Bird nest smugglers get 22, 14 years in jail

Thanh Nien News

HO CHI MINH CITY - Friday, August 28, 2015 09:32

A Ho Chi Minh City court Wednesday sentenced a woman to 22 years in jail for smuggling in more than six tons of bird’s nest from Malaysia and Indonesia.

Between May 2011 and July 2012 Vo Ngoc Phuong, 42, had operated a HCMC-based ring that smuggled VND36 billion worth of bird’s nest, causing losses of VND 9 billion in tax, the indictment said.

Her henchman Lu Chi Hao was sentenced to 14 years for his role in the smuggling.

Two custom officials at Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport, Nguyen Quang Hung and Nguyen Minh Duc, each got a three-year term for helping the huge contraband smoothly pass through customs.

Nguyen Trung Cong, a ground service official working for Vietnam Airlines, got a two-year suspended sentence for helping the smugglers.

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Africa's penguins dying off

Scientists don't agree on how to save food source

Associated Press

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – The cute, knee-high critters bray like donkeys and draw tourists near Cape Town. But African penguins – the continent’s only species of the flightless bird – are at risk of extinction.

As shoals of anchovies and sardines have migrated south into cooler waters, the population of African penguins that feeds on the fish has plummeted by 90 percent since 2004 along South Africa’s west coast, once the stronghold of Africa’s only penguin species.

This decline, recorded by South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs, led to four key fishing grounds being declared off limits seven years ago in an experiment to see whether the measure could help save the penguins. But scientists are still debating whether fishing has helped push the species to the brink of extinction.

In the 1930s, South Africa’s largest penguin colony had 1 million African penguins, and there were many other colonies. Now, only 100,000 of the birds remain in all of South Africa and neighboring Namibia, the only two countries where the species exists. In 2010, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the African penguin endangered.

Both fisheries scientists and bird specialists agree that the decline of the African penguin began around 2004 with a southern shift in anchovies and sardines away from the hub of colonies along South Africa’s Atlantic coast. Scientists are unsure why the fish have moved, considering as possible causes climate change, overfishing or natural fluctuations.

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Two more red kites illegally killed in North Scotland

Two more red kites were illegally killed in north Scotland during 2014 the Scottish Government have confirmed. 

The first victim was found last June near Beauly, and was subsequently confirmed by post-mortem, at the SAC Veterinary laboratory in Inverness, to have been shot.

The second red kite was found in September 2014, some 5 kilometres south-east of Cawdor village in Nairnshire. It was confirmed by Scottish Government testing to have been illegally poisoned with a banned pesticide. This female bird was part of a successful breeding pair which bred at Cawdor Castle in Nairnshire in 2014, representing the first breeding record of red kites in the county for over 100 years. 

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India bans large vials of vulture killing drug

The Indian Ministry of Health have put in force a ban on multi-dose vials of human formulations of diclofenac, a drug which is responsible for the death of tens of millions of Asia’s vultures, Birdlife International have reported.

The painkiller was banned from veterinary use in India in 2006 because of its lethal effects on vultures that feed on the carcasses of treated cattle and buffaloes, but human formulations of the drug have been illegally used to treat animals since then. The ban sees diclofenac production now restricted to human formulations in a single 3ml dose.

“Despite diclofenac being illegal for veterinary use since 2006, human formulations have been made readily available in large vials by irresponsible drug companies, making it cheap and easy to use illegally to treat cattle and buffalo,” says Chris Bowden, RSPB (BirdLife in the UK) and SAVE vulture programme manager.

“This ban means that the large vials can no longer be manufactured and sold, making it more difficult to use illegally for animals and thereby removing it from the primary source of food for Asia’s vultures. This is a huge step closer to bringing vultures back from the brink of extinction.”

