The beautiful bee eaters

The beautifully colourful bee eaters. I never tire of seeing them, as they flash through the air in search of insects or sit on wires sunning themselves. Every trip I've made into the forests is "greened" with a sighting of these birds. And even the backyards of Chennai for that matter.

I remember the one sitting on the wires at Siruthavoor, swooping, picking up insects, and munching them with glee.

At Bahminidadar in Kanha, among the tall brown grass of the plateau, there were these bee eaters perched on the grasses, a spot of green against the brown.  That sight has stayed with me all these years, and everytime I relive that moent of driving in the jeep, the grass crowding us on either side, and these flashes of green that made me gasp with wonder.

So I was especially thrilled to received these pictures from Mr Ramanan, a veritable bee eater photo festival!

The blue-tailed bee eater, seen at Sholinganallur.  A little bigger than the green bee eater.  Merops philippinus

The same chap.  They love to sun themselves and also watch for insects from these perches.

Notice the beak.  Sharp and pointed to catch those flying insects.  They generally bang about their insect morsel before eating it, to get rid of the venom.  They love bees incidentally.

Mr Ramanan photographed this pair of blue-tailed beeeaters at Corbett.  They are pretty gregarious birds, hang around in large groups, and are also monogamous for a season, so this may have been a "pair"?

The smaller green beeeater, seen at Corbett.  Merops orientalis, the more common one that we see around our cities as well. seen at Chennai near the marshes.

The chestnut headed bee eater seen at Thengumaragada, Kotagiri, Nilgiris.  Merops leschenaulti.  I have not yet seen this bird.  The chestnut head glints in the sun!

And neither have I seen this one.  The blue bearded bee eater!  Nyctyornis athertoni.  Amazing isnt it?  It is o the largest bee eater in India I'm guessing at about a foot in height, with a different square-ended tail.

Check out the beard feathers in this profile shot!  They are supposedly loners, and have a loud cackling call.

Little birds, with prominent sharp beaks, the bee eaters are a delightful introduction to birding, as they are active and busy and not so shy either.

Maybe this year I will see the bearded fellow?

Mangalajodi

I wrote about the Godwits of Mangalajodi and here is a piece after my own heart.

 Birdwatching: Flying wild

How a village near Odisha’s Chilika Lake, once infamous for hunting, transformed into a haven for migratory birds

A whiskered tern. Photographs by Ananda Banerjee/Mint

Today, the Mangalajodi marshes on the northern fringes of Odisha’s Chilika Lake are again a haven for water birds. Thousands of them flock there every winter, from November-February. The black-tailed godwit, the Siberian bluethroat, an assortment of ducks, geese, grebes, harriers, bitterns, herons, snipes, gulls, terns and crakes—you get to see them all. Many of them fly thousands of miles south to beat the harsh winter in their breeding grounds. According to local bird guides, some migratory birds have even started staying back in the area.

Chilika is the largest coastal lagoon in the country. It is spread over 1,100 sq. km and three districts: Puri, Khurda and Ganjam. Mangalajodi is one of 132 villages that dot this vast lake adjoining the Bay of Bengal. It is a poor, sleepy fishing village with a population of about 5,000, most of whom live off the land. So a wild duck for the pot or a waterfowl for a feast is not uncommon.

But in the early 1990s, the birds came under attack on a much bigger scale as Mangalajodi gained notoriety for the exploits of Kishore Behera. He is said to have begun poaching as many as 4,000 ducks daily, using nets, traps and pesticides, supplying the birds to markets nearby. Behera came to be known as the “Veerappan of Chilika”, a reference to the infamous sandalwood smuggler who eluded the authorities for years.

By 2001, Mangalajodi had begun to be described as a “poachers’ paradise”. The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) reported that the number of birds had dwindled to an estimated 5,000 during the migratory season, down from the many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that would be spotted earlier.

That was a time when “villagers were expected to carry a wild duck as a gift to officials to get work done, or if they were visiting family or friends outside Mangalajodi,” says Nilanjan Behera, founding chairperson of the Mangalajodi Ecotourism Trust (MET), a community-owned and operated eco-tourism enterprise that has been working on conservation issues since 2010.

