Attacks on birds of prey 'up 40%'

The number of crimes reported against birds of prey rose by 40% last year to a record level, the RSPB has said.

The bird welfare charity recorded 262 attacks in 2007, up from 185, including 34 shootings and 49 poisonings.
Crimes against all wild birds also hit a record high with 1,208 incidents reported to the RSPB, up from 1,109.
It said the rise may be down to better sharing of information with other agencies but believes many crimes go undetected in remote areas.
Eggs collected
The birds of prey poisoned included 17 red kites and one half of the only breeding pair of golden eagles in the Scottish Borders.
The RSPB's annual Birdcrime report also revealed:

619 reports of birds other than birds of prey being shot or the victims of destruction
39 egg-collecting incidents, including two confirmed and four probable from protected birds
165 reports of poisoning
The report said protected birds were also illegally disturbed and photographed, while other crimes included the theft, possession and sale of wild birds.
It urged the Home Office to make it clear to police forces that wildlife crime should be given a higher priority and called for measures to tackle it to be written into forces' policing plans

Data from the report identifies four counties that were the worst in England for reported persecution of birds of prey.
They were North Yorkshire, with 78 reports, Northumberland with 22 and Shropshire and Cumbria with 16 reports each.
RSPB head of investigations Ian West said: "The number of reports coming in to us is the highest we have ever had, but we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
"It's hard to say whether the problem is increasing or whether we are just getting to hear about more of the offences that are taking place.
"What is clear is that very large numbers of birds are being illegally killed every year and that is totally unacceptable in a civilised society. There has to be a greater effort to enforce the law."
There was worldwide condemnation after the 10-year-old female golden eagle was poisoned in Peeblesshire last August.
The male eagle has since found a new partner and a chick hatched earlier this year.

BBC News

Virus H7

Gripe das aves: Vírus H7 detectado em frangos na Inglaterra

Uma variante da gripe aviária, a estirpe H7, foi descoberta em frangos de uma quinta em Oxfordshire (no Sul de Inglaterra), informou o Ministério do Meio Ambiente, Alimentação e Assuntos Rurais do Reino Unido.
Todas as aves infectadas pelo vírus - muito contagioso entre os frangos mas bastante menos perigoso para os seres humanos do que o letal H5N1 - serão mortas como medida de precaução, segundo o veterinário-chefe do governo, Nigel Gibbens.
Além disso, o Ministério do Meio Ambiente, Alimentação e Assuntos Rurais britânico estabeleceu duas áreas temporárias de controlo em torno da exploração avícola que foi objecto da infecção.

Nigel Gibbens sublinhou a necessidade de os responsáveis da quinta se manterem «muito vigilantes» e de darem o alerta caso suspeitem de contaminação.

A Agência de Controlo Alimentar já esclareceu que o caso da gripe das aves não tem «implicações na segurança da cadeia alimentar humana».

Diário Digital / Lusa
04-06-2008 8:05:00

Para todos os criadores ! for all breeders!

después de vivir un sigloes como descifrar signossin ser sabio competentevolver a ser de repentetan frágil como un segundovolver a sentir profundocomo un niño frente a Dioseso es lo que siento yoen este instante fecundo.Se va enredando, enredandocomo en el muro la hiedray va brotando, brotandocomo el musguito en la piedracomo el musguito en la piedraAy, si, si, si.Mi paso ha retrocedidocuando el de ustedes avanzael arco de las alianzasha penetrado en mi nidocon todo su coloridose ha paseado por mis venasy hasta la dura cadenacon que nos ata el destinoes como un diamante finoque alumbra mi alma serena.Lo que puede el sentimientono lo ha podido el saberni el más claro procederni el más ancho pensamientotodo lo cambia el momentocuál mago condescendientenos aleja dulcementede rencores y violenciassolo el amor con su ciencianos vuelve tan inocentes.El amor es torbellinode pureza originalhasta el feroz animalsusurra su dulce trinodetiene a los peregrinoslibera a los prisionerosel amor con sus esmerosal viejo lo vuelve niñoy al malo sólo el cariñolo vuelve puro y sincero.De par en par la ventanase abrió como por encantoentró el amor con su mantocomo una tibia mañanaal son de su bella dianahizo brotar el jazmínvolando cual serafínal cielo le puso aretesy mis años en 17 los convirtió el querubín.

Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval (San Carlos, 14 de outubro de 1917 — Santiago do Chile, 5 de fevereiro de 1967) foi uma compositora, cantora, artista plástica e ceramista chilena, considerada a mais importante folclorista daquele país e fundadora da música popular chilena.
Nasceu em San Carlos, província de Ñuble. Realizou seus estudos escolares até o segundo ano do secundário, abandonando-os em 1934, para trabalhar e cantar com seus irmãos em bares e circos, desenvolvendo uma importante carreira musical, como autodidata, a partir dos 9 anos.
Em 1938, casou-se pela primeira vez e dessa união, teve dois filhos, Isabel e Ángel, que também viriam a se tornar compositores e intérpretes importantes.
Viveu em Valparaíso entre 1943 e 1945, e voltou a Santiago, para cantar junto com seus filhos Em 1949 voltou a se casar e teve duas filhas dessa nova união. Em 1952 começou a pesquisar as raízes folclóricas chilenas e compôs os primeiros temas musicais que a fariam famosa. Em 1954, quando já tinha o seu próprio programa de rádio, começou um rigoroso estudo das manifestações artísticas populares. Durante o ano de 1955 visitou a União Soviética, Londres e Paris, cidade onde residiu por dois anos. Realizou gravações para a BBC e os selos Odeón e "Chant du Monde". Em 1957 radicou-se em Concepción, voltando a Santiago no ano seguinte para começar sua produção plástica. Percorreu todo o país, recopilando e difundindo informações sobre o folclore. Em 1961 mudou-se para a Argentina, onde fez grande sucesso com suas apresentações. Voltou a Paris e ali permaneceu por três anos, percorrendo várias cidades da Europa, destacando-se suas visitas a Genebra. Em 1965 voltou ao Chile, viajou para a Bolívia e ao regressar a seu país, instalou uma grande tenda na comuna de La Reina, com o plano de convertê-la em um centro de referência para a cultura folclórica do Chile, juntamente com os filhos, Ángel e Isabel, e os folcloristas Patricio Manns, Rolando Alarcón e Víctor Jara, entre outros. No entanto, a iniciativa não obteve sucesso.
Emocionalmente abatida pelo fracasso do empreendimento e pelo dramático final de um relacionamento amoroso, Violeta Parra suicidou-se em 5 de fevereiro de 1967, na tenda de La Reina.

"Si calla el cantor" , Mercedes Sousa, Horacio Guarany

Cartoon

“Silence of the Songbirds.”

Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird?

Woodbridge, Ontario

THOUGH a consumer may not be able to tell the difference, a striking red and blue Thomas the Tank Engine made in Wisconsin is not the same as one manufactured in China — the paint on the Chinese twin may contain dangerous levels of lead. In the same way, a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.
In this case, the victims are North American songbirds. Bobolinks, called skunk blackbirds in some places, were once a common sight in the Eastern United States. In mating season, the male in his handsome tuxedo-like suit sings deliriously as he whirrs madly over the hayfields. Bobolink numbers have plummeted almost 50 percent in the last four decades, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

The birds are being poisoned on their wintering grounds by highly toxic pesticides.

Rosalind Renfrew, a biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, captured bobolinks feeding in rice fields in Bolivia and took samples of their blood to test for pesticide exposure. She found that about half of the birds had drastically reduced levels of cholinesterase, an enzyme that affects brain and nerve cells — a sign of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Since the 1980s, pesticide use has increased fivefold in Latin America as countries have expanded their production of nontraditional crops to fuel the demand for fresh produce during winter in North America and Europe.

Rice farmers in the region use monocrotophos, methamidophos and carbofuran, all agricultural chemicals that are rated Class I toxins by the World Health Organization, are highly toxic to birds, and are either restricted or banned in the United States. In countries like Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, researchers have found that farmers spray their crops heavily and repeatedly with a chemical cocktail of dangerous pesticides.
In the mid-1990s, American biologists used satellite tracking to follow Swainson’s hawks to their wintering grounds in Argentina, where thousands of them were found dead from monocrotophos poisoning.

Migratory songbirds like bobolinks, barn swallows and Eastern kingbirds are suffering mysterious population declines, and pesticides may well be to blame. A single application of a highly toxic pesticide to a field can kill seven to 25 songbirds per acre. About half the birds that researchers capture after such spraying are found to suffer from severely depressed neurological function.

Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States. Some but not all pesticide residues can be removed by washing or peeling produce, but tests by the Centers for Disease Control show that most Americans carry traces of pesticides in their blood. American consumers can discourage this poisoning by avoiding foods that are bad for the environment, bad for farmers in Latin America and, in the worst cases, bad for their own families.
What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. In contrast, traditional small coffee farmers grow their beans under a canopy of tropical trees, which provide shade and essential nitrogen, and fertilize their soil naturally with leaf litter.

Their organic, fair-trade coffee is now available in many coffee shops and supermarkets, and it is recommended by the Audubon Society, the American Bird Conservancy and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America.

