Owl Trouble
Today’s Endangered All-Star, Blakiston’s Fish Owl, highlights the costs of intensive—often illegal—logging across Siberia and northeast Asia. Like the spotted owl, infamous in the American west for sparking a reassessment of logging, the enormous fish owl prefers old growth forests for nesting; it is also dependent on wild riverine corridors for hunting. Its habitat has been hammered by logging, development, and the construction of dams, and the species now holds on in fragmented populations, with 30-35 pairs of the Hokkaido subspecies and perhaps 100-135 pairs of the subspecies in the Russian Far East. To make matters worse, owls are caught in snares set for furbearing mammals; hunters shoot them for food and out of a belief that the owls spoil the skins of trapped animals.
The Blakiston Fish Owl Project, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners, is working hard to collect important information about the species and its needs. In 2007, the project began tagging birds with backpack VHF transmitters and is using the data collected to create a species conservation plan and to map potential protected areas in Primorsky Krai, the far eastern Maritime Province of Russia. The project is also dedicated to providing local people with accurate information about the owls and the wider ecosystem, collaborating with Russian NGOs such as Amur-Ussuri Center for Avian Biodiversity, the Phoenix Fund (active in Amur tiger and Amur leopard conservation), and the Uragus Ecological Club. To support this work, the Project sells unique fish owl ringtones as well as shirts, mugs, stickers, and postcards. And we have to say, they’re pretty cool.
Photo: Pete Morris for www.wildimages-phototours.com/about.cfm
Sad News for Conservationists and Crocodilians
The Wildlife Conservation Society has announced the death of senior conservation scientist Dr. John Thorbjarnarson, 52, who died of malaria on February 14, 2010 in India. Dr. Thorbjarnarson was an expert on crocodilians, snakes, turtles, and other reptiles and had worked throughout his career to save critically endangered species such as the Orinoco Crocodile in Venezuela, the Cuban Crocodile, and the Chinese Alligator. When a Yangtze River valley survey he organized revealed that the Chinese Alligator had dwindled to fewer than 150 individuals, he alerted the Chinese government, which responded with a dedicated effort that included support for captive-breeding and restoration of habitat.
A John Thorbjarnarson Memorial Fund has been set up by WCS, and donations can also be made to the IUCN Crocodile Specialist Group’s Chinese Alligator Fund to support today’s Endangered All-Star. Dr. Thorbjarnarson’s latest book, The Chinese Alligator: Ecology, Behavior, Conservation and Culture, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in April.
Photo: Fritz Geller-Grimm
Clouded Leopard on the Menu
According to the Smithsonian, today’s Endangered All-Star, the Clouded Leopard, has been seen on restaurant menus catering to the wealthy in China and Thailand. Skins are for sale in markets throughout southeast Asia, and teeth and bones are used in traditional Chinese medicine, a replacement for tiger parts as that species grows ever more scarce. But with its population of 10,000 already in decline, this cat can hardly afford to feed Asia’s so-called “Big Bucks” businessmen.
In addition to poaching, rapid deforestation—exceeding ten percent over the past decade—endangers this forest-dependent species. Thought to provide a unique link between small and large felines, the clouded leopard has the largest canine teeth proportionately of any cat, prompting comparison to extinct sabre-toothed cats. Recently, motion-sensitive cameras captured evidence of seven species of cat, including Clouded Leopard, in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Ravi Chellam, representing the Wildlife Conservation Society, told the BBC: “The entire forest here should be protected as a single conservation landscape, free of disturbance and connected by wildlife corridors.” But with a Maoist insurgency active in a number of India’s tiger reserves, adding to poaching pressure, this seems unlikely to happen.
Meanwhile, the Clouded Leopard Project, organized by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ Clouded Leopard Species Survival Plan, supports research and better management throughout the species’ range: Learn how to adopt a Clouded Leopard here.
Photo: © Andy Rouse / www.nhpa.co.uk for ARKive
Today’s Endangered All-Star: The American Bison. Listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN’s Red List, the Center for Biological Diversity has nonetheless sued to list the bison on the Endangered Species List. Conservation threats include the shrinking of prairie ecosystems, the limited number of viable populations—most managed for commercial use—and the fact that the species is heavily dependent on conservation programs. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s American Bison Society is spearheading a program of continental-scale ecological restoration. A new book by Richard Manning, Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape, explores the history of the Great Plains and highlights considerable progress made by the American Prairie Foundation, which is in the process of buying, leasing, and managing some 130,000 acres of land in northeastern Montana for bison recovery, aiming “to assemble a fully functioning ecosystem able to support a full complement of prairie-based wildlife.” The organization hopes that their “American Prairie Reserve” may one day rival Africa’s Serengeti.
Photo: Jack Dykinga
Aping the Hype
Great footage of the newly discovered population of lowland gorillas in Congo Brazzaville accompanies the online story at NPR. But we at iWild wonder why so many news organizations forgot to ask the hard questions.
According to NPR, the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose researchers conducted the census that revealed these populations, “has helped large logging operations in other parts of Congo learn to harvest trees sustainably and to limit poaching operations that rely on logging roads.” Really? What exactly constitutes “sustainable” logging in the Congo? Exactly how much has WCS “helped”? Independent journalists—including Dale Peterson, in Eating Apes (University of California Press), his 2003 book about bushmeat—have questioned such easy assertions, particularly regarding the relationship between WCS and the major logging corporation, Congolaise Industrielle des Bois.
“The Wildlife Conservation Society writes its own report card…and gives itself generally good grades,” Peterson wrote. In the future, NPR and other news organizations might want to take WCS’s self-generated report card with a larger grain of salt.