Slowly but surely, efforts such as MET’s have brought about a remarkable change in Mangalajodi. The villagers are now involved in conservation. Binod Banik, 29, who dropped out of school in class VIII and was my guide for the two days I spent in the village, can easily spot about 70 of the 211 bird species recorded in the village. Bala, who effortlessly navigates the boat through the tangle of floating vegetation, knows exactly where to find an elusive crake in the reed beds.

Both Binod and Bala are members of MET. Their new-found winter professions have given them a certain social status and a better life; in summer, Banik works at a shop, while Bala goes back to fishing. The number of visitors to their village has been going up every season, and there is a growing pride among villagers in showcasing the avian diversity and setting an example in conservation.

Sugyan Behera, a bird guide, shows off a photo album in which his father, also a guide, has neatly pasted the currency notes of different countries that he and 12 other guides got as tips. George Washington, the first US president, looks down from the one-dollar bill in the plastic album, which also has a Bhutanese ngultrum, Bangladeshi taka, United Arab Emirates dirham and currencies from South-East Asian countries.

Mangalajodi is slowly turning into a birding destination, says Nilanjan. India Post has recognized the change, releasing a special cover on Mangalajodi in association with the Eastern Indian Philatelic Association.

The transformation, however, wasn’t easy. Nilanjan recalls the day he was mocked by his college teacher as someone who belonged to a village of poachers. That was in the 1990s. “I wanted to do something to change the image,” he says.

“The marshland of Mangalajodi comes under the revenue and irrigation departments. So the forest department had no land or presence in and around Mangalajodi. There was no control over poaching. Also, the village had little idea about conservation and wildlife protection,” says Nilanjan.

With the help of Wild Orissa, a non-profit, they formed a bird protection group called Sri Mahavir Pakshi Suraksha Samiti (SMPSS) in 2000. In 2010, this became the MET, with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Foundation India and Indian Grameen Services, a non-profit, playing a pivotal role in its establishment. Today, it provides alternative livelihoods for 70 households.

The turning point came in 1996, when they managed to convince Kishore Behera to give up poaching and take up pisciculture. Other poachers followed suit.

It took another decade or more for the SMPSS to get organized as a community-based conservation project, but this was the period when birdlife began returning to the village. Gradually, the villagers, too, began to understand how avian tourism could help them. Many villagers work under MET as boatmen, guides, souvenir shop operators and hospitality service providers.

Today, the marshland teems with birds. According to the BNHS, Mangalajodi sees around 150,000 migratory birds every year; it’s designated as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International, the world’s largest nature conservation partnership.

N. Sunil Kumar, director, RBS Foundation India, says: “Mangalajodi has struggled to get out of the infamy it had gained due to bird poaching in the 1990s. Today, the place is considered one of the best to spot different species of birds.”

It is now off the radar of Kishore Behera, who has left the village, and on the radar of tourists. Around 1,000 tourists visit every season. A number of hotel chains are showing interest in the area.

It is equally clear, however, that Mangalajodi cannot sustain mass tourism. Much, then, will depend on how Mangalajodi and MET walk the tightrope between economics and environment.

The poor Houbara Bustard

What is it with men and aphrodisiacs and wildlife?





For Saudis and Pakistan, a Bird of Contention - NYTimes.com

Photo

Pakistanis last year in Baluchistan Province with their catch of houbara bustard. Foreign hunting permits have been canceled. Credit Talha Ali 

For decades, royal Arab hunting expeditions have traveled to the far reaches of Pakistan in pursuit of the houbara bustard — a waddling, migratory bird whose meat, they believe, contains aphrodisiac powers.

Little expense is spared for the elaborate winter hunts. Cargo planes fly tents and luxury jeeps into custom-built desert airstrips, followed by private jets carrying the kings and princes of Persian Gulf countries along with their precious charges: expensive hunting falcons that are used to kill the white-plumed houbara.

This year’s hunt, however, has run into difficulty.

It started in November, when the High Court in Baluchistan, the vast and tumultuous Pakistani province that is a favored hunting ground, canceled all foreign hunting permits in response to complaints from conservationists.

Those experts say the houbara’s habitat, and perhaps the long-term survival of the species, which is already considered threatened, has been endangered by the ferocious pace of hunting.

