Australia's threatened birds declined by 59% over the past 30 years

DECEMBER 3, 2019

by Elisa Bayraktarov and Jaana Dielenberg, The Conversation

Australia's threatened birds declined by nearly 60% on average over 30 years, according to new research that reveals the true impact on native wildlife of habitat loss, introduced pests, and other human-caused pressures.

Alarmingly, migratory shorebirds have declined by 72%. Many of these species inhabit our mudflats and coasts on their migration from Siberia, Alaska or China each year.

These concerning figures are revealed in our world-first Threatened Bird Index. The index, now updated with its second year of data, combines over 400,000 surveys at more than 17,000 locations.

It's hoped the results will shed light on where conservation efforts are having success, and where more work must be done.

Bringing conservation efforts together

The index found a 59% fall in Australia's threatened and near threatened bird populations between 1985 and 2016.

Migratory shorebirds in South Australia and New South Wales have been worst hit, losing 82% and 88% of their populations, respectively. In contrast, shorebirds in the Northern Territory have increased by 147% since 1985, potentially due to the safe roosting habitat at Darwin Harbour where human access to the site is restricted.

Habitat loss and pest species (particularly feral cats) are the most common reasons for these dramatic population declines.

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Removing invasive mice from the Farallon Islands would benefit threatened birds

Date:October 10, 2019

Source:Point Blue Conservation Science

New research from Point Blue Conservation Science shows the significant negative impact that invasive, non-native house mice on the Farallon Islands are having to the threatened ashy storm-petrel. Original modeling by ecologists published today in the journal Ecosphere shows the potential impacts to the petrel's population if mice are allowed to remain. The super-abundant mice encourage migrating burrowing owls to stay on the island, who later in the winter switch from eating mice to preying on the petrels.

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Nigeria risks epidemics as vultures go extinct

By Chidimma C. Okeke

 Published Date Sep 18, 2019 0:47 AM

Nigeria is losing free ecological services as vultures go extinct in the country. The carrion feeders are a vital part of the ecosystem. They provide important ecosystem services that contribute to human health and wellbeing.

These services include removing carcasses and other organic waste from the environment, thereby, reducing the spread of diseases and contamination of water supplies.

Vultures, despite these services they render naturally are, however, faced with general population decline worldwide with a seven per cent decline yearly for the past three decades

The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list of threatened species said vultures are among the most threatened group of migratory birds in the world. As Nigeria joined the rest of the world to commemorate the International Vulture Awareness Day (IVAD) on the first Saturday of September, a day set aside by the global body to highlight the importance of vultures and their conservation, it was observed that the birds are fast going into extinction.

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Endangered Vultures Killed for Rituals in Nigeria

ENUGU, NIGERIA - Across Nigeria, there's a rising demand for vultures, and poachers are driving the local population of four large vulture species to near extinction.

The Nigerian Conservation Foundation is now placing vulture preservation high on its agenda, hoping to revive the threatened population. Abidemi Balogun, a senior special conservation officer with the foundation's educational unit, is engaging with local communities where superstitions and folklore about the birds persist.

"Someone actually asked me how do they identity the evil ones because there's been a belief that vultures are evil birds," Balogun told VOA with a laugh.

She's been with the foundation for eight years and said vulture poaching was not taken seriously in the past.

Spiritual practices

She said that the birds aren't being hunted for consumption as much as they're being killed for spiritual practices. In 2017, the foundation conducted a market survey to see how the birds were traded.

"Some of the findings that we made is that the head is used for ritual purposes and the head is the most expensive part of it," she said.

In local markets, vulture feathers are sold for about 100 naira, or less than 50 cents. But the head can fetch up to 25,000 naira, or about $70.

In Nigeria's diverse cultural landscape, the beliefs around vultures vary widely. In the southwest, where they're called igún, vultures are seen as sacred in traditional spirituality. According to folklore, they can be used to communicate with the dead or to appease the gods in elaborate sacrificial ceremonies.

In northern Nigeria, they are consumed. But they're also sold by traders known as yan shinfida to be used in traditional medicine and spiritual healing.

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Saving sage-grouse by relocation

Date: August 26, 2019

Source: Washington State University

Moving can be tough, but eventually most of us acclimate to new surroundings.

That's true for humans, and research from Washington State University shows it's the same for sage-grouse too.

