Attempting to locate one of the rarest animals on the planet, US government scientist Joe Madison pointed an antiquated VHF tracking antenna at a tangle of thick vegetation and twiddled some dials on the receiver. A red wolf, judging by the beeps, was in the vicinity but well-hidden. “Did you hear that beep? That’s a […]
Tag: passenger pigeon
One-two punch of habitat loss, capture hammers Southeast Asian birds
JAKARTA — Conservationists have underestimated the combined impact of deforestation and capture when assessing the threat to Southeast Asia’s bird populations — a one-two punch that a new report warns could lead to the extinction of dozens of species by the end of this century. Focusing on 308 forest-dependent bird species in the Sundaland subcontinent, […]
Can we bring vultures back to Thailand?
It’s the most dramatic bird decline ever recorded – faster even than those that robbed our planet of the Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius or the Dodo Raphus cucullatus. Since the 1990s, a staggering 99% of the vulture population in Asia have disappeared – a drop from several million to just a few thousand. As a […]
Europe approves vet drug that killed off almost all of Asia’s vultures
When Europeans first arrived in North America, they exterminated three to five billion passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) in the short span of a century through a combination of habitat destruction and hunting. In 1914, the last living passenger pigeon perished at the Cincinnati Zoo. Despite the staggering scale of this extinction event, three species of […]
Tracking one of the world’s last Great Indian Bustards to save the species
Bilal Habib is closely tracking the flight of a bird. Six times a day he gets its location, within a few hundred feet, through a GPS monitoring device attached to its body. One of the last members of its species, this Great Indian Bustard is part of the latest effort to save its kind from […]
Is Extinction Forever? Or Is the Passenger Pigeon Waiting in the Wings?
John James Audubon “was struck with amazement” at the darkened skies caused by the birds. The man who would become famous as an artist of nature was, not surprisingly, himself a naturalist. Yet his efforts to document the flock’s numbers were futile. “The birds poured in in countless multitudes,” Audubon would write. “The air was […]
Free-tailed funnel cloud (reprint from June 2011)
When Doppler radar first arrived in the area known affectionately to Texans as the Hill Country, the local television station meteorologists were understandably eager to show off the weather forecasting capabilities of their newest toy. Unfortunately, they got off to a less than impressive start. Night after night that summer, evening thunderstorms were forecast but […]
Rare Art Works by John James Audubon at Auction on December 5th Part IV
A rare collection of 82 original, hand-colored engravings of birds and quadrupeds by John James Audubon will come under the hammer in New York on 5th December 2012. “The Birds of America” was published in London between 1827 and 1838 by Robert Havell. Although some items will be purchased by art galleries for public display, […]