That legal order ballooned into a minor political crisis last week when a senior Saudi prince and his entourage landed in Baluchistan, attracting unusually critical media attention and a legal battle that is scheduled to reach the country’s Supreme Court in the coming days.

Anger among conservationists was heightened by the fact that the prince — Fahd bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the governor of Tabuk province — along with his entourage had killed 2,100 houbara over 21 days during last year’s hunt, according to an official report leaked to the Pakistani news media, or about 20 times more than his allocated quota.

Still, Prince Fahd faced little censure when he touched down in Dalbandin, a dusty town near the Afghan border on Wednesday, to be welcomed by a delegation led by a cabinet minister and including senior provincial officials.

His reception was a testament, critics say, to the money-driven magnetism of Saudi influence in Pakistan, and the walk-on role of the humble bustard in cementing that relationship.

“This is a clear admission of servility to the rich Arabs,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor and longtime critic of what he calls “Saudization” in Pakistan. “They come here, hunt with impunity, and are given police protection in spite of the fact that they are violating local laws.”

The dispute has focused attention on a practice that started in the 1970s, when intensive hunting in the Persian Gulf nearly rendered the houbara extinct there, and with it a cherished tradition considered the sport of kings.

As the houbara migrated from its breeding grounds in Siberia, newly enriched Persian Gulf royalty flocked to the deserts and fields of Pakistan, where they were welcomed with open arms by the country’s leaders.

For the Pakistanis, the hunt has become an opportunity to earn money and engage in a form of soft diplomacy.

Although only 29 foreigners have been permitted houbara licenses this year, according to press reports, they include some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Middle East, including the kings of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the Emir of Kuwait and the ruler of Dubai.

Their devotion to the houbara can seem mysterious to outsiders. The bird’s meat is bitter and stringy, and its supposed aphrodisiac properties are not supported by scientific evidence.

But falcon hunting, and the pursuit of the houbara, occupy a romantic place in the Bedouin Arab culture.

In Pakistan, the lavish nature of the winter hunts, which take place largely away from public scrutiny, have become the stuff of legend. In the early ’90s, it was reported, the Saudi king arrived in Pakistan with a retinue of dancing camels.

To curry favor with local communities, the Arab hunters have built roads, schools, madrassas and mosques, as well as several international-standard airstrips in unlikely places.

The only airport, at Rahim Yar Khan in the south of Punjab Province, is named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the former ruler of Abu Dhabi.

In recent times the hunts have also played a role, albeit unwitting, in the United States’s war against Al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden took refuge at a houbara hunting camp in western Afghanistan in the late 1990s, by several accounts, at a time when the C.I.A. was plotting to assassinate him with a missile strike.

Photo

A falcon, right, tried to catch a houbara bustard during a falconry competition in Hameem, the United Arab Emirates, last December. Baluchistan is a popular place to hunt the bustard. CreditKarim Sahib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

The journalist Steve Coll wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Ghost Wars,” that American officials declined to take the shot, fearing that the Arab sheikh who was hosting Bin Laden would have been at risk of dying in the attack.

For several years starting in 2004, the C.I.A. used an Arab-built airstrip at Shamsi, a barren desert valley in central Baluchistan, to launch drone strikes against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

When news of the American base stirred a scandal in Pakistan’s Parliament in 2011, the country’s air force chief sought to deflect blame onto the United Arab Emirates government.

The deserts around Dalbandin, where Prince Fahd landed on Wednesday, were the site of Pakistan’s first nuclear test explosion in 1998, and are an established way station for heroin smugglers and Taliban insurgents.

But the growing influence of Gulf Arab countries is not universally appreciated. Progressive Pakistanis bemoan their conservative influence on society, and the infusion of petrodollars for jihadi groups.

The hunts have also come under attack. In Baluchistan, where the houbara is the provincial symbol, some royal hunts had to be curtailed after Baluch separatist rebels opened fire on hunting parties.

Now the battle has shifted to the capital, Islamabad. The prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, enjoys close relations with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, where he spent much of his exile between 2000 and 2007 — one reason, critics believe, for the indulgence shown toward Prince Fahd.

