DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 2, 2016

Can We Protect Wildlife?

Two major wildlife conferences will convene in September.  Both are critical to the survival of species that are being pushed to extinction by human activity.  Both demand the best ideas and intentions of humanity.

Illegal trade, worth up to $20bn a year, is now happening at an industrial scale, driven by transnational organised criminals. It robs local people of livelihoods and countries of revenue, as well as of their natural and cultural heritage and the associated tourism potential. It can also become intertwined with legal trade, as we have seen with python skins, posing challenges for authorities and consumers in determining legal origin. It is pushing many species towards extinction.

September will see the 17th World Wildlife Conference, or CoP17, convene in Johannesburg, South Africa. CITES will consider changes to the trade controls of close to 500 species of wild animals and plants, along with new and improved measures to ensure the sustainability of legal trade and to combat the scourge of illegal trade.

And on the eve of CoP17 the wider conservation community will gather in Hawaii for the IUCN World Conservation Congress, where activists, scientists and leaders from across the globe will debate the planet’s most pressing conservation challenges and how to meet them under the theme “Planet at the crossroads”.

The world spotlight will be fixed on these critical sustainability issues in Hawaii and Johannesburg in September, as we map out a path for the ensuring the survival of the world’s wildlife on an increasingly crowded and interconnected planet.

Elephants!!!!!!!

Beautiful photo essay from Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve.

Though Kenya’s elephant population is stable and poaching is relatively under control, across Africa savannah elephants are increasingly under threat

Saving Africa’s elephants: ‘Can you imagine them no longer existing?'

More On Elephants

Despite relative security in Kenya, Africa’s elephants continue to face alarming population declines.  Losses of up to 8 percent of the overall population on an annual basis.

Results of a multiyear survey effort released Wednesday reveal that Africa's savannah elephants are far worse off than anticipated. A survey called the "Great Elephant Census" estimates that only around 352,271 elephants remain—down from previous estimates of 419,000 to 650,000 elephants in 2013. The report's authors estimate they recorded 93 percent of all savannah elephants in the survey. Elephants in Africa are threatened by poaching for their ivory, habitat loss and human encroachment and conflict.

In addition to presenting new survey data, the report uses existing data to estimate that from 2010 to 2014 savannah elephant populations decreased by 8 percent per year, roughly double the rate populations decreased annually from 2005 to 2010. Elephant carcasses—mainly from poaching but also natural deaths—were also surveyed and those results suggest that elephant deaths likely exceeded births. The carcass surveys raise even greater concern for the continued existence of savannah elephants.

DAILY QUICK READ - SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

Water is Life

The study pertains to groundwater which is important to the region, but monsoon fed rivers continue to be a major source of agricultural water.  Still, with the recent conclusions regarding glacier melt in the Himalayas, the availability of clean, safe water is going to be compromised for nearly two billion people.

Sixty per cent of the groundwater in a river basin supporting more than 750 million people in Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh is not drinkable or usable for irrigation, researchers have said.

The biggest threat to groundwater in the Indo-Gangetic Basin, named after the Indus and Ganges rivers, is not depletion but contamination, they reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“The two main concerns are salinity and arsenic,” the authors of the study wrote.

Up to a depth of 200m (650ft), some 23% of the groundwater stored in the basin is too salty, and about 37% “is affected by arsenic at toxic concentrations”, they said.

Sign The Petition

Then share it with your on-line communities.  Will it do any good?  Who knows, but every little bit can help.

Hello, my name is Jane Goodall, and I’m here to ask for your support to end wildlife trafficking. I spend about 300 days every year traveling and talking to people about how we can help animals, but I know the power of social media can connect far more people much more quickly than anyone could do on their own. Please help me end wildlife trafficking.

Greed and the desire for increasingly rare “trophies” have resulted in a boom in illegal wildlife trafficking. This is a gruesome trade that is rapidly pushing the earth’s endangered species toward extinction. I’m meeting with some of the top conservation leaders in the world this year, and urgently need your support to tell them you want wildlife trafficking to be a priority for the international community to focus on.

Here’s Something Else You Can Do

This is an app that allows you to report on any suspected illegal activity regarding wildlife.  Join in.

It's estimated that 100 elephants are poached every day for their tusks and more than 1,000 rhinos are killed every year for their horns, meaning both could be extinct within the next decade or two. Other animals like tigers, snakes, pangolins and turtles have suffered major population loss thanks to poaching for their skins, hides, bile and more.

While there are wonderful organizations doing what they can to crack down on the poaching and selling of these animals, there are many people like you and me who want to contribute to the fight, too. Australia’s Taronga Zoo and TRAFFIC, the international wildlife trade monitoring network have created an app that lets us do our part.

