Wildlife Disease News Digest

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Climate 'accelerating bird loss'
BBC News - news.bbc.co.uk
19 May 2008
M Kinver
Photo courtesy of Pete Morris

Climate change is "significantly amplifying" the threats facing the world's bird populations, a global assessment has concluded. The 2008 IUCN Bird Red List warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional stress on key habitats. The assessment lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction - one-in-eight of all bird species. The list, reviewed every four years, is compiled by conservation charity BirdLife International.

"It is very hard to precisely attribute particular changes in specific species to climate change," said Stuart Butchart, BirdLife's global research and indicators co-ordinator. "But there is now a whole suite of species that are clearly becoming threatened by extreme weather events and droughts." In the revised Red List, eight species have been added to the "critically endangered" category. One of these was the Floreana mockingbird (Nesomimus trifasciatus), which is confined to two islets in the Galapagos Islands.

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Alaska's largest caribou herd falls by 20 percent
Juneau Empire - www.juneauempire.com (Source: Associated Press)
19 May 2008
Area: Alaska United States

Alaska's largest caribou herd fell by 20 percent between 2003 and 2007, according the latest count by the state Department of Fish and Game. The Western Arctic Caribou Herd declined by 113,000 animals after years of steady growth. The reasons are not clear, said Jim Dau, the lead state biologist on the herd since 1988, but warm spells in the middle of recent winters may have played a role. The herd ranges from the North Slope to Eastern Norton Sound and from the Chukchi Sea to the Koyukuk River. It remains twice the size of any other caribou herd in Alaska.

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Colgate group heads to Uganda for extended study
Colgate University - blogs.colgate.edu
20 May 2008
T O'Keeffe
Photo courtesy of Frank Frye
Area: Uganda

Twelve students and two professors will spend three weeks in a remote Ugandan jungle as part of an interdisciplinary extended study course that emphasizes hands-on learning and research involving rare mountain gorillas. The group, led by geography professor Peter Scull and biology professor Frank Frey, will be working with community leaders in the village of Buhoma and park officials at the adjacent Bwindi Impenetrable National Forest. The village is a jumping off point for eco-tourism trips into the national park, where tourists can view mountain gorillas that are habituated, or accustomed to human contact. There is growing concern that the gorillas are becoming more susceptible to disease as contact with humans grows.

The Colgate team will help those in Uganda to determine if this is the case and, if so, how diseases are being transmitted. There are only about 700 mountain gorillas in the world, and half those live in the Ugandan park. The students also will be working with the Ugandan Wildlife Authority on wildlife management issues, as well as with Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a nonprofit organization addressing community health concerns. "I think this extended study is unique not only because of where we're going, but also because the students will be doing tremendously interesting research with people on the ground, those doing the actual work in the field," said Scull.

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Pollution eats up 3 species every hour
Economic Times - economictimes.indiatimes.com
20 May 2008

Three species every hour are being scraped off from earth due to pollution, it has been revealed at world conference to save wildlife. It was 65 years ago that dinosaurs were eradicated from the earth and since then, no rate of extinction has been observed as yet. But now a shock report on the destruction of natural habitats has alarmed many by indicating that one in four mammals are on the endangered list, which includes orangutans, chimpanzees and elephants. The United Nation's World Conservation Union reports that the list includes one in eight bird types, a third of amphibians and 70 per cent of plant life.

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