At risk of extinction

 

 

JEFFREY ST CLAIR 

+ In the last 50 years, the North American bird population has lost 3 billion breeding adults, nearly 30 percent of the population. Lark buntings are down 56%, canyon wrens by 23%, roadrunners and lesser scaups by 27%, tufted titmouse by 22%, bobolinks by 20%, Carolina chickadees down 22%, redwings blackbirds down 15%, American goldfinches down 12% and even seemingly ubiquitous crows, down 14%.

+ My favorite bird since I was kid, watching them hover and dive over fields in central Indiana, has been the American Kestrel. In college, I helped my Chaucer professor rehab an injured Kestrel in northern Virginia. The recuperating falcon, which we named Troilus, often perched over his desk on a bust of Dante, as if contemplating what contemporary villains most deserved damnation. And for the past 15 years, I’ve been doing Kestrel surveys here in the Willamette Valley, where their numbers have declined by more than 22%. Pesticides, the disappearing insect populations, the loss of old trees with nesting cavities, encroaching subdivisions, the recent mass conversion of fields and pastures into vineyards, and climate change have all played a nefarious role.

+ At least, 17,000, which amounts to about 96%, of the elephant seal pups on the Patagonian coast of Argentina now have been killed by avian flu.

+ Despite bans on chopping off shark fins for soup, the number of sharks killed in fishing operations is actually increasing, placing one-third of all shark species at risk of extinction, according to a new study in Science.