Mr. Sharif sent his federal planning minister, Ahsan Iqbal, to greet Prince Fahd in Dalbandin, as well as Baluchistan’s minister for sports and culture.

“Not a single political leader reacted against illegal hunting by Arab princes,” Asma Jahangir, a prominent human rights campaigner, posted on Twitter.

Although Mr. Sharif never confirmed it, Saudi Arabia is widely believed to have injected $1.5 billion into Mr. Sharif’s government last year to help prop up the ailing economy. Last year in Islamabad, Mr. Sharif laid out a lavish welcome for the other Saudi hunting permit holder: Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who last month was inaugurated as king.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has termed the houbara a vulnerable species, and India has banned the hunt. The Baluchistan court order in November cited Pakistan’s obligation to international conservation treaties.

Hunt supporters say the houbara population has never been scientifically surveyed, and complain that the royal visits are being unnecessarily politicized.

“The foreigners are a blessing, not a problem,” said Ernest Shams of Houbara Foundation International Pakistan, a charity that works with the United Arab Emirates government to boost houbara stocks. “They bring so much money into the country.”

In a bid to overcome the court ban, the Baluchistan government has lodged an appeal in Pakistan’s Supreme Court that is likely to be heard on Wednesday, officials in Islamabad said Friday.

Prince Fahd is currently at his hunting camp in Bar Tagzi, surrounded by his falcons and a contingent of security — and most definitely not hunting any houbara, according to Pakistani officials.

“They are visiting development sites,” said Obaidullah Jan Babat, an adviser to the Baluchistan chief minister. “They are not hunting.”

Next in Asia Pacific

China Purges a Party’s Rolls (and Tissues)

Success stories and learnings

Restored Forests Breathe Life Into Efforts Against Climate Change

By JUSTIN GILLISDEC. 23, 2014

LA VIRGEN, Costa Rica — Over just a few decades in the mid-20th century, this small country chopped down a majority of its ancient forests. But after a huge conservation push and a wave of forest regrowth, trees now blanket more than half of Costa Rica.

Far to the south, the Amazon forest was once being quickly cleared to make way for farming, but Brazil has slowed the loss so much that it has done more than any other country to limit the emissions leading to global warming.

And on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have been made in the past few months to halt the rampant cutting of that country’s forests, backed by business interests with the clout to make it happen.

In the battle to limit the risks of climate change, it has been clear for decades that focusing on the world’s immense tropical forests — saving the ones that are left, and perhaps letting new ones grow — is the single most promising near-term strategy.

That is because of the large role that forests play in what is called the carbon cycle of the planet. Trees pull the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of the air and lock the carbon away in their wood and in the soil beneath them. Destroying them, typically by burning, pumps much of the carbon back into the air, contributing to climate change.

Over time, humans have cut down or damaged at least three-quarters of the world’s forests, and that destruction has accounted for much of the excess carbon that is warming the planet.

But now, driven by a growing environmental movement in countries that are home to tropical forests, and by mounting pressure from Western consumers who care about sustainable practices, corporate and government leaders are making a fresh push to slow the cutting — and eventually to halt it. In addition, plans are being made by some of those same leaders to encourage forest regrowth on such a giant scale that it might actually pull a sizable fraction of human-released carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it into long-term storage.

With the recent signs of progress, long-wary environmental groups are permitting themselves a burst of optimism about the world’s forests.

“The public should take heart,” said Rolf Skar, who helps lead forest conservation work for the environmental group Greenpeace. “We are at a potentially historic moment where the world is starting to wake up to this issue, and to apply real solutions.”

Still, Greenpeace and other groups expect years of hard work as they try to hold business leaders and politicians accountable for the torrent of promises they have made lately. The momentum to slow or halt deforestation is fragile, for many reasons. And even though rich Western governments have hinted for years that they might be willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to help poor countries save their forests, they have allocated only a few billion dollars.

Around the world, trees are often cut down to make room for farming, and so the single biggest threat to forests remains the need to feed growing populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the means to eat better. Saving forests, if it can be done, will require producing food much more intensively, on less land.

Continue reading the main story

“For thousands of years, the march of civilization has been associated with converting natural ecosystems to crops that serve only man,” said Glenn Hurowitz, a managing director at Climate Advisers, a consultancy in Washington.

