RSPB Images

A wading bird called the bittern has returned to the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) nature reserve in Somerset after not being seen in the area for 40 years. Two nests have been found in this reed-bed site created especially for the bittern, making for encouraging evidence that a European Union-funded rescue package has improved the quality of the highly endangered birds’ habitats and that some females still remain.

The species, which remains on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, actually went extinct in Britain between 1886 and 1911. Though it was reintroduced, by 1997, only 11 males remained. However, while the female population remains nearly extinct, following the rescue work, a high of 55 males was recorded in 2004. Most live in the freshwater wetlands along East Anglia’s low-lying coast, where rising sea levels are damaging their traditional reed-bed nesting sites.

“It is great news that at last bitterns are beginning to re-colonize parts of their former range, especially when it’s at a site that’s been created with them in mind,” said RSPB research biologist Simon Wotton, who is also the national organizer of the Bittern Monitoring Program. “The bitterns’ core populations are concentrated in areas threatened by sea level rise. The Somerset birds hopefully represent the start of a new population, not subject to this environmental threat.”

No living female was known of until recently, when the Wildlife Conservation Society discovered “China Girl” in the Changsha Zoo in Hunan province. Brought in from a traveling circus approximately 50 years ago, the 80-year-old (still-fertile) turtle is now being mated with a 100-year-old male. Overseers report that considering neither had seen another of their own kind for many decades, and that males are aggressive breeders, the union is developing better than had been expected.

The Caribbean monk seal was the only subtropical seal native to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and now only two additional monk seal species remain. Both the Hawaiian and Mediterranean monk seals are endangered and also at risk of extinction, with populations under 1,200 and 500 individuals, respectively. Some of the threats now facing these animals, including erosion and debris, are reported to be global warming-related, as they are tied to the El Nino weather pattern and rising sea levels.

Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya

There are now more than 21,000 African rhinos—the highest number seen in decades—according to the latest report by the IUCN Species Survival Commission African Rhino Specialist Group. Of these animals, there are 17,480 white rhinos, listed as “Near Threatened,” but up from a population of only 14,540 in 2005. However, despite the increasing numbers of the Southern white rhino, another subspecies called the Northern white rhino is listed as “Critically Endangered” and faces extinction.

Restricted in the wild to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, poaching reduced the Northern white rhino’s population to only four confirmed animals by August 2006. “Worryingly, recent fieldwork has so far failed to find any presence of these four remaining rhinos,” said Dr. Martin Brooks, chair of the IUCN group. “Unless animals are found during the intensive surveys that are planned under the direction of the African Parks Foundation, the subspecies may be doomed to extinction.”

wikipedia.org

A strange type of contagious cancer has cut Australia’s Tasmanian devil population by as much as 60 percent, and the government decided in May to list the species as “Endangered” on the Endangered Species List. The animals are afflicted by a fast-growing, disfiguring head tumor that is spread by biting and eventually covers their faces and mouths, preventing them from eating—and often causing death within a few months.

Previously listed as “Vulnerable,” the world’s largest marsupial carnivore is already at risk, and now only lives on the Australian island of Tasmania. In addition to giving Tasmanian devils more protections, the Australian government also plans to breed an “insurance population” of the species in captivity, which could eventually be used to help re-establish population numbers in the wild.