A team of scientists successfully moved sage-grouse, a threatened bird species in Washington state, from one area of their range to another to increase their numbers and diversify their gene pool. A WSU study on the project in The Journal of Wildlife Management shows relocating the birds is a viable and productive step towards helping their population recover in the state.

"In the first year after moving sage-grouse in, they tended to move around a lot and didn't reproduce as effectively as the native population," said Kyle Ebenhoch, a researcher now working at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). "It took them about a year to settle in and get used to their new surroundings."

Ebenhoch, a WSU graduate student during this project, wrote the paper with WSU School of the Environment professors Daniel Thornton, Lisa Shipley, and Jeffrey Manning. Kevin White, a contract wildlife biologist with the Yakima Training Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was also a member of the research team. The training center hosts a population of sage-grouse where the relocation work was done.

An adjustment period

Ebenhoch wanted to investigate how newly introduced sage-grouse would survive and reproduce in order to determine if relocating birds to the area could be a workable way of keeping the species from further decline in Washington.

It turns out, the birds can adjust, though the training center population continued to decline.

"The birds did adjust to their new surroundings, but it didn't stabilize the population," Ebenhoch said. "This can be one tool in our toolbox for helping, but we'll need more research to find other tools as well."

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It would take 50 million years to recover New Zealand's lost bird species

Date:  August 5, 2019

Source:  Cell Press

Half of New Zealand's birds have gone extinct since humans arrived on the islands. Many more are threatened. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 5 estimate that it would take approximately 50 million years to recover the number of bird species lost since humans first colonized New Zealand.

"The conservation decisions we make today will have repercussions for millions of years to come," says Luis Valente of Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. "Some people believe that if you leave nature alone it will quickly recuperate, but the reality is that, at least in New Zealand, nature would need several million years to recover from human actions -- and perhaps will never really recover."

The biodiversity observed today is the result of millions of years of evolutionary time, Valente explains. Extinctions caused by human activities erase this history. While the number of lost or threatened bird species often has been quantified, the broad-scale evolutionary consequences of human impact on island biodiversity rarely have been measured.

In the new study, Valente and colleagues developed a method to estimate how long it would take for islands to regain the number of species lost due to humans. They realized that New Zealand birds would be an ideal system to apply and demonstrate this new method.

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Conservation agency, wildlife group to release 100 songbirds in Kerinci Seblat

Jon Afrizal

The Jakarta Post

Jambi / Tue, July 16, 2019 / 06:24 pm

The Jambi Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) and Flora and Fauna International (FFI) are set to release 100 white-rumped shamas into the wild amid rampant illegal hunting in Jambi province.

Locally known as murai batu or kurcica hutan, the songbirds will be released at Kerinci Seblat National Park (TNKS) in September.

Agency head Rahmad Saleh acknowledged that the release of the birds was a response to the decline of the species in the wild due to widespread hunting.

Even though the population of the singing bird is reported to be threatened, the white-rumped shama is not listed as a protected bird in Indonesia.

“We have so many singing birds right now. However, the population will continue to decline,” Rahmad said.

The birds, to be released in September, come from breeding facilities in Bogor, West Java. Each breeding facility in the country is obliged to release 10 percent of the animals it breeds into the wild.

Source

After the Storm: Can This Rediscovered Bird Recover?

 21 Jun 2019

Amongst the destruction and tragedy on Grand Bahama caused by Hurricane Matthew, there is an untold story of a rediscovered, but very threatened bird with a potential population of just two.

How low can a bird species’ population drop and still be saved from extinction? It’s an interesting theoretical question, and it became more than an academic one for scientists and conservationists last summer, when the Bahama Nuthatch Sitta insularis, a bird feared extinct, was rediscovered.

Prior to the rediscovery, the nuthatch had not  been seen since Hurricane Matthew ripped through Grand Bahama – the island on which the bird is endemic – in June of 2016. Two years on from the carnage, two students from the University of East Anglia, working in conjunction with BirdLife International and the Bahamas National Trust (BirdLife Partner) went on an expedition to catch sight of the bird.

“We had been scouring the forest for about six weeks, and had almost lost hope,” says Matthew Gardner of the rediscovery. “At that point we’d walked about 400 kilometres. Then, I suddenly heard its distinctive call and saw the unmistakable shape of a nuthatch descending towards me. I shouted with joy, I was ecstatic!”

