Threats to Migratory Birds

[Deleted]

I think my bird-mad lecturer wants to spread the word about this, so I'll post the link here for anyone who's interested.

www.chrispackham.co.uk

I can't remember off hand if it's .com instead. Not on the computer to check right now.

[mizloco]

Very interesting

[stace]

I saw this as a news item recently. Humans can be very unthinking as a species sometimes.

[Hezz]

Ira, I will come back and watch this with a little more time, but just want to say that I have just finished watching one of Sir David's series, this one on India's wildlife - a country which can teach a lot of us about rehabilitating wildlife, having the world's best success rates at bringing almost extinct species back from the brink. There was a segment that particularly made my day: a small village where one man started feeding demoiselle cranes on their way through their migration. Here is a video I found on Youtube:


It seems like a rather poor village, and now the whole village is behind feeding these huge flocks - they were saying numbers in the 10's of thousands - that they manage to spare the grain to feed to a bird that comes and goes is surely a selfless thing. Makes me want to go and buy a huge sack of grain and donate to them to ease their lives.

[Deleted]

That's amazing, Hezz! If only everyone were like the people of that village.


One of my lecturers does work on a lot of endangered species, actually he seems to have a finger in every mammal and bird pie possible Big mammals and birds of prey seem to be his speciality though.

Anyway, he was once telling us about one country, I forget where now, which (before captive birds were available) traditionally caught birds of prey during the southward autumn migration. They taught the birds to hunt for them, took care of them, and then when the wild ones were migrating north again in the spring they would release the birds they had caught so that they could rejoin the breeding flocks.

He was telling us this as an example of a sustainable use of wildlife, because they weren't removing the birds from the wild population.

[Hezz]

It was lovely, wasn't it? And then I went and watched the three episodes from your link. Albeit in reverse! Those hides really are a blight on the landscape, as well. I hope the bird people are successful in their attempts to stop all this.

That other is an interesting thing as well - the differences in human nature, eh?