“What’s happening now is that we are trying to break that paradigm. If that succeeds, it’s going to be a major development in human history.”

A Remarkable Comeback

Deep inside a Costa Rican rain forest, white-faced capuchin monkeys leapt through the tree tops. Nunbirds and toucans flew overhead, and a huge butterfly, flashing wings of an iridescent blue, fluttered through the air.

Ignoring the profusion of life around him, Bernal Paniagua Guerrero focused his gaze on a single 20-foot tree, placing a tape measure around the spindly trunk and calling a number out to his sister, Jeanette Paniagua Guerrero, who recorded it on a clipboard.

With that, the tree, a black manú just over two inches in diameter, entered the database of the world’s scientific knowledge. Its growth will be tracked year by year until it dies a natural death — or somebody decides to chop it down for the valuable, rot-resistant wood.

The Paniaguas and their co-worker, Enrique Salicette Nelson, work for an American scientist, Robin Chazdon, helping her chronicle a remarkable comeback.

Costa Rica: A Success Story

Costa Rica is considered a forest success. Much of the country’s old-growth forest was lost from the 1940s to the 1980s, but then new policies stemmed the loss, and forests have regrown to cover more than half the country. Serious threats persist, including a boom in pineapple farming that gives landowners an incentive to cut down recovering forest plots.

NICARAGUA

Liberia

COSTA RICA

San José

Limón

A large, intact forest area still exists in Costa Rica, extending to the south and east into Panama. The dense, natural forest remains unfragmented by roads and has not been used for timber production.

PANAMA

David

Forest cover in 2000

Loss since 2000

Gain since 2000

50 miles

Sources: Matthew Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Google; U.S.G.S; NASA; Global Forest Watch, World Resources Institute

The New York Times

Cuatro Rios, the forest they were standing in one recent day, looked, to a casual eye, as if it must have been there forever. Trees stretched as high as 100 feet, and a closed canopy of leaves cast the understory into deep shade — one hallmark of a healthy tropical rain forest.

In fact, the land was a cattle pasture only 45 years ago. When the market for beef fell, the owners let the forest reclaim it. Now the Cuatro Rios forest, near the tiny village of La Virgen, is a study plot for Dr. Chazdon, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, who has become a leading voice in arguing that large-scale forest regrowth can help to solve some of the world’s problems.

Indeed, forests are already playing an outsize role in limiting the damage humans are doing to the planet.

For the entire geologic history of the earth, carbon in various forms has flowed between the ground, the air and the ocean. A large body of scientific evidence shows that the amount of carbon in the air at any given time, in the form of carbon dioxide, largely determines the planet’s temperature.

The burning of coal, oil and natural gas effectively moves carbon out of the ground and into the active carbon cycle operating at the earth’s surface, causing a warming of the globe that scientists believe is more rapid now than in any similar period of geologic history.

Though the higher temperatures are causing extensive problems, including heat waves and rising seas, the increasing carbon dioxide also acts as a sort of plant fertilizer. The gas is the primary source of the carbon that plants, using the energy of sunlight, turn into sugars and woody tissue.

Scientific reports suggest that 20 percent to 25 percent of the carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air is being absorbed by trees and other plants, which keep taking up more and more even as human emissions keep rising.

Continue reading the main story

But when people damage or destroy forests, that puts carbon dioxide into the air, worsening the warming problem. Historically, forests have been chopped down all over the planet. Now they are actually regrowing across large stretches of the Northern Hemisphere, and the most worrisome destruction is occurring in relatively poor countries in the tropics.

Scientists concluded decades ago that deforestation must be stopped, both to limit climate change and to conserve the world’s biological diversity. These days, they are also coming to understand the huge potential of new or recovering forests to help pull dangerous emissions out of the air.

“Every time I hear about a government program that is going to spend billions of dollars on some carbon capture and storage program, I just laugh and think, what is wrong with a tree?” said Nigel Sizer, director of forest programs at the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington. “All you have to do is look out the window, and the answer is there.”

Scientists are still trying to figure out how much of a difference an ambitious forest regrowth strategy could make. But a leading figure in the discussion — Richard A. Houghton, acting president of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts — has argued for turning some 1.2 billion acres of degraded or marginally productive agricultural land into forests.

