Recently in Conservation Category

John James Audubon's images may be beautiful, but they were created at the heavy cost of avian lives. 

In the deep dark chasm,

California condors are remarkable birds. They have a nine-foot wingspan, the largest of any North American bird! They are so large that they are more often mistaken for airplanes than other birds. Due to their size, Native Americans called them "thunderbirds," because the sound of their wings flapping purportedly made thunder. They are mostly black, with white patches under the wings. Another myth, from the Chumash tribe, tells that condors once had white feathers, but were burned when they got too close to a fire.

The critically endangered condors are in the same family as vultures, and many vultures are scavengers, meaning that they eat the remnants of dead animals. Unlike some vultures, however, condors do not have a particularly good sense of smell, instead using their sharp eyes to find food. They do not have talons and cannot carry prey, so they eat 2-3 pounds of food at a sitting and then sit for a day to recover! They are so big that they intimidate most would-be competitors for food. Even bears ignore them, and golden eagles are the only species that will fight them. Dominant, older birds eat before the younger ones.

Condors mate for life. When a male spots a potential mate, his head turns bright red and he walks towards her with his wings spread. If she lowers her head, it means she accepts. Although no actual nest is built, they lay their eggs in hard-to-access caves in rocky cliffs. Incubation takes two months, with the parents taking turns sitting on the egg.

At one point, there were thousands of condors in the wild. Ten thousand years ago, they lived on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, from British Columbia to Baja California and from New York to Florida. However, they were endangered by many factors. They were hunted (particularly for museums) and poisoned by DDT. They got lead poisoning by scavenging dead animals killed by hunters who used lead bullets. Their habitat was also destroyed, and, as more people moved in, condor collisions with power lines increased. Additionally, people collected the condors' eggs. In the Gold Rush, condors were even turned into pets. The entire California condor population was reduced to 22 birds.

Captive breeding programs saved the condors. In the wild, condors are slow breeders, but they "double-clutch," or lay a second egg if the first one is lost or taken. So scientists took the condors' first eggs, allowing the pairs to raise the second eggs. The first eggs were put in an incubator until they hatched, when the chicks were fed with condor puppets and recordings of condor sounds were played to them. In twenty years, the population grew to 200 birds.

Today there are 369 condors in the world, and 190 of these are wild. However, they are not safe. Some of them have been killed by coyotes or eagles. Some still flew into power lines, but now before new birds are released they "undergo a power pole aversion training program which uses mock power poles that deliver a small electric shock to the birds when they try to land on them," according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. This has effectively stopped the collisions. They are also accidentally hunted, or are poisoned by chemicals. Lead poisoning from scavenged meat is still one of the biggest threats. Since reintroduction, 15 condors have died from lead poisoning. (Nine of the cases were proven, and six were recorded as very likely.) Recently, lead ammunition has been banned within the condors' range. Although some people refuse to comply with this law, it has reduced the risk. They have been reintroduced to parts of California, Arizona, and Utah. They are still very rare, but their populations are increasing. Captive breeding and careful conservation seem to have saved this magnificent raptor.

When most people see the word "panda," they think of the big, furry, black-and-white Giant Panda. But the lesser-known Red Panda, three times smaller, is also in danger. Today classified as vulnerable, its status could quickly change to endangered.
 
The red panda is a living fossil. It has no close surviving relatives, and most resembles raccoons and skunks, not giant pandas. Living in temperate (neither tropical nor arctic) mountain forests from Nepal to China, they spend most of their time in trees. They are both nocturnal and crepuscular, meaning that they come out in the early morning and evening. The red panda is also called the cat-bear, lesser panda, and fire fox. The browser "Mozilla Firefox" was named after them.

Their diet is two-thirds bamboo, but they also eat acorns, flowers, berries, lichen, mushrooms, roots and grasses and occasionally insects, fish, eggs, and chicks. Like giant pandas, they have a bone that acts like a thumb, helping them hold the bamboo. However, because bamboo is low in calories, they spend most of their time eating and sleeping. They drink by dipping one paw into water and then licking it!