Now that spring is here, we take it for granted that the birds’ cheerful songs will fill the air when our apple trees blossom. But each year, as we continue to demand out-of-season fruits and vegetables, we ensure that fewer and fewer songbirds will return.

Bridget Stutchbury, a professor of biology at York University in Toronto, is the author of “Silence of the Songbirds.”
By BRIDGET STUTCHBURY
Published: March 30, 2008

Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia

starlings

Singing starlings and why thousands of babies who should have been boys are being born as girls.

Next time you hear a starling sing, stop and listen hard. It may well be warning of a peril that endangers the whole world of nature - and the very future of the human race itself.
For scientists have found that gender-bender chemicals - increasingly contaminating the environment, our food, our water and our bodies - are having a bizarre effect on common birds, causing the males to give voice to longer and more complex songs.
This is only the latest in a long series of increasingly urgent alarms being sounded by wildlife against an insidious but devastating danger that threatens our children. But so far our leaders have steadfastly and scandalously turned a deaf ear to them - and, even more shamefully, ignored the first signs that the peril is already affecting birth patterns, causing thousands of babies who should have been boys to be born as girls instead. Starlings and their diverse, complicated and mimicking - though not beautiful - songs have long fascinated humanity.
Mozart was entranced by a starling after it copied a tune that the great composer was whistling in a pet store.

Modern scientists have discovered that starlings' songs contain similar patterns to human speech.
But if we could, indeed, understand what they are communicating, we would be wise to take heed.
Scientists at Cardiff University have discovered that the brains of male starlings foraging for worms at a sewage treatment works in South-West England have been subtly changed by being contaminated by oestrogen from the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
The female hormones - present in women's urine, and passing through the sewage treatment unaffected - caused the part of the brain that controls their song to grow much bigger, causing them to sing at greater length and with even more virtuosity than usual.
The study confirms similar, if slightly differing, research on other birds, which scientists say is adding up to some of the first concrete proof of the effects of gender benders on the natural world.
Researchers at the University of California have found that feeding female finches with a hormone used in HRT has caused them to sing, something hitherto done only by their males.
And studies at the University of Alberta have found robins exposed to the pesticide DDT before birth suffered damage to the region of the brain that enables them to sing and protect their territory.
Dr David Crews of the University of Texas calls the research on birdsong "very significant", describing it as "the first step needed to demonstrate a causal link between specific pollutants and the effects on wildlife populations

Yet there have been strange warning signs for decades. Way back in the early 1970s, researchers found that female gulls had taken to nesting together all over the U.S., the males having apparently lost interest.
When the bashful males were caught and examined, they were found to have developed female egg-laying canals.
In the 1980s, researchers in Florida found that alligators were failing to reproduce because their males had mysteriously tiny penises; further investigations revealed that they had developed female hormone patterns - and that turtles in the same waters had developed into hermaphrodites.
Most alarming of all, repeated studies by Britain's own Environment Agency have shown that about a third of the male roach in rivers and streams right across the country have begun producing eggs, after developing female sex organs.
Again, the problem was traced to oestrogen passing through sewage works - in some areas, near particularly heavy inflows of treated water, all the males were found to be between sexes.
The findings have inevitably raised concern that people may also be affected, since one-third of the country's drinking water comes from rivers, much of it beneath sewage outfalls.
And, whether or not this is the cause, male sperm counts have been dropping precipitously both here and across the world.
Fertile
Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that average amounts have fallen by well over half in the past 50 years, from an average of more than 150 million per millilitre to 66 million.
The result is that men are now less than half as fertile as hamsters.
The counts are continuing to plunge by two per cent a year, and no end to the decline is in sight. At this rate, the average man will be unable to father children within decades.
Increasingly the sperm crisis is being blamed on a whole host of chemicals, not just synthetic oestrogen, but a wide variety of substances that have become ubiquitous in daily life.
They include the common plastic PVC; dioxins, the notorious pollutants found almost everywhere; PCBs, one-and-a-half million tons of which have been used in countless products from paints to plastics; and phthalates, universally used to make plastics more flexible.
Recent tests by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) on 14 basic foodstuffs taken from supermarket shelves found that every single one contained PCBs, and most were contaminated by phthalates.
Both substances have been shown to have deeply worrying effects on babies and children.
Scientists at Rotterdam's Erasmus University have found that boys born to mothers exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea-sets.
And research at the University of Rochester in New York State has shown that the male children of women exposed to phthalates have smaller penises and other signs of feminisation of their genitals.
Communities exposed to high levels of these and other gender-bender chemicals, from the Great Lakes of North America to the Russian Arctic, have been found to give birth to twice as many girls as boys.
This may offer a clue to the cause of a mysterious shift in the sex of babies worldwide.
Conflict
Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, in what is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact that males were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.
But increasingly this ratio is slipping - it is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born girls in the U.S. and Japan alone.
You would think that all this accumulating evidence would long since have sparked alarm in governments worldwide.
Far from it. When the EU drew up its first comprehensive controls on chemicals two years ago, it largely exempted gender benders from them.
Britain, under Tony Blair's leadership, was largely responsible for this exemption, and confidential documents show that it obediently acted to water down the controls following direct representations from the Bush administration - almost unbelievably putting the interests of foreign firms above the health of British children.
Since then, as Dr Gwynne Lyons, director of the expert group, CHEM Trust puts it, there has been "regulatory inertia".
That needs to change, and fast. If ministers continue wilfully to refuse to heed the science, they should, at least, listen to the starlings.