That is an exceedingly ambitious figure, equal to about half the land in the United States. But researchers say it would be possible, in principle, if farming in poor countries became far more efficient. Some countries have already pledged to restore tens of millions of acres.

Dr. Houghton believes that if his target were pursued aggressively, and coupled with stronger efforts to protect existing forests, the rapid growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could be slowed sharply or possibly even halted.

That, he believes, would give the world a few decades for an orderly transition away from fossil fuels. “This is not a solution, but it would help us buy some time,” Dr. Houghton said.

Finding an Effective Tactic

The Amazon, spreading across nine countries of South America, is the world’s largest tropical forest. The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, which for decades treated it as a limitless resource.

Sometimes aided by United States government funding for development, Brazil encouraged road construction that effectively opened the forest to settlement, including illegal land grabs. Crews harvested select trees for timber and then cut or burned the rest to make room for cattle ranching and soybean farming.

Deforestation was so rampant that by the middle of the last decade, 17 percent of the Amazon had been cut, and millions more acres had been damaged. Environmental groups worldwide sounded the alarm, as did indigenous and traditional peoples whose ancestors had lived in the forest for thousands of years.

Deforesting the World

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have destroyed or badly damaged perhaps three-quarters of the world’s forests. This map shows loss and gain of forest cover over the last decade, including mechanical removal, fire and disease. Since the 19th century, forests have been re-established across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, but in the tropics, they are still under broad assault.

Costa Rica

Indonesia

Researchers, led by a team at the University of Maryland, used thousands of satellite images taken from 2000 to 2012 to track deforestation around the world.

Brazil

LOSS

GAIN

Change in tree cover since 2000 for every three degrees of latitude and longitude

in square miles

5,000

1,000

500

Sources: Matthew Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Google; U.S.G.S; NASA; Global Forest Watch, World Resources Institute

By Jeremy White

As deforestation hit a peak in 2004, the Brazilian government came under international condemnation, and it began trying to halt the destruction. In 2006, environmental groups found a way to bring marketplace pressure to bear.

Crops grown on deforested land, notably soybeans, were being used to produce meat for Western companies like McDonald’s, creating a potential liability in the eyes of their customers. Greenpeace invaded McDonald’s restaurants and plastered posters of Ronald McDonald wielding a chain saw. That company and others responded by pressuring their suppliers, who imposed a moratorium on products linked to deforestation.

The Brazilian government used satellites to step up its monitoring, cut off loans to some farmers in counties with high deforestation rates, and used aggressive police tactics against illegal logging and clearing. Brazilian state governments and large business groups, including some beef producers, joined the efforts.

The intense pressure resulted in a sharp drop in deforestation, by 83 percent, over the past decade. Moreover, the Brazilian ministry of agriculture began to focus on helping farmers raise yields without needing additional land.

Not only were millions of acres of forest saved, but the carbon dioxide kept out of the air by Brazil’s success also far exceeded anything any other country had ever done to slow global warming. Norway put up substantial funds to aid the effort, but otherwise, Brazil did it without much international help.

With so little money from abroad, the gains in Brazil are considered fragile, especially if a future government were to lose interest in forest protection. Daniel C. Nepstad, an American forest scientist who has worked in Brazil for decades and now heads a group called the Earth Innovation Institute, said, “We could still see a huge slide backward.”

Brazil: An Improving Situation

Deforestation was rampant in Brazil until a decade ago, but campaigns by environmental groups and the Brazilian government slashed the rate of forest loss by 83 percent. That means Brazil has done more than any other country in the world to slow the emissions leading to global warming. It has received relatively little financial help from richer countries.

GUYANA

VENEZ.

Forest cover in 2000

Loss since 2000

Gain since 2000

SURINAME

Manaus

BRAZIL

Natal

Salvador

Amount of deforestation in

the Amazon each year,

BOLIVIA

Brasília

in thousands of square miles

9

6

3

PARAGUAY

0

250 miles

'90

'96

'02

'08

'14

Sources: Matthew Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Google; U.S.G.S; NASA; Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research

The New York Times

The Next Big Test

With deforestation somewhat under control in Brazil, Indonesia is becoming a big test of the environmental groups’ strategy.

