This is what most Cypriots think of when you put ‘birds’ and ‘a fun time’ in the same sentence. Either that, or eating them. This particular picture is from Fall 2007, when two Cypriot men found a convenient spot to go take some target practice, and shot 52 Red-Footed Falcons. They were caught, taken to trial, and given a slap on the wrists.

Image credit: BirdLife

I caught word recently about the publication of a book on the natural flora and fauna of the island. English and Greek editions are available of this 272-page coloured nature guide book. It contains extensive information, including photos, maps, tables and description of around 200 selected nature spots on the island.

It is described as a very useful tool for those interested in any of the following: Beach going, Walking, Birdwatching, Fresh water angling, Nature photography, Nature study, Ecotourism.

The book is being sold for €15 by leading bookshops and other nature related shops on the island.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is an influential article written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. It’s one of those pivotal articles at the dawn of the environmental and conservation movements, which describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen. challenged the philosophical assumption of Adam Smith that decisions reached individually will be the best decisions for an entire society and advocated “social arrangements” that produce responsibility. These arrangements might include some form of “mutually agreed upon coercion”, although perhaps “coercion and incentives” more accurately describes his intentions.

Today, the strongest criticisms of the environmentalist and conservationist political stances, advocating regulatory measures and incentives for directing human industry, are still being voiced by the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith. These critics – Libertarians – continue to take the position that anything benefiting individuals in a competitive economy is good, and any hindrance of those liberties is bad, even when scientists indicate that the opposite is the case.

Ever heard of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique? They’ve got themselves some neato merit badges, for amusement and “By the grace of all that is good about science.”

For the propagation of an ideal where science communicators can meet firstly, for drinks; secondly, for communicating; and ultimately, for networking.

Well, I’m a little far away from other science bloggers for meeting over drinks. And I admittedly blog more about nature nowadays that science per se. But I support all of the same things and occasionally jump in to promote science literacy. So let’s see what merit badges I’m qualified for…

Via BBC News, Sheep rule defunct Cyprus village:

In 1974, after Turkish troops arrived on the island amid political upheaval, the residents of Variseia – who were Greek Cypriots – received 24 hours’ notice to leave their homes as conflict enveloped Cyprus.

Eventually a divide was created to separate Turkish Cypriots from Greek Cypriots, a barrier that runs through the island. In parts, such as in the capital city Nicosia, the divide is only a few meters apart, but elsewhere on the island it stretches to over 7km wide. Variseia sits in this no-man’s land to the mountainous north of the island.

“This area was originally called the green line because a soldier drew the line with a green marker pen on the map, but we’d like to show the world it is a green line because it’s a wildlife corridor,” remarks Nicolas Jarraud, an environmental officer from the local UN Development Programme.

Pigeons, foxes and rats have got comfortable where humans once bedded down. But more exotic animals and plants have also found the lack of human activity in the buffer zone to their liking.

These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

The costs of an ignorance of science are not just practical ones like misbegotten policies, forgone cures and a unilateral disarmament in national competitiveness. There is a moral cost as well. It is an astonishing fact about our species that we understand so much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff it’s made of, the origin of living things and the machinery of life. A failure to nurture this knowledge shows a philistine indifference to the magnificent achievements humanity is capable of, like allowing a great work of art to molder in a warehouse.

- Steven Pinker, “The Known World”

Credit: Robert Moyle

In ScienceNOW, On the Road to a New Species, a fantastic illumination of allopatric speciation being correlated to a single point mutation:

The late Ernst Mayr, a famous Harvard University evolutionary biologist, was the first to notice the speciation potential of flycatcher birds in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands. During the 1940s, he described differences in the body size and plumage of several populations of the flycatcher (Monarcha castaneiventris) and asserted that there existed at least five subspecies. Evolutionary biologist J. Albert Uy of Syracuse University in New York state and colleagues decided to see just how different two of these subspecies were. One lives on a larger island and has a reddish-brown belly with an iridescent blue-black back and head, and the other, which is all blue-black, lives on smaller islands about 10 kilometers away.

To track down the gene underlying the color change, Uy and his colleagues took a cue from black sheep and pigs. These animals have a mutation in the gene for the melanocortin-1 receptor, a protein that helps control how much black pigment is produced. The researchers sequenced part of that gene from 28 black birds and 19 brown-bellied ones. They found a few differences but only one that mattered: a genetic change that altered a single amino acid in the resulting protein. It seems this change permanently activates the protein so that more black than brown pigment is produced.

Next, the researchers evaluated whether this color change might make any difference to the birds. They put stuffed birds of either color into the territories of live flycatchers. Flycatchers are not bothered by most foreign birds, but they will attack potential rivals of the same species. Black bird decoys drew angry responses from black birds but little reaction from brown-belly birds and vice versa, Uy and his colleagues report in the August issue of The American Naturalist.

In the lab, I happen to be studying embryology (in frogs as the model organism). I’m not going to blog on the theory or methodology of my research in the immediate time, but I am interested in making more general reflections. For instance…

Embryology intersects with the public sphere to generate some very hot political issues, such as embryonic stem cell research, and first-trimester abortion. The ethical question of “when does life begin” is the usual refrain. The “Pro-Life” political factions typically make the claim that life begins at conception, and that any intervention ending the embryonic development is murder. There are a lot of loaded assumptions that I’d like to dispute from the basis of my laboratory experience.

From the Project Operation Migration team, working to recover the endangered Whooping Crane:

Teaching birds to migrate is not an easy task. It takes a year-long commitment for every generation we release, and a crew of twelve to compete the migration. Adding an isolation protocol and removing all human elements multiplies the complexity by a factor of ten. We fly our aircraft with peripheral vision limited by goggles that hide our eyes and suffer through the heat of July in full-length costumes. We restrict all access to a small, but essential crew; keep the birds away from buildings and cars, and ensure that their every experience is as natural as we can make it.

Simple tasks like cutting the grass on the training strips adjacent their Necedah enclosures, or making repairs requires extra people to sequester the birds away from the area while the work is completed. Each migration stopover we select must have an isolated area to place the pen and another one to hide the birds while it’s set up. And all the while we live in fear that someone will approach the birds in the belief that their curiosity takes precedence over our hard work.

There are those that believe that our protocol excludes everyone but them; and others that feel tameness in wild animals is a fact of life and that only those that have learned to live in proximity to people will survive.

But Whooping cranes are a paradigm of the kind of wildness that exists beyond the backyard in the regions outside the security of a park. They are denizens of the open and inaccessible wetlands and surely we can make a space for them to exist as they were meant to be.

Most of the people who follow this project understand what we are trying to achieve but there are also those who choose to ignore it. Among them a woman who lives on Tooke Lake in Florida where crane #710 and four other birds wintered last year. The local residents understood the problem of the five cranes being attracted to backyard songbird feeders and agreed to stop the practice while the tracking team used all their tools to flush them away. But one woman ignored the pleas and continued to provide food to attract them.

Of the five birds that used her feeder, number 710 was the worst offender. Completely tamed to people and cars he began to frequent the ethanol plant near the Necedah Refuge once he returned to Wisconsin. Attracted by a free meal of spilled corn, he became accustomed to trucks and traffic. His presence there attracted other birds and often as many as 9 were there at one time. The tracking team tried using our swamp monster but it only worked for a short time and Mylar strips hung on string only worked for a day or so. It didn’t take long before 710 realized that no harm came to him if he didn’t fly away.

Above and beyond the job of monitoring the 79 birds that are now in this population, keeping 710 away from the ethanol plant became a constant problem for the Tracking Team. Believing he was completely corrupted and beyond rehabilitation and any chance of ever being wild again they asked WCEP and the Recovery Team for permission to remove 710 from the study. So last Tuesday he was captured and temporarily moved to the International Crane Foundation. Yesterday, he was relocated to the Lowry Park Zoo in Florida to spend the remainder of his life as a captive display bird.

It’s a sad story. Sometimes, the best way that people can preserve wildlife is to respect it, and stay away. And always, people should follow advertised “Codes of Practice” in appreciating wildlife.

In three parts…

Parts 2 and 3 below the fold.