The red panda is threatened due to many factors. Deforestation reduces their habitat and grazing livestock can trample their bamboo. In China, they are poached for their fur, which is considered good luck by newlyweds and used in traditional ceremonies. Although the practice of capturing red pandas for zoos has ended, they are sometimes sold to private collectors and are occasionally kept as pets in Nepal and India. Even without interference in the wild, the red panda has a low birth rate and high death rate.

However, red pandas are officially protected throughout their range and hunting them is illegal. Parks protect them in every country they live in and some villages are involved in conservation, as well. Although some originally trapped wild red pandas, many zoos have developed successful captive breeding programs. If we protect them now, the red panda will flourish in the wild.

The Tasmanian devil is a bearlike marsupial native to Australia. It is the size of a small dog. Young are called joeys, imps or pups. They were killed until the 1990s because they were seen as a threat to sheep and other livestock. Occasionally a pack of tasmanian devils would eat a weak sheep. So, in 1923 alone, 900,000 devils were killed.

Chimpanzees are great apes with dark fur. They are the closest relatives to humans, and have almost as much mental capacity. 

Before 1851, no one had heard of a black-footed ferret. That was the year in which John James Audubon and John Bachman wrote a book together titled The Quadrupeds of North America. This was the first work to mention the species, but it was still more than twenty-five years before their existence was proven. (Audubon, who sometimes killed fifty birds of one species to produce one painting, only got to see one ferret while working on his book, which was not enough evidence to prove that the black-footed ferret was a new species.)

Although they lived throughout the Great Plains, the ferret population has been falling ever since we first knew about them. One reason for this is that the ferrets are so dependent on prairie dogs, a species of ground squirrel. Not only are these rodents their staple food, the ferrets also cannot dig their own burrows and are squatters in prairie dog towns. When settlers moved west, many became farmers. They plowed under the prairie dog towns and hunted or poisoned many of the animals. Both the prairie dogs and the ferrets grew increasingly fewer.

Then, in 1981, a Wyoming dog named Shep found a ferret. Eventually, the animal was identified and its colony -- of about 130 animals -- found. However, this population quickly plummeted due to canine distemper and sylvatic plague. In 1986, the remaining 18 animals had to be removed from the colony. The ferret was extinct in the wild.

At this time, there were only fifty captive black-footed ferrets in the world. After years of captive breeding, the first place to reestablish a small colony was Wyoming in 1991. Now, there are fifteen established fesnyngs (or businesses: the name for a group of ferrets) in the wild, in eight US states as well as Mexico and Canada.

There are, however, still threats to their survival. Their close relationship with prairie dogs does not aid their recovery. Prairie dogs are often viewed as pests because they prevent farmers from growing crops in certain areas by rooting up the plants around their burrows. Their tunnels also make the ground less stable and more prone to collapse if animals are turned out to graze.

Because of these things, many people dislike prairie dogs. Even today they are hunted, both commercially and privately. To eradicate colonies, they are poisoned, which indirectly affects many other species. Two of the popular poisons, Rozol and the recently approved Kaput-D, contain chemicals that thin the prairie dogs' blood until they bleed to death. Not only is this horrible for the prairie dogs, any animal that eats them will encounter the same fate. Black-footed ferrets, swift foxes, American badgers, ferruginous hawks, and golden and bald eagles all prey on prairie dogs. An infected animal is easy to catch because it becomes unable to move quickly or control its motions, so many of these predators are suffering secondary poisoning. Additionally, mountain plovers and burrowing owls live and nest in prairie dog burrows and can also become infected.