Deforestation is rampant there, with people chopping down even national forests with impunity. The biggest reason is to clear land for the lucrative production of vegetable oil from the fruit of a type of palm tree.

Just a handful of companies sell the oil — used in a wide array of consumer goods like soap, ice cream, confections and lipstick — into global markets, and the environmental groups have been targeting these big middlemen. Companies controlling the bulk of the global palm-oil trade have recently signed no-deforestation pledges, and Indonesia’s influential chamber of commerce recently threw its weight behind a demand for new forest legislation in the country.

But even if Indonesia takes strong action, there are fears that the gains could prove fleeting. The economic incentive to chop down forests remains powerful, and crackdowns on deforestation can just spur profiteers to go elsewhere.

“Asian companies are rushing into Africa and grabbing as much land as possible,” said Mr. Hurowitz, of Climate Advisers. “That’s kind of scary.”

Still, with hopes running high that the world may finally be rounding a corner on the deforestation problem, attention is turning to the possibility of large-scale forest regrowth.

Dr. Chazdon believes strongly in halting deforestation, but she says that many of the plots of old-growth forest that have already been saved are too small to ensure the long-term survival of the plants and animals in them. Forest expansion onto nearby land could help to conserve that biological diversity, in addition to pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.

Indonesia: Still a Trouble Spot

MALAYSIA

Medan

Kuala Lumpur

MALAYSIA

Singapore

BORNEO

INDONESIA

SUMATRA

Indonesia is now the world’s hot spot for deforestation, losing more forest each year than Brazil despite being a much smaller country. The purpose of much of the clearing is to grow palm oil for use in Western consumer products like ice cream and soap. Companies and environmental groups have recently promised a bold new crackdown.

Jakarta

Bandung

JAVA

Forest cover in 2000

Loss since 2000

Gain since 2000

250 miles

Sources: Matthew Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Google; U.S.G.S; NASA; Global Forest Watch, World Resources Institute;

The New York Times

But the strategy presents many challenges. It will require abandoning marginal agricultural land, meaning the remaining farms will have to become more efficient to keep up with demand for food, as well as a growing demand for biofuels. And some scientists have warned that if the strategy is poorly executed, agriculture could merely be pushed away from forests into grasslands or savannas, which themselves contain huge amounts of carbon that could escape into the atmosphere.

Costa Rica, a “green republic” famous worldwide for its efforts to protect forests, shows how difficult a forest restoration strategy can be in practice.

Legal protection is minimal for much of the forest that has grown there in recent decades. The workers who help Dr. Chazdon track her plots often see telltale signs of illegal hunting and logging, and they say the authorities are lax about stopping it. “So many ugly things happen that we just lose a little faith,” said Mr. Paniagua, one of the workers.

Moreover, a wave of pineapple production to supply a growing world market is sweeping the country, tempting many owners to reclear their land. Growing Chinese demand, in particular, has raised the fear that “the whole of Costa Rica will be paved in pineapples,” said Carlos de la Rosa, director of La Selva Biological Station, a famed research outpost where Dr. Chazdon does much of her work.

But for now, the second-growth forests of Costa Rica, covering roughly 14 percent of the land area of the country, at least show what may be possible if the world gets more ambitious about tackling global warming. Brazil, too, is beginning to see regrowth on a large scale in the Amazon, and is spending millions to restore forests along its Atlantic coast.

Decades of watching the Costa Rican forests recover have taught Dr. Chazdon that, at least in areas that still have healthy forests nearby to supply seeds, the main thing human beings need to do is just get out of the way. After all, forests were recovering from fires and other natural calamities long before people ever came along to chop them down.

“The forests know how to do this,” Dr. Chazdon said. “They’ve been doing it forever, growing back.”

Correction: December 25, 2014
An article on Wednesday about conserving and restoring forests as a strategy to fight climate change referred incorrectly in some editions to the relative size of the Amazon forest. The Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the lower 48 American states; it does not cover more land than the lower 48 states.

 

We were at the lake on the 17th of Jan, and saw a large flock of Greater Flamingoes.