The world was ecstatic along with him. The news made international headlines, and the ornithological world celebrated the rediscovery of the Bahama Nuthatch. But are the celebrations warranted? Gardner and his partner, David Pereira, saw the Bahama Nuthatch six times throughout their three-month survey, but they never saw two birds together, leading them to believe there may only be one individual left. A team of Bahamian students, led by Zeko McKenzie of Loma Linda University, independently recorded five sighting of the nuthatch in the same forest, and believe they may have seen two birds together. With only one or two Bahama Nuthatches left though, is it possible for the bird to make a comeback?

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Appeal for householders to help save Scotland’s fastest bird

Swift to decline, slow to recover: A conservation charity is seeking good homes for the threatened birds as their nest sites vanish

GEORGE MAIR Published: 06:00 Friday 15 February 2019

A conservation charity has appealed for Scots homeowners and businesses to help save the nation’s fastest flying bird, the swift, by providing thousands of new homes for them.

The iconic summer visitors used to be seen in large numbers swooping across the rooftops in Scotland’s urban areas. Nicknamed devil birds because of their distinctive screams, swifts can reach speeds of up to 70 miles per hour in flight. But the bird is also one of Scotland’s fastest declining, with the population crashing by 59 per cent since 1995.

Now, as swifts prepare to make their epic 6,000 mile journey back to Scotland to bring up their chicks in the coming months, RSPB Scotland says some birds hoping to lay their eggs here will be thwarted because their former homes under the eaves are gone, as are the spaces once left for them. The charity yesterday appealed to people in towns and cities to help the species by providing as many new homes for them as possible.

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Parakeet nest discovery hints at new conservation opportunity

29/01/2019

Rufous-fronted Parakeet, a threatened psittacine endemic to Colombia, has been recorded nesting inside a building for the first time, possibly offering a new conservation opportunity for this rare and range-restricted species.

An almost all-green, dainty parakeet just 18-19 cm in length, Rufous-fronted Parakeet inhabits the temperate tree-line and open paramo (grass-shrub zone) mainly between 3,000-4,000 m altitude in Colombia's Central Andes. The species is listed in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as 'Vulnerable' to extinction, and is included in a project of the Colombian NGO, Fundación ProAves, for the protection and recovery of threatened parrots of the Cordillera Central (Central Andes), which has been supported by Loro Parque Fundación since 2003.

The species' favoured habitat is contracting due to agricultural activities, especially cattle grazing and related burning. Farmers replace the native plants with grass, which is bad news for the paramo as cattle slowly erode the land, making it unfertile and poorer at retaining water. It may be that Rufous-fronted Parakeets can tolerate some habitat alteration, as they are sometimes observed feeding in fallow fields and areas altered by grazing. They are social birds which are usually observed in flocks, sometimes consisting of as many as 100 individuals. They feed on or near the ground, mostly taking grass seeds, as well as some small fruits and flowers of shrubs and bushes.

In February 2007, a field team at ProAves made the singular discovery of the first-ever nest of this species. It was constructed of moss and placed 18 m high in the canopy of a guayabo tree (Myrcianthes sp) growing in an open area of sub-paramo, at 3,000 m above sea level (asl). Observations by the ProAves biologists revealed that six parakeets visited the nest daily, which strongly suggests that the species can be a co-operative breeder. Remarkably, until the recent discovery of the nest in a building, the tree nest had remained the only documented nest of the species.

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WORLD'S RAREST BIRDS RETURN TO WILD A DECADE AFTER THEY WERE THOUGHT TO BE EXTINCT

DEC 29, 2018 15:55 PM IST

Researchers have released 21 ducks of the species called as the Madagascar pochards – the rarest birds in the world – into their new home in a rescue effort to conserve the species, BBC reported.

The release was one in a series of steps that an international team of conservationists have taken to recover the duck's numbers.

Just a decade ago, the species of diving duck was thought to have been wiped out completely. The ducks were rediscovered in a remote lake in 2006, after the last confirmed sighting of the species at Lake Alaotra in Madagascar in 1991.

The ducks were then taken under the wing of an army of conservationists and researchers from wildlife organizations and the Government of Madagascar.

Since the 1960s, Madagascar pochard numbers have come down dramatically because of many new fish species that found their way into the lakes, killing off the pochard chicks in large numbers and damaging the bird's nesting sites.

The problem was made much worse by polluted water, which forced the few remaining birds into a single, untouched lake in central Madagascar.

They were only "clinging on to existence in a place not really suited to them", said Rob Shaw, head of conservation programmes at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) to BBC. "The threats that they face across the rest of Madagascar - and why they've been wiped out so extensively – are vast."