Another threat to ferrets is disease, particularly sylvatic plague. Luckily, the animals can be immunized against the disease, and all ferrets born in captivity are required to be given two shots of the medicine. Although prairie dogs are also susceptible to this, it has been found more difficult to protect all of the wild colonies from the bacteria. One widespread method was to spray each burrow with flea-killing pesticides, but scientists realized that this was probably too expensive and hard to do and maintain. There had to be an easier way to accomplish this. Finally, they developed a medicine that could be mixed in with food left for the prairie dogs to eat. This also proved more efficient than the pesticides. Additionally, these studies will benefit other species susceptible to the sylvatic plague, both wild rodents and some pets.

There are now more than 1,500 ferrets throughout the established colonies, so the species has been upgraded from extinct in the wild to endangered. Although the number is low, it is still a success considering how few animals lived at one point. Black-footed ferrets are considered the most endangered mammal in North America, but the numbers are still rising to the extent that they may become relatively common over time. The current ambition is to establish ten breeding populations in the wild. When this is met, the ferret can be listed as threatened, instead of endangered. When this happens, the ferret will have returned.

"Look," Mikaela cried as we glimpsed a furry, brown leg, "A bear!"

We all ran out onto the smaller balcony and looked out. A young black bear was gazing at us, puzzled. Mom was leaning out the bedroom window taking photos with her new camera, and I was taking some pictures as well.

He was young. The year before we had discovered him, just an overgrown cub, at the fork in the unpaved road where our steep driveway met the neighbor's. Now he was bigger, we noticed, as he crossed the "animal highway." This was where deer and coyotes, but never before a black bear, made their crossing behind our house.

He loped off the other way and disappeared into a myriad of bushes and berries. He was gone.

Black bears are smaller than grizzly bears and do not have as defined a shoulder hump as their relatives. Grizzly bears' humps are shoulder muscles useful for digging up roots. Grizzly claws, partly for the same reason, are larger than black bears' claws. Signs that a bear has been somewhere are digging sites, clawed trees, and tracks which have five toes and look heavy. (The main hand is a thin egg shape with a little triangle at the end.)  A black bear is eighty-five percent vegetarian, and most of the carnivorous percentage consists of bees, ants, and yellow jackets.
 
There is such a thing as a Kermode or Spirit Bear. These are rare, white subspecies. Only one in ten are completely white, and some are tan with patches. It is very special to see a Kermode bear. They are not albino, however, and are white because of a recessive gene. Other subspecies include the Eastern black bear, the Florida black bear and the Newfoundland black bear. The Florida black bear deserves special attention because it is threatened. At first, the Fish and Wildlife Department declared it threatened except in areas where it was a game animal. This was a rather hypocritical statement, as a bear could be passing a hunting area, though it was born in a refuge. Probably the Fish and Wildlife Department realized that after the criticism that they got. The Florida black bear is listed as threatened wherever it occurs.

In the case that you meet a black bear on a trail, rangers advise you to put up your hands and raise a backpack (if you have one) above your head to frighten it off. Do not do this unnecessarily, like if you hear rustling in the bushes a ways off the trail. However, do talk or clap your hands in such cases. Finally, if a black bear attacks you, fight back.

There's a good reason why the harbor seal is also called the "common seal." They're found all over the northern hemisphere's coastlines, in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and throughout the North and Baltic seas. They are also the most widespread pinniped, a term which refers to true seals, eared seals (sea lions and fur seals), and walruses. (Neither true seals nor walruses have ear flaps, known as pinnas.)

Harbor seals are true seals. They have small flippers that do not rotate and consequently have a hard time moving around on land. They rely on layers of blubber for warmth, buoyancy, and extra energy. The blubber also allows the seal's skin to be the temperature of the water surrounding it, while their core temperature, or how warm they are inside, is 100° F. They have large eyes, but most scientists think that their color vision is very bad, if existent. Harbor seals have better eyesight than humans underwater, but worse on land. Since blind seals have been found with pups in the ocean, scientists believe that sight is unimportant to harbor seals. Although they usually stay closer to the surface and come up for air once in ever three to seven minutes, they can dive 1,500 feet underwater and stay submerged for 40 minutes! Mostly, these seals catch fish, but sometimes when they've gone that deep they'll eat shrimp, crabs, mollusks, octopods, and squids.