Called Wildlife Witness, the app lets users submit information and photos of any suspected hunting, trapping or selling of endangered animals by pinning the incident to a virtual map. The submission then gets forwarded to wildlife authorities who will investigate it.

I’m Really Going to Miss This Guy

President Obama has set aside more land for wildlife conservation than any previous president.  Just think what could have been accomplished if Republicans put our national interests ahead of politics.

President Obama gave the keynote address at the 20th annual Lake Tahoe Summit, 20 years after President Bill Clinton spoke at the inaugural summit that led to a massive investment of public and private funds in the interest of reversing the decline in clarity of the pristine waters of the famed Sierra lake.

"The conservation mission is more urgent than ever," he said. "We made it a priority from day one, setting aside more acres than any administration in history."

In the last week alone, the president created two national monuments on opposite ends of the nation, protecting a swath of land in the Maine North Woods, while carving out more than half million square miles to expand the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the waters north of Hawaii.

But Obama argued that conservation of acres alone is not sufficient with the daunting threat of climate change looming.

"Conservation is more than just sticking a plaque on a sign and calling it a park," he said. "We need to embrace the conservation of diverse lands and waters because it will help us build resilience to climate change."

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 31, 2016

The Age of Humans Begins

If we continue our current habits, this will be a very short epoch.  Look at the list of human accomplishment below. 

The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa this week.

After seven years of deliberation, members of an international working group voted unanimously on Monday to acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a geologic time interval so-dubbed by chemists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000—is real.

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. And there's evidence in the geographic record. Indeed, scientists say that nuclear bomb testing, industrial agriculture, human-caused global warming and the proliferation of plastic across the globe have so profoundly altered the planet that it is time to declare the 11,700-year Holocene over.

• ·        Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is now on course to see 75 percent of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.
• ·        Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.
• ·        Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.
• ·        Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with our fertilizer use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.
• ·        Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

More Evidence of the Anthropocene

The conspiracy of virtually every government agency, academic institution and anyone with any common sense apparently believes that human activity may be the cause of global warming.  Bunch of fools – the carbon energy industry has the proof – global warming is a hoax. 

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.

This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.

But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

The increasing pace of warming means that the world will heat up at a rate “at least” 20 times faster than the historical average over the coming 100 years, according to Nasa. The comparison of recent temperatures to the paleoclimate isn’t exact, as it matches modern record-keeping to proxies taken from ancient layers of glacier ice, ocean sediments and rock.

Habitat Loss

The Tricolored Blackbird is heading toward the brink and we of the West Coast could actually do something to save this incredible social species.  Will we?

The Tricolored Blackbird breeds in groups of thousands, forming the largest colonies of any species in North America. Like the Passenger Pigeon, the bird's colonial nature makes it particularly vulnerable to rapid population declines: Tricolored Blackbird populations have plummeted by roughly 66 percent over the past six years due to habitat loss. An estimated 140,000 birds remain; all are in California.

American Bird Conservancy's Western Program, formed in 2015, is on a mission to save the Tricolored Blackbird from extinction. Working with researchers, ranchers, dairymen, state public officials, and several NGOs, ABC aims to identify and conserve key remaining habitat for the species.

Now May Be A Good Time - For A Pep Talk

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DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 30, 2016

Dogs Brains Process Speech the Same Way as Human Brains

This is not a surprise to dog owners, but it has interesting ramifications across many species.  This capability is not a learned or evolutionary response caused by domestication. 

Dogs really can understand what we’re saying to them, according to a new study that seems to confirm the dearest wish of many a dog-lover. And yes, that does mean if you say a mean thing to a dog in a friendly tone, the dog knows.

Most importantly, dogs are smart enough not to be tricked by gibberish said in a happy voice. They can put vocabulary and tone together, and the reward areas of their brains are most active when they hear both positive words and positive tones. One reward area didn’t activate at all if positive words and positive tones weren’t used.

Domestication might have helped dogs learn to process language in both parts of the brain, but it’s unlikely that it’s the sole reason behind it, they say. This suggests that maybe it wasn’t human language that made our brains process speech with both sides. Rather, it might be that many animals — including humans and dogs — use the same areas to process language.

Plant Extinction – A Slow Process

Invasive plants crowd out native plants leading to extinction.  It’s a slow process, but it leads to less environmental diversity.

Researchers from South Africa and Australia teamed up to study how invasive plants were linked to the extinction of native species. In order to have a framework to study and discuss their observations, they developed an "extinction trajectory" that consists of six steps plant species go through during the extinction process.