The WWT along with Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, The Peregrine Fund and the Government of Madagascar teamed up to rescue pochard eggs and raise the species back to healthy numbers in captivity.

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Conservation project sees threatened birds return

13:28, Dec 14 2018

A tourism company's efforts to put conservation at the heart of their operations appears to be bearing fruit as native birds flock back to Rotorua's Dansey Road Scenic Reserve.

Forest zipline company Canopy Tours has just finalised its bi-annual monitoring and trap resetting and found little evidence of dead predators across their 515 traps. 

The intensive pest control programme has been running for five years and Canopy Tours conservation lead Scott Davis said it was inspiring to see native birds return.

"It's really exciting to see different species coming back and a greater number of all species in the reserve. The tangible impact of five years of conservation blitzes is a win for all Kiwis," Davis said.

Recent new arrivals to flock back to the reserve are more sightings of Kārearea (New Zealand Falcon), our nation's only threatened bird of prey with only 3000-5000 breeding pairs left in existence, along with two species of cuckoo - Pīpīwharauroa (Green Shining Cuckoo) and the Koekoeā (Long Tail Cuckoo).

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Bitterns, curlews and lapwings at risk as vital wildlife funds dry up

Bird experts call on ministers to plug gap left by EU grants worth millions of pounds

Robin McKie

Sat 8 Dec 2018 16.00 GMT

They are some of the most elusive birds to nest in the UK. Indeed, they hide so well in their reedbed homes that ornithologists can only estimate bittern numbers by counting the sources of the booming sounds made by males in summer. It is a census that has produced alarming results. Only 11 booming bitterns were counted across the country in the 1990s.

But since then the bittern has begun to bounce back – thanks to a remarkable system of EU environment awards called Life grants. One of these, worth €3.9m (£3.5m), has helped ecologists restore the bittern’s reedbeds in South and West Yorkshire and rebuild bittern numbers.

Other threatened species to benefit from Life grants include stone curlews, golden plovers and lapwings, and plants such as the sundew.

But that Life grant system is now under threat itself, and unless a replacement is found a critically important mechanism for saving endangered species will be lost.

“This is an extremely worrying development,” said Alistair Taylor of the RSPB. “The Life fund has played a vital role in holding back destruction of the environment and loss of endangered species. If we lose them, it will make it much harder to stop the rot.”

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For the first time we’ve looked at every threatened bird in Australia side-by-side

Glossy Black-Cockatoos used to be common on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island until possums started eating their eggs and chicks. After volunteers helped protect nest hollows and erect safe nest boxes, the population more than doubled.

But how do you measure such success? How do you compare cockatoo nest protection with any other investment in conservation?

Unfortunately, we have few ways to compare and track the different efforts many people may be making to help conserve our natural treasures.

That’s why a group of us from a dozen Australian universities along with scientists and private researchers around the world have created metrics of progress for both our understanding of how to manage threats of different intensity, and how well that management has been implemented. We also provide guidance on what still needs doing before a threat no longer needs active management.

For the first time, we looked at every threatened bird in Australia to see how well – or not – they are managed. Hopefully, we can use this to avoid compounding our disastrous recent track record of extinctions in Australia.

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The North Yorkshire Turtle Dove Project

16/11/2018

From small dreams of local action for threatened birds, bigger projects can grow! In 2015 our group of local naturalists, birders and conservationists decided to form the North Yorkshire Turtle Dove Project. Our vision was to collect accurate population and distribution data within the Great Yorkshire Forest as quickly as possible with a view to using the results to help this very special bird. We were a small group of dedicated volunteers with no real idea of how our dreams could grow so quickly …

Only a year later our success led to a new Heritage Lottery (HLF) funded project. A strong partnership was forged between North York Moors National Park (NYMNP), Forestry Commission (FC), North and East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre (NEYEDC), Howardian Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Scarborough Borough Council (SBC). The project area now covers a total of 100,000 hectares of land from Scarborough to Helmsley and down beyond Ampleforth in the AONB.

Our formal European Turtle Dove surveys started in 2016, with 28 volunteers in the forest at dawn. I was worried that the start time would put people off but quite the opposite happened, as everyone loved being out in the forest at dawn and it created a great opportunity for birding, with species such as Long-eared Owl and European Nightjar seen by some volunteers.