Harbor seals spend approximately half of their time in the ocean, and the other half on land. Although they typically stay in the water only when feeding, they have been known to sleep in the water, too. Places where they regularly rest on land are called "haulouts," and the process of a seal climbing up onto the land is called "hauling out." Unfortunately, if people repeatedly disturb them they will abandon their haulouts or even their babies. Sometimes, seals dart into the sea as soon as they see or hear people. That's why beaches often post signs warning people to stay at least 100 feet away from the seals and use binoculars or cameras. Goat Rock Beach suggests 150. The Point Reyes National Seashore website advises visitors to come no closer than 300 feet.

To attract a mate, male seals will form a group, put their heads together and call the females. It is thought that the females select the strongest males. Although they can be seen at any time of the year, the best time to view harbor seals in California is probably from February to April, when they are having their babies. In the Arctic, they may wait until July! Young seals are called pups and usually born with a spotted coat. If you see a pup with a white coat, called a lanugo, it was born prematurely. (In the Arctic, the pups are born with the white fur but molt soon afterwards.)

Harbor seals haul out on many beaches. We saw them in February on California's Goat Rock beach. (The origin of Goat Rock's name is disputed. There is a very large rock connected to the beach by a thin strip of land, and the most popular theory states that goats used to be permitted to graze on the rock because they were the only species surefooted enough to climb it.)

The Californian or Pacific harbor seal is a subspecies of harbor seal found along the entire coastline of California. In the San Francisco bay, some seals appear reddish. This unusual coloration is thought to result from tiny quantities of elements, such as iron or selenium, in the water.

Some field guides make it sound like it is very difficult to tell a harbor seal from a sea lion, but it is actually very simple. Harbor seals are usually light gray, and sea lions are dark brown. The sea lion is able to flip its flippers forward so that it can walk on land. For the most part, the seals lie on the beach, while the sea lions sit up on their front flippers and grunt. Additionally, studying a photo of any animal beforehand will help you identify it in the field.

The worldwide population of harbor seals is five or six million. Hunting seals is illegal throughout most of their range, but certain subspecies are threatened. Besides people disturbing them on beaches, the seals are caught in fishing nets and hit by boats. They are endangered by chemicals dumped in the water or released by power plants. Diseases such as the phocine distemper also threatened them. And while it is illegal in the United States to hunt harbor seals, if a seal is thought to endanger a fishery it can legally be killed. Happily, however, the numbers of harbor seals have been rising on the east coast of the US, and some have even been spotted in Florida. With care, these seals will continue to haul out throughout their widespread range.

The tuatara is the last member of an order of reptiles that lived, along with the dinosaurs, 225 million years ago. The order is rhynchocephalia, which comes from Greek and means "beak head." The tuatara is called a "living fossil," but in some ways this is the wrong name for it. Although in some respects it seems a little more primitive than some of the more modern reptiles, scientific experiments have proven that its rate of molecular evolution* is quicker than that of any animal yet tested.

The Maori word "tuatara" has been translated in many different ways, but the most common meaning is that tua means 'back,' and tara, 'spine.' Both the males and the females have spines (actually just flaps of skin), but the males' are larger and can be stiffened in order to attract a mate or fight another male.

There are two types of tuataras. For a long time, the Cook Strait tuatara (also called the common tuatara) was the only kind known to exist. Then, a second one, the far rarer and slightly smaller Brothers Island tuatara, was discovered. Today, the classification of tuataras is controversial, with some people arguing that there are two species, while others hold that it's one species, just slightly adapted to its environment. One way to distinguish the two types is that the Brothers Island species is olive-green with yellow speckles, while the Cook Strait tuatara, which is usually mottled and always has white spots, varies from green to grey, dark pink, or brick red. It can also change color throughout its lifetime. Additionally, when caught by a predator, a tuatara can drop its tail which continues to wriggle, allowing time for escape. Their tails do grow back, but they are often a different color plus shorter. They also can lose spines and regrow them and will shed their skin annually.

