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.

Millenium Ecosystem Assessment synthesis:

The most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem service changes are habitat change (such as land use changes, physical modification of rivers or water withdrawal from rivers, loss of coral reefs, and damage to sea floors due to trawling), climate change, invasive alien species, overexploitation, and pollution.

Blackcaps on a limestick. Photo copyright RSPB

Of those factors causing loss of biodiversity in regions across the globe, habitat loss, climate change, and invasive species are all getting a lot of attention from governmental and non-governmental conservation organizations. The impacts of pollution have also been addressed in campaigns dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.

Overexploitation of species, especially by non-selective means that result in large by-catch of a wide range of species, are a very direct means of human degradation of biodiversity that gets little attention from even conservation organizations (the exception is for marine overfishing). It’s very difficult to find information resources with good data on the biodiversity impacts of, say, bird trapping along migratory routes in the Mediterranean basin.

We do know though that some 100 migrant passerine bird species are caught on limesticks and in mist nets and killed each year, including 58 priority species for Europe such as owls, masked shrikes and birds of prey caught in nets and limesticks. But still it feels as though there is little attention being given by the major conservation organizations, and little study of its impacts by conservation biologists.

Rufous-tailed Rock Thrush

The first two are in English, and the last in both Greek and English.

Birdwatching in Greece (photo source)

Birdwatching in Athens

Nature in Greece

All three look great, and I would love to have the funds to get a good camera for bird photography. Alas, I don’t have a 1000+ Euro to go out and spend these days.

On a lark, I asked in a Cyprus discussion forum today about their thoughts on the Cypriot ambelopoulia ‘delicacy,’ and got this revolting response in return:

Two questions though – How would you know that the wild ones are better? (Why have souvlaki if wild is better, why not have mouflon for dinner?) And, what good are they wild if you poach them until you’ve killed all the birds in a given area?

Okay, that’s three questions.

Wild ones got to be better Caged ones dont get enough of excersise and are too fatty.

Well when they all finished in one area just move onto another area theres plenty – all this palaver about not enough to go round its just propaganda by conservationists innit

Mans gotta be fed eh

You one of them vegantarianistisms ??

It comes across as a kind of caveman-like thoughtlessness.

One thing I’m rather proud of having here on the blog is my “Bookshelf” page, providing a list of books that I’ve read and recommend on the variety of topics I’m interested in and blog on, along with some books that are academic mainstays in their fields. I admit I haven’t read all of the latter (I only have so much funds to buy books, and some are not found in your standard public library, especially in Cyprus), although I know those books well by reputation.

I’m sure that most readers don’t take much of a glance at this virtual bookshelf of mine, but I like having it anyway. And lately I’ve been thinking that it’s a bit too cluttered, that it should be pruned down to a more concise bibliography of where my mindset is. Perhaps I should take out books that I haven’t actually read, important works though they be. And perhaps I should take out sections that I do not blog often on. For instance, I have them grouped into the following sections:

* Popular Science
* Birdwatching and the Environment
* Cell & Molecular Biology
* Evolution and The Modern Synthesis
* Human Origins, Minds, and Society
* Philosophy of Science
* Politics and History
* Biology Textbooks
* Documentaries
* Field Guides

I don’t actually blog much on anthropology, nor am I an anthropologist. Maybe I should take those out. Similarly with the philosophy of science, or politics. How should I group the book references that I retain? Into two categories, “Biology/Science” and “Birds/Nature,” representing the separation of my professional interest in molecular/developmental/evolutionary biology, and birdwatching and conservation? Or should I add a third category, addressing “Pseudoscience and Science Literacy?” What about important references such as Textbooks, Documentaries, and Field Guides?

I think I’m going to prune it down to this in the coming days:

* Birdwatching and Conservation
* Molecular, Developmental, and Evolutionary Biology
* Science Literacy Issues
* Biology Textbooks
* Documentaries
* Field Guides

Darwinius masillae

I don’t really have to say much that hasn’t been said. Just read these expert perspectives on the newly unveiled fossil:

Introducing Ida – the great-great-great-great-grandmother (or aunt)

Darwinius masillae

Poor, poor Ida, Or: “Overselling an Adapid”

The Dangerous Link Between Science and Hype

And of course the article itself:

Franzen JL, Gingerich PD, Habersetzer J, Hurum JH, von Koenigswald W, Smith BH (2009) Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723.

Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth’s climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

That is the dilemma already implicit in current environmental debates. It springs from the clash of two opposing human self-images. The first is the naturalistic self-image, which holds that we are confined to a razor-thin biosphere within which a thousand imaginable hells are possible but only one paradise. What we idealize in nature and seek to re-create is the peculiar physical and biotic envrionment that cradled the human species. The human body and mind are precisely adapted to this world, notwithstanding its trials and dangers, and that is why we think it beautiful. In this respect Homo sapiens conforms to a basic principle of organic evolution, that all species prefer and gravitate to the environment in which their genes were assembled. It is called “habitat selection.” There lies survival for humanity, and there lies mental peace, as prescribed by our genes. We are consequently unlikely ever to find any other place or conceive of any other home as beautiful as this blue planet was before we began to change it.

The competing self-image – which also happens to be the guiding theme of Western civilization – is the exemptionalist view. In this conception, our species exists apart from the natural world and holds dominion over it. We are exempt from the iron laws of ecology that bind other species. Few limits on human expansion exist that our special status and ingenuity cannot overcome. We have been set free to modify Earth’s surface to create a world better than the one our ancestors knew.

- Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (pages 277-78)

Recently, I was told something about Sardinian Warblers (Sylvia melanocephala) pushing the endemic Cyprus Warblers (Sylvia melanothorax) out of some of their range here in Cyprus in recent years. That could be a big deal, with Cyprus Warblers which have such a restricted range to begin with, even if they are currently listed as a species of Least Concern. So, naturally, I took the time to look into it and find some more concrete data on the warblers and their population changes.

I dug up a paper by Derek Pomeroy and Frank Walsh in The Oryx (2002), A European endemic warbler under threat? Population changes in Sylvia warblers on the island of Cyprus. The abstract:

In the early 1990s the Sardinian warbler began nesting in Cyprus, and now has two breeding populations, in the west and north of the island. Observations of the western population show that its range is still expanding and that the endemic Cyprus warbler has declined in the areas colonized by the Sardinian warbler. However, the Cyprus warbler is still present in most of these areas, and hence, although the Cyprus warbler is a species of European Conservation Concern, the current situation requires further study rather than alarm. The Sardinian warbler is the more numerous species at lower altitudes, whilst the Cyprus warbler is more common at higher altitudes, especially above 500 m. Within their areas of overlap, both Cyprus and Sardinian warbler populations occur throughout almost all habitats; natural, semi-natural and agroecosystems. We recommend that monitoring should continue, with more detailed ecological studies.

Comments after reading the paper:

To start with, I’ll just get my naiveté out of the way, by saying I didn’t know that Sardinian Warblers only started breeding in Cyprus in the early 1990s. Prior to then, they were only winter visitors, even though they had been breeding successfully throughout the Mediterranean basin. That was genuinely new info for me, and interesting to learn.

The paper has a couple original findings that they described in the abstract, quoted above. Most importantly, the authors describe how data and personal observations suggest that the species are not in direct competition. It does not appear clear whether they are choosing different habitat features, or using the same resources. They note however the “almost total absence of detailed information on the foods of the two species.

The article’s discussion is also very interesting for its analysis of documented shifts in biogeography of other Sylvia warblers in the Mediterranean basin. For instance, the observed replacement of Balearic warblers (S. sarda balearica by Dartford warblers (Sylvia undata), driving the former to local extinction on Menorca within five years of the first reported breeding of Dartfords there (1975).

They also mention the near total replacement of Spectacled warbler (Sylvia conspicillata) by Sardinians on Malta, albeit in a much less abrupt shift. While the first breeding Sardinians may have occurred in 1884, it was not until 1981 that Spectacled warblers experienced a drastic decline, and they are now very rare on Malta.

The Malta instance is seen as a possible outcome in Cyprus with Cyprus warblers and maybe Spectacled warblers at some later time. Although the population changes don’t appear to be due to direct competition, it is still possible that the extremely generalized Sardinian warblers will replace the endemic species.

Despite the need for more detailed ecological studies needed to better know what is going on, I have not been able to find any articles published on this topic since 2002, leaving the question unanswered, just how are Sardinian warblers replacing Cyprus warblers in the Western part of the island?

Image:
Sardinian Warbler (Wikipedia)

Reference:
Pomeroy D, Walsh F. (2002) Oryx 36 : 342-348.
doi:10.1017/S0030605302000686

Shown here, the unusual courtship ritual of the blue manakin, as shown in David Attenborough’s documentary, The Life of Birds. What an fascinating example of sexual selection.