Though there have been no proven plant extinctions as a result of invasive species to date, the authors of the study believe that many may already be functionally extinct. In other words, the plants do not have the means to sustain their population.

"The main reason why there is no clear evidence of extinction that can be exclusively attributed to plant invasions is that invasions have not been around long enough," co-author and professor at Stellenbosch University's Centre for Invasion Biology Dave Richardson said in a release.

“No African Benefited From That”

Kaddu Sebunya is the president of one of Africa's largest conservation groups, the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).  Here are excerpts from an interview he give on a recent visit to Zimbabwe.

What poaching is doing to us today is what another form of poaching did to our grandmothers and grandfathers a century ago, if you remember our history well, through slavery. People came here and picked our brothers and sisters. Today, we keep asking what did our mothers and fathers, our ancestors, do to prevent slavery. People just came here, took our people and sold them off! No African benefited from that. But back to poaching; your children and your grandchildren will also ask you the same question 40 to 50 years from now. They will say: what did you do to prevent poaching? They will ask us how we lost all our elephants. Poaching is dire. I think we are under a serious crisis in Africa. Africa, for the last couple of years, has been losing 30 000 elephants annually. Many African countries have, in the last 30 years, lost all their rhino populations. All! It is now Zero! It is worrying! We have lost elephants through poaching, trafficking, not through any legal mechanism. That is the crisis we are against as AWF. Our lion population has halved globally. We need to do something about it. If we don't do anything about that, Africa will lose all its lions in the next 20 years, in your lifetime.

…let's not concentrate so much on animals as if they dwell in living rooms. The real threat is on the habitat. We need to start talking about the space. What space does Africa want to leave for wildlife? Our human population is increasing and we are urbanising fast. If the population of Zimbabwe is going to double, what space will we leave for wildlife?

DAILY QUICK READ - AUGUST 29, 2016

Donald Trump Is Dangerous

OK.  That’s not a man bites dog headline is it?  The Republican Party’s assault on science has culminated in Trump’s studied ignorance of the real world.  Now Scientific American is calling him out on that ignorance.

…one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.

…the major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago, we can only hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

We encourage the nation's political leaders to demonstrate a respect for scientific truths in word and deed. And we urge the people who vote to hold them to that standard.

Third Pole Is Melting

One billion people may lose the source of the water within 50 years.  But, Everest may become a much easier climb in shorts and t-shirts. 

The Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau, dubbed the "Third Pole" for having the largest ice mass on Earth after the polar regions, are rapidly losing their glaciers. Eighteen percent of China's glaciers have vanished in the past 50 years according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Air pollution and rising air temperatures are combining to increase glacial melt, threatening water supplies for one billion people.

Most of the 5,500 glaciers in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region—home of Mount Everest—may vanish by the end of this century. The long history of climbing through the Khumbu Icefall and up the Lhotse Face may become a rock scramble instead.

Hummingbirds Are Simply Amazing

A 3,000 mile migration for some, extinction for many.  Habitat destruction is the leading cause.  That’s something we could fix.

Imagine a Rufous Hummingbird traveling more than 3,000 miles on his annual spring migration from Mexico to British Columbia. Armed with a prodigious mental map of every place he's ever found food, the tiny bird heads to a familiar spot in California where he remembers a field full of flowers. He arrives only to find a big-box store and a giant parking lot. No flowers, no nectar. But the hummingbird has no time to waste; he spends the majority of his waking life gathering food to survive. So he flies on.

The Americas are home to 365 species of hummingbirds. Of these, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists 28 species, or roughly 8 percent, as endangered or critically endangered. For most of these declining hummingbirds, loss of habitat is the leading threat to their survival.

11 Places to See

Before it’s too late.  Even, always optimistic travel publicans are facing the reality of global warming.  These are good places to go, however, as you won’t run into any Republicans at any of them, otherwise they might have to admit that climate change is real.

Get your reservations.

Climate Change Isn’t The Only Problem

Human behavior is a larger threat today than climate change.  We might not be able to fix climate change tomorrow, but there are things we can do to protect wildlife right now.

Climate change is dangerous, and it’s happening now. It threatens wildlife and the ecosystems they live in. It will make life harder for billions of people, with the greatest harm hitting the world’s poorest people. It may make some parts of the world uninhabitable for humans, and will almost certainly drive many species to extinction.

But there are a half-dozen other environmental threats that are even worse.

That’s according to a study published this month in Nature, generally considered the world’s most respected scientific journal. According to the study, which lists ten kinds of human-caused environmental damage and ranks them according to the number of wildlife species they now threaten, climate change comes in at just seventh place behind things like logging, farming, and urban development.