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Life history trade-offs: why tropical songbirds have fewer chicks

Tropical songbirds produce fewer, high-quality nestlings per breeding effort than do songbirds that breed in temperate zones, according to a study published today. This study reports that tropical songbirds’ nestlings grow longer wings, and faster, which means they spend less time in the nest where they are vulnerable to predators

GrrlScientist

Thursday 27 August 2015 19.00 BSTLast modified on Monday 31 August 201513.32 BST

It has been a long-standing ornithological mystery as to why tropical songbirds have smaller clutches of eggs and raise fewer chicks per breeding effort than do temperate songbirds. But today, a study published in the journal Science argues that life history strategies lie at the heart of this conundrum. In this study, evolutionary ecologist Thomas Martin, an Assistant Unit Leader and Senior Scientist at the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Montana, compares nestling growth rates between closely-related species of tropical and temperate songbirds. He documents that nestlings of tropical songbirds grow longer wings, and grow them faster, than do nestlings of temperate songbirds. Further, they achieve longer wings without increasing their time in the nest, which reduces their risk of predation. Further, because tropical songbirds have more resources available to invest into their offspring, they produce fewer chicks per breeding effort and invest more resources into each individual, thereby giving their offspring a higher survival rate after they fledge (leave the nest). In contrast, temperate songbirds have fewer resources available to nurture their chicks and their offspring suffer a higher mortality rate after they leave the nest, so temperate songbirds compensate by producing a greater number of lower-quality offspring.

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Conservationists appalled at illegal killing of 25m birds a year in the Mediterranean

Glued, poisoned, trapped, shot – a shocking report reveals enforcement failure at a colossal scale as hunters across southern Europe and the Middle East kill birds with impunity

John Vidal

Wednesday 26 August 2015 14.57 BSTLast modified on Thursday 27 August 201500.03 BST

The Egyptians line their beaches with fine two-metre high nets that can stretch for miles across the Nile delta and will catch any bird coming close; the Maltese will cover whole trees in nylon; the Cypriots smear branches in glue to stop birds flying; the Italians will kill nearly anything that flies and the French like to set metal traps for small birds.

But the sheer scale of the cruelty of the illegal wild bird killings around the Mediterranean which was revealed last week has shocked conservationists and bird lovers across Europe.

According to the first study of its kind, which has attempted to put a realistic number on how many birds are killed illegally each year, possibly 25 million chaffinches, thrushes, robins, quails and many other species are being shot, trapped or poisoned as they migrate to and from mainland Europe.

But what has shocked most is that strong laws have been shown not to be working and are being openly flaunted by hunters. Nearly half the 25m killings occur in EU states where the birds directive applies, and many other Mediterranean countries also ban the hunting of songbirds.

British ornithologist and conservationist Bill Oddie this week blamed hunting groups and complicit bureaucrats for what he says is a massive failure of governments and the authorities to act.

“Around half the birds being killed are in countries where strong laws theoretically protect birds,” said Oddie. “The figures are shocking and it’s getting worse. Hunting groups in many countries are stopping the laws being enforced. Many people in the EU probably know or actually are shooters. People in power like killing things.”

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Up to 90% of seabirds have plastic in their guts, study finds

Birds are eating ‘astronomical’ amount of marine debris they mistake for fish eggs, with the biggest problem areas near Australia and New Zealand

Tuesday 1 September 2015 03.44 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 1 September 201504.31 BST

As many as nine out of 10 of the world’s seabirds are likely to have pieces of plastic in their guts, a new study estimates.

An Australian team of scientists who have studied birds and marine debris found that far more seabirds were affected than the previous estimate of 29%. Their results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s pretty astronomical,” said study coauthor Denise Hardesty, a senior research scientist at the CSIRO.

She said the problem with plastics in the ocean was increasing as the world made more of it. “In the next 11 years we will make as much plastic as has been made since industrial plastic production began in the 1950s.”

Birds mistook plastic bits for fish eggs so “they think they’re getting a proper meal but they’re really getting a plastic meal”, Hardesty said.

Some species of albatross and shearwaters seem to be the most prone to eating plastic pieces.

She combined computer simulations of garbage and the birds, as well as their eating habits, to see where the worst problems are.

Hardesty’s work found the biggest problem was not where there was the most garbage, such as the infamous patch in the central north Pacific Ocean.

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