Fighting A Last-Ditch Battle To Save the Rare Javan Rhino
by Rhett Butler
April 26, 2012
From the article: Rhinoceroses worldwide are under siege as their habitat shrinks and poachers slaughter hundreds annually for their valuable horns. Now, in Indonesia, conservation groups are engaged in a desperate struggle to save the last 40 Javan rhinos on earth.
Read the whole article.
Cockerell’s Sifaka (Propithecus coquereli)
Photograph by Hermann Erber/Photo Library
Ninety percent of the plants and animals found on the island of Madagascar evolved there and nowhere else. All of the country’s 70-plus species of lemur—including this sifaka—are considered endangered. To help protect them and other unique species, the government has set aside more than nine million acres (3.7 million hectares) of land.
(via: National Geo)
Source: rhamphotheca
Extremely Rare Guam Rails Hatch at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo
by Smithsonian staff
March 2012 - As Washington, D.C.’s unseasonably warm winter turns into spring, a baby boom is underway at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Two Guam rail (Gallirallus owstoni) chicks hatched March 3 and 4; they join six others in the Zoo’s collection—three of which live at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va. This brings the total population of these small, flightless birds to 162 individuals. Each hatching is significant—the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists these birds as extinct in the wild.
In about six weeks, keepers will separate the chicks from their parents, and Zoo veterinarians will perform a routine medical exam and take feather samples to determine their sexes.
To date, 82 chicks have hatched at the Zoo and SCBI, and each provides scientists with the opportunity to learn about the growth, reproduction, health and behavior of the species. The Zoo sent 29 Guam rails to the government of Guam for release and breeding, and an additional 25 birds have gone to other institutions to breed…
(read more: Smithsonian Science) (photos: Jim Jenkins)
Source: rhamphotheca
Guam Rail (Gallirallus owstoni) - CRITICALLY ENDANGERED
… a flightless bird, endemic to Guam. The Guam Rail, which is locally known as the Ko’ko’ in Chamorro, disappeared from southern Guam in the early 1970s and was extirpated from the entire island by the late 1980s. This species is now being bred in captivity by the Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources on Guam and at some mainland U.S. zoos. Since 1995, more than 100 rails have been introduced on the island of Rota in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in an attempt to establish a wild breeding colony. Although at least one chick resulted from these efforts, predation (largely by feral cats) and accidental deaths have been extremely high. A small number of birds potentially persists…
(read more: Wikipedia) (photo: Greg Hume)
Source: rhamphotheca
In separate letters today, 89 conservation groups and 97 scientists expressed opposition to a proposed Obama administration policy that would sharply limit protection for the nation’s imperiled wildlife by reinterpreting a key phrase in the Endangered Species Act that determines when plants and animals qualify for protection. Conservation groups opposing the policy include the Center for Biological Diversity, Endangered Species Coalition, Earthjustice and the Humane Society of the United States.
“This policy is like ignoring an injured patient in the emergency room and jumping into action only when he’s at death’s door,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If this policy had been in place when the Endangered Species Act was passed, the bald eagle would never have been protected in any of the lower 48 states, because there were still a lot of eagles up in Alaska.”
Under the Act, an endangered species is defined as any “in danger of extinction in all or a significant of portion of its range.” The phrase “significant portion of range” is important, because it means that a species need not be at risk of extinction everywhere it lives to receive protection. The proposed Obama policy reinterprets this phrase by defining “significant” to mean that loss of the species from that portion of range would threaten the survival of the species, creating a much higher threshold for imperiled wildlife to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. It also limits consideration of whether species are endangered in portions of their range to only where they currently exist and not their historic range—effectively pretending species have not already experienced massive losses from which they need to recover.
To read more, click here.
See, shit like this, Obama. LOOK AT HOW ANGRY YOU’VE MADE THAT OWL.
The Obama administration has been very disappointing when it comes to wildlife conservation.
(via randomc)
Source: ecowatch.org
It’s awful that it has to come to this, but how else do you stop such selfish waste?
Wildlife vet Alex Lewis injects a mixture of dye and poison into the horn of this drugged rhino on Inverdoorn Game Reserve near Ceres. Picture: Matthew Jordaan
The horns of rhinos are being poisoned in hopes of deterring poachers and saving the species
The poison will not kill, but is designed to make anyone who consumes the ground-up horn feel sick. Most poached horn is smuggled into Asia where it fetches sky-high prices in the traditional medicine trade, although it has no proven medicinal qualities.
The horns were also injected with a bright-red dye that effectively defaced their interior, making them unusable as dagger handles or other ornamentation. Rhino horn has been used, particularly in Yemen, for dagger handles. The dye and poison combination was developed by Denel and has been designed to bind with keratin, the substance horn, hair and nails are made of.
The third part of the anti-poaching cocktail was barium, injected into smaller holes, which will show up on X-rays if the horns are smuggled through airport security.
Inverdoorn owner Damian Vergnaud, who was present throughout the operations that began before dawn yesterday, said yesterday: “I wanted to destroy the market value of the horns, and I hope other game reserve owners will follow what we’ve done. That way we can destroy rhino horn as a product. I think it will work if many people do it. I want everyone to know that we have done this to the horns.”
(via carolinafrica)
Source: mohandasgandhi
Conservation of the Javan Rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus)
The Javan, or lesser one-horned, rhino is on the brink of extinction. As few as 40 individuals are thought to survive in the wild in Ujung Kulon National Park, Indonesia, and there are none in captivity. The Javan rhino in Vietnam was confirmed extinct on October 25, 2011.
Human population pressures and poaching continue to threaten the few remaining Indonesian Javan rhinos. WWF is working to:
• protect the remaining Javan rhinos from poaching
• monitor the existing population
• establish a second population through translocation, which establishes different populations of a species in more than one areaWith as few as 40 Javan rhinos left in the world, WWF needs your support to fund urgent rhino projects, including an ambition translocation plan.
(via humanformat)
Source: rhamphotheca
nrdcbiogems: Good News in North American Mammal Conservation
Good news!! Lynx kittens are back in New Hampshire, Pacific fishers are being restored in California, and buffalo have returned to 3,000 acres of tall grass prairie in Missouri. Check out these and other good news story to start off your new year.
(via Wildlife Roundup: the Good News | Andrew Wetzler’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC)
Source: switchboard.nrdc.org
UN pushes energy projects to stop deforestation in the Congo
By Agence France-Presse
Friday, November 4, 2011
From the page: …. Only nine percent of the 62 million Congolese have access to electricity despite the 100,000 megawatt potential of the Inga dam on the mighty Congo River, underexploited due to a lack of equipment and maintenance.
Therefore the people cut down some 400,000 hectares (988,000 acres) of forest every year just for their heating and lighting needs, according the UNEP.
“Conservation is directly linked to development, because if there’s no energy how can you stop the people from going and chopping down the forest for firewood? It’s impossible,” Environment Minister Jose Endundo said.
He insisted however that “we are evolving towards a green economy,” under the aegis of the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD), foreseeing a multiplication of initiatives for reforestation and the use of less polluting energy sources….
Great Lakes face stresses from run-off, invasive species
The 5 lakes, which contain one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and supply millions of people, may be ‘veering close to ecosystem collapse.’
Source: mothernaturenetwork
