World's birds on death row: Race against time to save 189 species from extinction

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:


World's birds on death row: Race against time to save 189 species from extinction
The world's most ambitious bird conservation project will be launched this week amid evidence that hunting and loss of habitat has caused species to disappear at an unprecedented rate. David Randall reports
Published: 12 August 2007


The biggest and most wide-ranging bird conservation programme the world has ever seen will be launched next week with the aim of saving every one of the planet's critically endangered species from extinction.

The task is urgent. There are now no fewer than 189 birds in this most precipitous category – 51 more than there were just seven years ago. Scientists say that if no action is taken then all of them could be gone within the next 10 years; 15 are already classified as "possibly extinct ".

The death of bird species is now happening faster than at any time in history. Without human interference, the natural rate of loss would be one bird each century. But extinctions are accelerating and running at 50 times that rate. In the past 30 years alone, 21 have gone – three of them since 2000.

BirdLife International, which acts as a scientific and conservation " United Nations" for bird organisations worldwide, now aims to stop the rot. So next week at Birdfair, the three-day festival for British enthusiasts co-organised by the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, Birdlife will launch a project to pull each and every one of the 189 species back from the brink.

This danger list includes six owls, three albatrosses, 16 birds of prey, 10 hummingbirds, 17 parrots, four woodpeckers, six ducks and umpteen pigeons, plovers, wrens, warblers, finches, curlews and larks.

Their names are some of the most evocative in the bird world: the gorgeted wood-quail, sapphire-bellied hummingbird, Alagoas foliage-gleaner, Pernambuco pygmy-owl and Iquitos gnatcatcher (some of which have never been photographed), Bulo Burti boubou (a shrike, discovered in Somalia in 1988), the kakapo (the world's only flightless, nocturnal parrot), and the turquoise-throated puffleg, a hummingbird so rare no one has seen it since 1850. There are, happily, no British birds on the list.

BirdLife's project, called "Preventing Extinctions: Saving the World's Most Threatened Birds", will launch what are in effect 189 different races against time. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://environment.independent.co.uk/wildlife/article2856857.ece

[izzie]

1. My but this stuff up sets me so.

I can not understand why we are doing all this? Some times I think it is the people who should just go.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. They're going to have to do a better job of identifying each bird by geographical region

and include photos, because that list is just not reader friendly. If you already didn't know what you were looking for, you'd never find it.

[jgraz]

3. I just had one of these birds in my home last week.

http:/homepage.mac.com/jgraz/cubby

I fostered him for a couple of weeks. It's unbelievably sad to think that his species may die out in the wild. :cry:

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

4. Safari doesn't open your page

I just get this:
Could not open the page “http://localhost/homepage.mac.com/jgraz/cubby” because Safari couldn’t connect to the server “localhost”.

[jgraz]

5. For some reason your html request is looping through localhost

Did you have something redirecting your HTML requests? DreamWeaver, perhaps? ;)