National Parks At 100

Great collection of vintage posters promoting our national parks.

A collection of posters created to promote tourism to the national parks is part of the creative legacy of the New Deal developed by Franklin D Roosevelt. Between 1938 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration and its Federal Arts Project designed a series of artworks promoting, and inspired by, the landscapes and wildlife of the parks. The collection is housed in the Library of Congress.

POST FROM THE PAST - California Law Banning the Possession and Sale of Shark Fins Upheld By U.S. Supreme Court (5/25/16)

Two Federal laws (passed in 2000 and strengthened in 2010) made removal of shark fins illegal, but did not ban the possession and sale of the fins.  Every year millions of sharks are killed only for their fins.  The remainder of the shark is dumped back into the ocean to die.  A 2013 California law made possession and sale of shark fins illegal.  A group including restaurant owners, shark fin suppliers and Chinese American community organizations filed suit against the state.  Monday the United State Supreme Court upheld the California law.

California’s ban on the possession and sale of shark fins survived a legal challenge Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Bay Area suppliers and sellers of shark fin soup, a traditional dish in the Chinese American community.

Federal law prohibits shark “finning,” the removal of fins from sharks, but does not forbid possessing or selling shark fins. California lawmakers went a step further with a statute that took effect in July 2013 and had the impact of removing shark fin soup from restaurant menus.

What cultural relevance is gained by driving a species to extinction?

Many species of sharks are currently in danger due to shark finning, including the scalloped hammerhead, which is endangered, and the smooth hammerhead, which is vulnerable according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Between 1.3 and 2.7 million of just these two sharks are killed every year in the shark fin trade, and the northwestern Atlantic population of the scalloped hammerhead declined from around 155,500 in 1981 to 26,500 in 2005. Today, some shark populations have decreased by 60-70% due to human shark fisheries.

For more information on the impact of the war on sharks read this report.

August 28, 2016

Here is an update on the law and more details on additional actions to save the world's sharks.

POSTS FROM THE PAST - 1,000,000,000 Birds - Just Gone (5/19/16)

The just released State of North America’s Birds report is grim reading.  Based on a comprehensive evaluation of species population size and trends, ranges and threat severity the assessment reaches a stark conclusion.

 A billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970, and a third of bird species across the continent are threatened with extinction...

The first State of North America's Birds report finds that of 1,154 bird species that live in and migrate among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, 432 are of "high concern" due to low or declining populations, shrinking ranges and threats such as human-caused habitat loss, invasive predators and climate change.

Complied by experts from Mexico, the United States and Canada, the report breaks down species risk in 10 habitats. Even when these "high concern" species are protected by international agreements and or endangered species protection they are placed at risk by both human encroachment and the impact of climate change  on breeding grounds and food sources.

Most threatened, with more than half the species of "high concern" are ocean birds such as northern gannets, tropical and sub-tropical birds, including many that breed in Canada and the U.S., but winter in Mexico.

There are also steep declines in coastal shorebirds like semipalmated and western sandpipers and red knots, which have lost 90 per cent of their population; grassland birds such as the greater sage grouse, Sprague's pipit and chestnut-collared longspur; and aridland birds.  

Species with long migration paths have sustained population losses of 70% over the last half century.

...species in coastal, grassland, and aridland habitats are declining steeply. In particular, long-distance migratory shorebirds and species that migrate from the Great Plains to Mexico’s Chihuahuan grasslands have lost, on average, almost 70% of their continental populations...

Among the bad news, the report highlights some successes as examples of cooperation between governments and conservation organizations resulting in stable or growing species populations. However, efforts that have sustained waterfowl populations may not apply to many of the most threatened species.

The North American wetlands and waterfowl conservation effort capitalized on synergies between continental policy and funding (North American Wetlands Conservation Act), coordinated science across species’ ranges (North American Waterfowl Management Plan), and the delivery of habitat conservation on the ground by local groups (regional conservation partnerships called Joint Ventures). Nonprofit conservation groups played a pivotal role in this model by harnessing the energy of a crowd of enthusiasts, funneling their philanthropy and their constituent voices toward directed policy objectives, and fueling conservation mechanisms through matching funds. The success of this habitat conservation model has helped support consistently rising populations of waterfowl.

We have models that work, but do we have the will to implement them?  None of this is easy and the obstacles are immense.  We have a choice.

On the centennial of the Canada/U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty and the 80th anniversary of the Mexico/U.S. bird treaty, the governments and citizens of our three countries must develop a vision for migratory bird conservation in this century.  

If we fail the sky will be empty in the next century.