Hunter of Panthera, a non-governmental organisation in New York.
The United States experts in this scheme put warmongers like Bush, Cheney, and McCain to shame.
From ABC in Australia:
