Via BirdLife International:

BirdLife International and its national Partner BirdLife Cyprus (BirdLife in Cyprus) strongly opposed today’s decision by the Cypriot government to allow spring shooting of Carrion Crow Corvus corone and Black-billed Magpie Pica pica. This is viewed as a backdoor allowing hunters to shoot European Turtle-doves Streptopelia turtur. The EU Birds Directive prohibits the shooting of wild birds in spring to ensure they get a chance to breed and raise their young. Last week the European Court of Justice ordered Malta not to open a spring hunting season for European Turtle-dove and Common Quail Coturnix coturnix.

In today’s announcement, the Cypriot government justified the decision by referring to the damage Carrion Crows and Black-billed Magpies cause to crops and livestock. BirdLife however, stressed that no evidence was produced for such damage, and that instead the government tried to provide a cover for illegal hunting of European Turtle-dove and other species protected during their spring migration such as European Bee-eater Merops apiaster and Common Quail.

BirdLife International and Birdlife Cyprus informed the European Commission when the Cyprus plans were announced. BirdLife has today filed a formal complaint, highlighting a clear breach of the EU Birds Directive.

This announcement of the Cypriot government is a post-election reward for the national hunting lobby and a provocation to the European Union. Cyprus, like any other Member State, needs to comply with EU law. If migratory birds are put at risk in such a way, many will be shot on their journey to Central and Northern Europe.
—Konstantin Kreiser, EU Policy Manager, BirdLife International

When Cyprus gave permission for the spring shooting of European Turtle-dove last year, the European Commission warned that it was infringing the EU Birds Directive – which was followed by a promise of the Cypriot government not to open spring hunting of European Turtle-doves again.

Fulfilling a pre-election promise made to hunters, the government this year is going ahead under the disguise of shooting crows and magpies. It is allowing six days of shooting (May 1, 3, 4, 7, 10 and 11 2008) across the whole country at a time when European Turtle-doves are migrating and crows are unlikely to do any crop damage.

The shooting of crows for population control purposes, although not favoured by BirdLife, is not uncommon. In Cyprus it has been allowed during June and July since 2004. This is a time when European Turtle-doves are not migrating, and permission was confined to restricted areas.

“There has been no change in the birds’ behaviour in Cyprus since last year. Therefore if June and July were good enough for controlling the birds last year, and the years before that, it should good enough for 2008”, said Martin Hellicar, Executive Manager of BirdLife Cyprus.

The “Nature” versus “Nurture” debate is a perennial topic. In Beyond Revenge, McCullough suggests that both revenge and forgiveness are hard-wired into us as social primates. In doing so, he manages to distinguish his claims that such human behaviors are natural from fatalistic conclusions, because “natural” does not connotate a justification for vengeful actions, nor does it suggest that natural behaviors are unavoidable.

It’s a compelling argument that McCullough makes, and a difficult task to balance a presentation of the science with readibility for reaching a broad audience. That is, his descriptions of behavioral studies in humans, primates, and game theory modeling seem to lose their potency in the course of the storytelling. Large parts of it come across as just what McCullough seeks to avoid: adaptationalist “just-so” stories. But his argument is well-written and persuasive.

For instance, his description of Robert Axelrod’s work on game theory modeling and cooperation is extremely insightful and resounding proof that natural selection actually leads to a nicer world in the long run. Primate studies, as he describes them, also suggest that the standard response - and healthy - mechanism of closure to an act of aggression is forgiveness and reconciliation. Human psychology studies back this up, and identify the components of apologies that elicit forgiveness the best.

And in the next-to-last chapter, he debunks the notion that religion is the shortcut to forgiveness and compassion. True, as McCullough notes, religious individuals often forgive more readily - *if* the offender is part of the same social network, and particularly if the offender is part of the same religion. Moveover, devoutly religious individuals are more likely to exhibit more intolerant and vengeful attitudes towards offenders who are outsiders, on the margins of society, etc.

The last interesting item that struck me, reading Beyond Revenge, was something that I don’t think McCullough stressed enough considering his argument that revenge and forgiveness are natural behaviors. That is, the differences between revenge and retaliation - revenge requires planning and forethought as provided by the prefrontal cortex (something that our primate relatives lack compared to us). A similar difference exists for forgiveness and reconciliation, which McCullough mentions but does not elaborate on. These concept pairs are related though, and despite the role of our mighty prefrontal cortex, are all part of our primitive emotional drives.

So I liked the book. In a world of suicide bombers and pre-emptive invasions, it is an important book. We can influence the cycle of retaliation that exists in a harsh world by considering the psychological factors that activate “the forgiveness instinct.”

With writing grants, time is at a premium. I still find time to scan the other blogs when I need a break, and here are a number that stand out. Also, check out tomorrow where I’ll cover the molecular bio blogs at Bitesize Bio.

Contrary Imaginations -

Here’s an article that you should read, given your dubious credulity of global warming denialism: VERY interesting, and insightful series of articles in Slate.The three part series was written by Daniel Engber and focus on how certain elements of our society (i.e. climate skeptics, the ID movement, and the tobacco industry) have cultivated this notion of super-skepticism in an attempt o discredit current scientific consensus.

The idea is that these elements attempt to cast a wee bit of doubt and then illogically deduce that the whole structure of scientific research is corrupt. As mentioned in yesterday’s Science Saturday, this pattern of thought resembles that of conspiracy theorists. A must read.

Still just a lizard (Evolution works, b*tches) - The title gets the principal objection of any creationist out of the way: yes, this population of Podarcis sicula is still made up of lizards, but they’re a different kind of lizard now. Evolution works.

Evolution and Ethics: Is Morality Natural? - This seminar addresses, in historical perspective, controversies about the cultural, philosophical, and scientific implications of evolutionary biology. Discussions focus upon questions about gods, free will, foundations for ethics, meaning in life, and life after death.

Shorebird staging-sites in short supply… - “Our grandchildren will not be able to share in the excitement of marvelling at the migratory feats of shorebirds if the current decline continues” —Dr Graeme Hamilton, CEO Birds Australia

Lab of O helps protect endangered right whales with warning buoys in shipping lanes - Endangered North Atlantic right whales are safer along Massachusetts Bay’s busy shipping lanes this spring, thanks to a new system of smart buoys. The buoys recognize whales’ distinctive calls and route the information to a public Web site and a marine warning system, giving ships the chance to avoid deadly collisions.

There is no pro-science political party - With the news that in addition to John McCain both Clinton and Obama have now pandered to anti-vaccine denialism I think it’s time to reiterate there isn’t a political party in this country that has a truly sound grasp on sound science. And in this instance it is clear that both sides are more than happy to pander to the denialists.

Greg Laden likes YouTube clips, and some originating with David Attenborough really stand out. Take this first one listening to the Magnificent Lyre Bird, a second with raising Whooping Crane chicks, and a third displaying the Superb Bird Of Paradise.

Attenborough has produced over 150 hours of video of the highest caliber, covering so many different areas of nature. My favorites are Blue Planet, Planet Earth, The Life of Birds, and Life in the Undergrowth, and my wife and I own the first two to re-watch every now and then.

PS - How could I forget that it was Earth Day?

Here’s an article from the Environmental News Service (ENS) on September 20, 2005: Cyprus Tries Education to Halt Illegal Songbird Slaughter.

NICOSIA, Cyprus, September 20, 2005 (ENS) - In an attempt to stop the illegal trapping and sale of migratory songbirds for food, the Cyprus government and BirdLife Cyprus announced Monday the launch of an anti-bird trapping publicity campaign. To get the word out, they will distribute a leaflet prepared jointly by BirdLife Cyprus, the government’s Game Fund, and police.

Trapping songbirds has been illegal in Cyprus for more than 30 years, but fines are low compared with money to be made supplying the songbirds to local restaurants, where birds can sell for two pounds (US$3.60) or more each. They are served to customers as an expensive delicacy known as ambelopoulia.

Image: Migratory songbirds served up at a local restaurant as ambelopoulia, a lucrative and popular dish, from RSPB.

According to a recent poll commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or BirdLife in the UK, 88 percent of Cypriots surveyed say they disapprove of the illegal trapping of migrating songbirds.

Still, half those polled had tried ambelopoulia, and 14 percent of those surveyed said it was their favorite bird dish.

Large-scale commercial trapping takes place between September and October, mostly in the Famagusta District in the southeast of the island, including on the British Sovereign Base Areas.

In 2000, BirdLife Cyprus estimated more than 12.6 migratory million birds were trapped each year.

Blackcaps, Sylvia atricapilla, and European robins, Erithacus rubecula, are the most common targets, but because the trapping methods are not selective, some 150 species have been caught in the traps. Forty-two of those species are threatened or vulnerable in Europe.

Two of the species often caught in mist nets are Cypriot endemics, the Cyprus warbler, Sylvia melanothorax, and the Cyprus wheatear, Oenanthe cypriaca.

The indiscriminate use of mist-nets and lime twigs to catch the birds results in “by-catch,” unsaleable birds such as long-eared owl Asio otus and the globally threatened lesser kestrel, Falco naumanni.

The trapping of songbirds persists due to the popularity of ambelopoulia. The restaurant price usually charged for each tiny bird - served either pickled or boiled in pilaf - can be as high as CYP 2,00 (US$4.25).

There is strong support for songbird trapping in some Cypriot communities, who regard it as a traditional form of hunting which ought to be exempt from European law. But local anti-trapping campaigners point out that it has become a multi-million pound industry, with nothing traditional about it.

Image: A European robin trapped on a limed twig is headed for a Cypriot restaurant, from RSPB.

Once a way of supplementing a family’s subsistence diet by setting out a few limed twigs, trapping now uses mist nets, recordings of songs and calls, and groves of trees deliberately planted to attract migrating birds looking for water and shelter. A campaigner with the RSPB, investigating one such grove in 2004, found poles for mist nets permanently embedded in concrete bases.

“With demand for ambelopoulia still strong, we want tough action against restaurants which serve it, and truly deterrent penalties imposed by courts for bird-trapping offenses,” said Martin Hellicar of BirdLife Cyprus.

BirdLife Cyprus has been working in partnership with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) to crack down on the trapping. The partners believe that since 2002, their efforts have saved around 20 million birds.

With the law enforcement taking effect, some restaurateurs have been turning elsewhere for supplies of songbirds. Malta and Italy are seen as alternative sources, and one restaurateur discussed with an undercover reporter from the “Cyprus Mail” the possibility of buying songbirds frozen, by the container load.

RSPB Chief Executive Graham Wynne said, “The majority of islanders, strongly supported by the Cypriot government, clearly want this practice to end. Regrettably, the activities of a tiny minority of die-hard isolated hunters continue to bring shame on the island and one of the European Union’s newest members.” Cyprus joined the European Union on May 1, 2004.

The RSPB and BirdLife Cyprus conduct surveillance in the areas where the illegal activities are most widespread. They have provided information to the police in the UK’s Sovereign Base Area and to the Cyprus Government’s Game Fund, and illegal hunters have been arrested, say the conservation groups.

Links:
BirdLife Cyprus
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Expelled Exposed
“Flunked, not expelled: What Ben Stein isn’t telling you about Intelligent Design,”
via the National Center for Science Education

One of the foundations of my high school education was watching and discussing Jacob Bronowski’s 13-part series titled The Ascent of Man. It crystallized my thinking about Western thought, science, and the trends that humanity perpetrates. It inspired Carl Sagan to produce his series Cosmos, and resonated with many young minds of my generation. It represents what I think of when I hear the term “Humanism” in the context of open learning.

Below the fold is a clip from the end of chapter 11 of his series, where he says:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false - tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Inspiring. I don’t know if I would describe science quite that way (e.g., we can have absolute knowledge that the Earth is round, orbits the sun, life evolves, and a few other things that we consider facts), but this is exactly the problem when we discuss science vs. faith: the absence of certainty, but a “tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.”

These comments of Bronowski’s unify the concepts that (1) science is a logic for acquiring knowledge despite the inherent uncertainties of any observation or measurement, and (2) that it must compete with man’s unending tendency to affirm the arrogance of certitude and ignorance [i.e. faith]. It is embodied in the modern culture wars of science vs. religion, where observations of reality must contend with “faith.” It is also embodied by the observation that, across the history of man, dogmatic faith in an ideology has always been a decisive factor in man’s inhumanity to man.

Habitat Destruction May Wipe Out Monarch Butterfly Migration:

Intense deforestation in Mexico could ruin one of North America’s most celebrated natural wonders — the mysterious 3,000-mile migration of the monarch butterfly. According to a University of Kansas researcher, the astonishing migration may collapse rapidly without urgent action to end devastation of the butterfly’s vital sources of food and shelter.

I’m a bit late in posting this, but do you remember a few months ago, when two men here in Cyprus were tracked down after slaughtering 52 Red-footed Falcons (Falco vespertinus), for target practice? The incident occurred on British Sovereign Base Area (SBA) land, and the case went to the SBA courts.

Last month, the British SBA court issued a ruling: the two men were fined a ‘derisory’ €1,250 each. That’s it.

Under the relevant bird protection law, the British SBA court could have imposed a fine of up to €17,000 or up to three years imprisonment, or both. The shocking massacre of the migrating falcons – the worst incident of bird of prey killing ever reported in Cyprus – made headlines across Europe after BirdLife Cyprus released shocking pictures of the gunned down birds. The shot falcons – a species of global conservation concern – appear to have been hit for target practice, with 46 corpses and 6 injured birds left lying in a citrus grove a stone’s throw from a main road. The injured birds did not survive.

The defense argument:

After plea-bargaining before their court appearance, the two Limassol men accused of killing the threatened birds of prey admitted to shooting just four of the falcons, which they said they had mistaken for turtle doves. The shooting took place in a ‘no hunting’ area at Phasouri, within the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area.

How do they mistake falcons for turtle doves? If they weren’t hunters and had never paid attention to birds much before, I’d believe it. My impression of the hunters here in Cyprus though is that they are as familiar with species identification as a good birdwatcher, and could distinguish between different falcon species with skill. In fact, hunters still routinely illegally poach songbirds of specific species served as expensive ambelopoulia delicacies in village restaurants (who overlook the illegality), with estimates of 500,000 songbirds being poached this past Autumn alone. And these hunters claim that they cannot distinguish a falcon from a pigeon? - The obvious conclusion is that these hunters are bald-faced liars.

Birdlife Cyprus issued this response:

‘This is disastrous case of failure of a judicial system coming close on the heels of failure of an enforcement system,’ said BirdLife Cyprus Executive Manager Martin Hellicar. He added: ‘The shooting of these highly endangered falcons should never have been allowed to happen and the derisory penalties imposed today will not even begin to act as a deterrent for other would-be poachers in what is a well-known poaching black-spot.

‘Unfortunately, ineffective penalties such as the ones imposed today are the norm when it comes to poaching offences in Cyprus, whether this be with guns, nets or limesticks. It is high time for Brussels to take serious note of the degenerating poaching situation in Cyprus - particularly as regards illegal bird trapping, which doubled last autumn - and demand effective enforcement action from both the UK and Cyprus governments.’

Regarding the Red-Footed Falcon:

The Red-footed flacon, Falco vespertinus, is a small, handsome, migratory falcon and a colonial species that nests and migrates in groups. Strictly protected everywhere in the EU, the red-footed falcon has suffered severe declines in its main, eastern European breeding range in recent decades and is classified as ‘near threatened’ by BirdLife International. The falcon is also listed in Annex I of the EU Birds Directive, which means Member States are obliged to make a special effort to conserve it. This threatened falcon is regarded as one of the farmer’s best friends, due to its predation on grasshoppers and beetles.

I know, I just had a quote posting, but here’s another hot off the presses. In response to ‘framing’ as laid out by Nisbet/Mooney, PZ has the money quote on why Mooney’s grand scheme for duping the public into greater acceptance of science is bullshit:

[Framing implies] a demeaning opinion of the public, and it assumes that the only way to approach people is to “pare down” the ideas. I think this is false. I can agree with the general idea of framing as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I think [Mooney/Nisbet are] going in the wrong direction.

Science educators need to get people to accept new ideas, and they have the goal of having people learn more. [Chris Mooney] and [Matt Nisbet] are too mired in the politics, where the idea is to get people to shift more laterally, to get them to back something without necessarily expecting them to actually acquire new information. Feed their frame, don’t expect them to actually change substantively, but get them to adopt a policy in a way that doesn’t require them to actually change attitudes or beliefs. That’s fine if you’re trying to get them to vote on a bill, but I’m not interested in that.

We want to challenge people, we want to annoy them and shake them up, we want to make them rethink, we want to make them absorb new information and come out of the process smarter. “Framing”, as [Mooney] and Nisbet have presented it, makes all that undesirable. [Framing is] actually a process for preserving the status quo, and if you dislike the status quo, it’s going to be the opposite of what we want to do.

Exactly. The last thing we want is for the public to treat science like a list of facts to memorize. As I said recently on Bitesize Bio, what we want above all is to be promoting inquiry and discussion of descriptive expertise by kinesthetic instruction of the scientific method where we can. And where that’s not feasible, by engaging the public in thoughtful discussion as though they were adults. We must trust that understanding of the scientific method itself will unlock doors to greater rationality in the layperson’s mind, which he or she will then choose to walk through on their own accord.

Not framing.