By GEOFFREY LEAN

Last updated at 23:46pm on 27th February 2008

Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?

When Temple Grandin argued that animals and autistic savants share cognitive similarities in her best-selling book Animals in Translation (2005), the idea gained steam outside the community of cognitive neuroscientists. Grandin, a professor of animal science whose best-selling books have provided an unprecedented look at the autistic mind, based her proposal on the observation that animals, like autistic humans, sense and respond to stimuli that nonautistic humans usually overlook.
In a new essay published today in PLoS Biology, Giorgio Vallortigara and his colleagues, argue that, while Grandin’s book “shows extraordinary insight into both autism and animal welfare,” the question of equivalent cognitive abilities between savants and animals “deserves scrutiny from scientists working in animal cognition and comparative neuroscience.” The extraordinary skills shown by savants are accompanied by deficits in other cognitive domains, which the authors argue is not the case for the remarkable species-specific adaptations seen in some taxa. For example, the Clark's nutcracker can stash whitebark pine seeds in thousands of different sites and recover them up to eight months later. Yet the bird exhibits no cognitive deficits in other areas.
Furthermore, the authors argue, rather than having privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts, as has been argued for savants, animals, like non-autistic humans, process sensory inputs according to rules--a manner of processing that is a specialized feature of the left hemisphere in humans and nonhuman animals. At the most general level, they argue, “the left hemisphere sets up rules based on experience and the right hemisphere avoids rules in order to detect details and unique features that allow it to decide what is familiar and what is novel. This is true for human and nonhuman animals, likely reflecting ancient evolutionary origins of the underlying brain mechanisms.”
Grandin, who responds to the authors’ critique in a special commentary, suggests that “the basic disagreement between the authors and me arises from the concept of details—specifically how details are perceived by humans, who think in language, compared with animals, who think in sensory-based data. Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions.” And sensory-based information, she says, is inherently more detailed than word-based memories. “As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures,” she explains. “The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language.”
Grandin calls for further experiments to either confirm or disprove Vallortigara et al.’s hypothesis that birds such as the Clark’s nutcracker have retained good cognition in other domains. Grandin hypothesizes that "birds that have savant-like skills for food storage sites or remembering migration routes may be less flexible in their cognition.” Grandin welcomes the discussion following the publication of her book—we invite readers to join in that discussion by posting their own Reader Response.

Aves são usadas em terapia para soldados traumatizados

Veteranos americanos das guerras do Iraque e do Afeganistão estão sendo tratados de traumas em Los Angeles com uma terapia que inclui aves que sofreram maus tratos.

O soldado Matthew Simmons, que desenvolveu síndrome do estresse pós-traumático, está aprendendo a cultivar relacionamentos e seus novos amigos são papagaios. Segundo ele, as aves percebem quando ele está revoltado ou com medo, e voam para longe.A psicóloga Lorin Lindner disse que resgata papagaios há muitos anos.

Ela tratava de veteranos viciados em drogas e viu como eles se derretiam diante dos papagaios. Apesar de serem espécies muito diferentes, as aves ficam tão traumatizadas quanto soldados em combate.Os soldados traumatizados reaprendem a criar um clima de confiança, acabando com a sensação de isolamento e revolta, e deixando de lado drogas e álcool, dizem os psicólogos.

Da BBC Brasil

02/08/2007

11h00

Não pares de Voar !

Art & Design de Isabel Filipe

Maria de Medeiros nomeada «Artista da UNESCO para a Paz»

A actriz Maria de Medeiros foi nomeada «Artista UNESCO para a Paz» e é a primeira portuguesa a alcançar tal distinção...,

Alijó: Família hospitalizada por inalação monóxido carbono

Photo

photo-carnaval

PHOTO