The adult tuataras are nocturnal and as a result eat mainly insects that are active at night. Beetles are their favorite food, but they sometimes eat lizards, birds, and bird eggs. They do not have real teeth as humans do. Instead, their teeth are sharp protrusions of their jaw bones. Tuataras have two rows on their upper jaws and one row on bottom. The lower teeth fit between the top teeth when the tuatara's mouth is closed and are useful for eating hard insects. Tuataras are the only animal with this kind of dental arrangement. Unfortunately, having built-in teeth means that they can't replace them as they wear down. Older tuataras have to switch to soft food, like larvae, slugs, and earthworms, and eventually make do with smooth jaw bones.

Adult tuataras can go for an hour without breathing if they need to -- even if they don't need to, a resting adult may take only one breath an hour. Although they are cold-blooded, tuataras prefer cool weather to hot. They stay active in 50° weather, while many lizards don't. Like many other reptiles, tuatara eggs are very sensitive to temperature. If the eggs are incubated at 70° F, they have an equal chance of being male or female. At 64°, they are guaranteed to be female and above 72°, they are almost always be male. One threat from global warming is that the weather will be too hot for female eggs to incubate and the remaining males will not be able to find mates. Even if the eggs are laid, that's no guarantee that they're going to hatch because many predators enjoy eating them. If a theoretical tuatara had just laid a fresh clutch of eggs today, and no one was going to eat them, it would still take more than a year for them to hatch (incubation takes 13 to 16 months because they stop developing when they get too cold).

At 13 to 20, they reach maturity, but they don't stop growing until they're thirty. That is a long childhood, but it is not exactly an ideal one. Tuatara moms are not very attentive. They lay their eggs once every four years and then leave. The hatchlings must hunt in the day to avoid being eaten by adult tuataras at night. Then, they have to dig their burrow for protection. Burrowing is much easier for an adult tuatara, because they do not mind staying in 'hotels.' Whenever they sense danger, they dart into the nearest burrow, which is often inhabited by nesting seabirds. The birds go fishing during the day, and the tuatara goes hunting at night. The birds do not seem to mind this arrangement -- except in the occasional case where a tuatara eats one of their chicks.

One feature visible in tuatara hatchlings is their "third eye," also called a "parietal eye." This comes with its own lens, cornea, retina, and non-functional connection to the brain, which makes scientists think that it evolved from a real eye. This can be seen through the skin on top of the tuatara's head until it is a few months old, when scales and pigment will have covered it. One possible use is to tell the time of day or the season. Interestingly, tuataras also have three eyelids. The first closes from the top, the second from the bottom, and the third horizontally. This last is a clear one, called a nictitating membrane, which protects and moistens the eye while still allowing the tuatara to see. Their eyes also focus independently.

The chief reason tuataras are endangered is that introduced species, such as the rats and dogs first brought by the early Polynesian settlers, prey on tuatara eggs and hatchlings. The Europeans brought more of these pests, as well as cats and ferrets. In 1895, New Zealand's government fully protected the tuataras, but their population continued to plummet as rats reached one island after another. Even as late as 1984, they killed all of the tuataras on a 25-acre island. For a long time, tuataras lived only on 32 remote islands. On the mainland, where captive release programs have been operating, one nest and one hatchling have been discovered in the wild. Many fenced preserves also keep tuataras, which also benefits other endangered species, such as kiwis, other birds, lizards, and the giant weta, a flightless insect. More than 60,000 tuataras are estimated to live worldwide, which means that this remarkable reptile can resurge in the wild.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Kiwi Conservation Club
San Diego Zoo