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Nighthawks' migration route tracked in search of clues to species' steep decline

In a quest to develop conservation strategies to protect a threatened species whose population has declined 80 per cent in the last 50 years, scientists at the University of Alberta have discovered the enigmatic nighthawk travels 20,000 kilometres each year in its annual migration from north of Fort McMurray to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

"Until now, we've understood very little about migration routes and wintering grounds of the nighthawk," explained Elly Knight, a Ph.D. candidate who worked on the research project with her colleague Janet Ng, U of A conservation biologist Erin Bayne and researchers from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C.

The research team needed to track the nighthawk to understand what risks it might encounter during the eight months it spends outside of Canada each year.

"We were surprised to find that they spent their winter in Brazil because most observations of them are from further south, in Argentina. We also learned that nighthawks return to almost exactly where they summered in the past year," said Knight.

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A group of Highland villages are luring hundreds of threatened bird species potentially to their deaths

by Reporter

 October 3, 2018, 5:58 am

A new scientific paper has explained why bright lights in a group of Highland villages are luring hundreds of a threatened bird species potentially to their deaths – and a lot is due to the moon, or lack of it.

It also says the research could lead to council street lights being dimmed at key migration times – especially on moonless nights.

More than four times as many Manx shearwaters were rescued in and around Mallaig in September than in the whole of the last migration season.

Around 400 this year have clattered into homes in the Mallaig, Arisaig and Morar area.

The bright light danger faced by Manx shearwaters comes at the very start of their incredible 6,000-mile journey.

The chicks fledge from the mountains of the Isle of Rum before flying to their wintering grounds in South America.

However each year some of the young birds can become disorientated by outside lights left on in Kinloch on Rum and surrounding villages, but particularly Mallaig on the mainland.

They often crash land close to the light source and many are then killed by gulls, crows, cats or dogs.

Now a paper published in the Ibis International Journal of Avian Science has revealed that the moon and wind play a huge part in the birds’ demise.

“A model was developed that used meteorological variables and moon cycle to predict the daily quantity of birds that were recovered on the ground. The model, explaining 46.32% of the variance of the data, revealed how new moon and strong onshore winds influence grounding,” says the report.

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Threatened orange-bellied parrots to hitch ride on plane in effort to save species

ABC Ballarat 

By Dominic Cansdale

Posted Fri at 9:36pm

One of Australia's most threatened bird species will be boarding a plane from Victoria to Tasmania's south-west wilderness next month in a desperate effort to save the animal from extinction.

There are only 30 to 50 orange-bellied parrots left in the wild, 10 of which have undergone final health checks at Werribee Open Range Zoo in Victoria ahead of their flight over the Bass Strait in October.

The zoo has been conducting health checks on the parrots throughout winter, with another six captive-bred birds to be released at the same time.

"They're quite critically endangered and at serious risk of extinction in the wild," zoo veterinarian Paul Eden said.

"Habitat loss is a major driver, particularly for their wintering grounds, so on the mainland a lot of habitat is being lost to development and agricultural land."

Introduced predators such as cats and foxes, along with disease, are also threatening the species' survival.

In the wild, the birds spend summer breeding in Tasmania, then spend winter in coastal Victoria and South Australia.

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Exclusive project sought for protection of bird species

Corbett Foundation and Hem Chand Mahindra Foundation scientific adviser Dr Asad R Rahmani said the government should implement an exclusive project for the protection of bird species as poaching and loss of habitat have been posing huge threats for b...

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Grasshopper sparrows return to Katama plains

 Lucas Thors

August 23, 2018

Grasshopper sparrows have returned to the Katama grasslands and pastures surrounding the FARM Institute, according to a press release from The Trustees of Reservations. The sparrows are a threatened species which had historically nested on the Katama plains and across the Island, but have not been recorded in the area since 2005, according to the release.

An ecological assessment conducted in late June by Trustees ecology staff to evaluate the farm’s habitat and natural resources led to the discovery of the species’ presence.

As sandplain grasslands began to be invaded by woody species of plants and trees, the sparrows vacated the area as it grew less suitable for nesting.

Trustees ecology assistant Caitlin Borck wrote in an email to The Times that seeing the birds is a good sign. “The fact that a small population used the FARM Institute’s pastures this summer indicates the birds liked the habitat, suggesting the pastures can be managed with grazing to encourage productive habitat for rare birds,” Borck wrote. “Without grazing, the habitat would not exist at the farm.”

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