Arrival of Lesser Flamingos declines at Sambhar Lake - The Hindu

Arrival of Lesser Flamingos declines at Sambhar Lake

Aarti Dhar

According to a survey only 54 of the birds visited the lake this year, down from 1,812 recorded last year

The number of Lesser Flamingos visiting the Sambhar Lake and adjoining waterbodies in Rajasthan has declined to 54 this year from 1,812 recorded last year, according to a survey. The bird has already been declared an endangered species and put on the IUCN-Red List, the most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species.

The Asian Waterbird Census (AWC), conducted at the Sambhar Lake and adjoining waterbodies on January 13, has, however, shown an increase in the diversity of migratory birds and a jump in the population of other waterbirds. While the bird diversity has increased from 7 to 31, the number of birds has gone up from 3,155 to 3,495. The number of Greater Flamingos has increased from 1,325 last year to 1,853.

A similar survey was conducted at the Keoladeo Ghana National Park, where a large number of resident and migratory bird species was spotted. Even in foggy and cloudy conditions, the team recorded 44 species of waterbirds, including 18 resident and 26 winter migratory species of a total population of 5,879.

Among the major migratory species with larger populations are Bar-headed Geese, Graylag Geese, Northern Shoveler, Eurasian Coot, Gadwal and Common Teal, and among the resident species with a large population are Lesser Whistling Duck and Indian Moorhen.

The AWC was carried out by a team of Wetlands International South Asia and the Territorial Forest Division of Jaipur, led by T.K. Roy, ecologist and AWC Delhi State Coordinator. The areas covered in the Sambhar Lake include the wetlands of Gudha, Jhaping and Devyani. The threatened species spotted include Lesser Flamingo, Eurasian Curlew and Black-tailed Godwit. While the other migratory species found are Bar-headed Geese, Northern Shoveler, Eurasian Coot, Northern Pintail, Pied Avocet, Common Teal, Common Pochard, Tufted Duck, Gadwal and Tuff.

Sambhar is the largest inland saline lake in the country and the largest Ramsar site in Rajasthan.

Sri Lankan snake sighted in Seshachalam and Rishi Valley, in AP

Sri Lankan snake sighted in Seshachalam - The Hindu

Chrysopelea Taprobanica Smith 1943, a snake endemic to Sri Lanka, found for the first time in India at Chamala in the Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve of Andhra Pradesh.

TOPICS

India

Andhra Pradesh

human interest

animal

nature

wildlife

Considered endemic to Sri Lanka, the snake has now been found for the first time in India in the Biosphere Reserve of Andhra Pradesh.

Chrysopelea taprobanica Smith 1943, a snake considered endemic to the dry and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka, has been sighted for the first time in India in the Seshachalam Biosphere Reserve, Andhra Pradesh.

The development, which significantly expands the known area of presence of this species, also indicates its probable movement between the dry zones of peninsular India and Sri Lanka, which remained connected around 17,000 years ago.

The rare sighting has found a mention in the tenth anniversary issue of ‘Checklist’, the journal of biodiversity data. The January 2015 edition released on Thursday indicates that the sighting of the snake in Chamala area of Seshachalam is the first-ever confirmed record of C. taprobanica from India and anywhere outside Sri Lanka.

The study was conducted by researchers Bubesh Guptha and N.V. Sivaram Prasad of the Biodiversity Lab in the Tirupati Wildlife Management Circle under the guidance of the Conservator of Forest M.Ravikumar, in collaboration with Simon T. Maddock of The Natural History Museum, London and V. Deepak of Centre for Ecological Studies, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

In fact, an unidentified specimen suspected to be chrysopelea taprobanica was sighted in the year 2000 in Rishi Valley, Andhra Pradesh and even photographed by V.Santharam, but the specimen was not collected. “In November 2013, we collected the specimen in the dry deciduous forest of Chalama and conducted morphological studies and DNA test to prove that it is the same”, Mr. Bubesh Guptha told The Hindu.

The chain of broken hills in the peninsular India, comprising the Eastern Ghats, has remained unexplored compared to the Western Ghats. “The Eastern Ghats are a repository of biodiversity and further studies will certainly bring newer species to light”, says Mr. Sivaram Prasad.

The recording of this snake is considered prestigious as it adds a new species to the biodiversity list of India.