Vijay Pinjarkar / TNN / Updated: Sep 15, 2021, 13:20 ISTFACEBOOKTWITTERLINKEDINEMAILAA+

• https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/mystery-shrouds-death-of-100-crows-in-chikhaldara/articleshow/86212632.cms?fbclid=IwAR3ZME5hfFgBwNmaI_HxwFpX-MwxeJPH1J4hOMRI15BIcow-M-DV_Q2lTSE

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• Maharashtra: Mystery shrouds death of 100 crows in Chikhaldara
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The incident occurred on Sunday and Monday, too, was a holiday.NAGPUR: At a time when the population of crows is declining, over 100 crows were found dead under the jurisdiction of the Chikhaldara Municipal Council (CMC) on Sunday. However, animal husbandry department officials claimed only six crows died.
Vice-president of CMC Abdul Sheikh, who first raised the issue, slammed the animal husbandry doctors for not staying at the headquarters to ensure the number of birds’ deaths and solutions thereon. “This is for the first time that such large-scale deaths of crows was reported and people, who came complaining to me, are themselves witnesses,” Sheikh said.

“We collected only six crows for sampling while the remaining birds were disposed of in a tractor, a fact not known to the foresters and veterinary staff. The crows were lying dead at various spots near pipal trees where vendors sold mutton and chicken in the open on Sunday,” Sheikh told TOI.
“The incident occurred on Sunday and Monday, too, was a holiday. There were no livestock development officers at the veterinary hospital (LDOs). Hence, we handed over the case to the Chikhaldara range forest officer (RFO). I don’t know what happened later,” Sheikh said.
Crows are listed under Schedule V of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, but have been legally declared as vermin. After vultures vanished, crows have been playing the role of predators and scavengers. They eat practically anything.
Melghat Tiger Reserve (MTR) CCF & field director Jayoti Banerjee said, “I’ve been told by my RFO at Chikhaldara that pesticide is suspected to be the reason for the death of the birds. It’s not bird flu. After the municipal staff handed over the six dead crows to the staff, veterinary doctors collected the samples to know the cause of death. The birds were later buried.”

Talking to TOI, Amravati district animal husbandry officer Dr Vijay Rahate denied death of 100 crows. “There were six crows. There is no major reason to worry. I suspect the birds died of food poisoning may be after scavenging on flesh thrown as waste in the area.”
“Samples are being sent to the Regional Disease Investigation Laboratory, Pune, for toxicological and bacterial tests. Had it been some epidemic, more crows would have been found dead in the last two days but we have not found a single dead bird. We are keeping a close watch and our staff is alert. Bird flu is also ruled out as the reason for death,” said Dr Rahate.
Dr Ajay Poharkar, president, Maharashtra State Veterinary Council (MSVC), said it could also be the West Nile Virus (WNV), which has been detected in several birds, mostly crows and jays. “But unless it’s proved scientifically it would not be right to comment. Similar deaths of crows had occurred near Mouda in the summer of 2005,” the raptor scientist said.
“I believe the population of crows is declining fast. In Melghat, there are huge trees and hence, the crow population there is in sizeable numbers. The loss of birds is an eye-opener for the forest department which should come with research on the subject,” said Dr Poharkar.
Bird expert Nitin Marathe says, “Rapid disappearance of crows is a cause for concern. One of the major reasons for the decline is habitat destruction. Generally, crows prefer strong trees like pipal and banyan for nesting. These trees are being destroyed for road expansion and urbanization. Hence, they are left in very few pockets in the city.”

• By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
• Sep 16, 2021 Updated 10 hrs ago
• https://www.eptrail.com/2021/09/16/steamboat-springs-family-trapped-bear/?fbclid=IwAR0tWwO091DVVhGgYBCm_gd5McyHx2j3eRHmohx4Oy1sWqzIGpo8ehAJ78o
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An orphaned bear cub was captured at the Santa Fe National Cemetery and taken to a wildlife shelter last week, the day after its mother was fatally struck by an unidentified driver on Rosario Boulevard.

State game officials believe a second stray cub is still roaming the area.

The captured female cub was spotted Sept. 9 in a tree at the national cemetery.

State Game and Fish Department officers used a dart gun to tranquilize the bear and then climbed up a ladder to carry it down.

They took the cub to the Cottonwood Veterinary Clinic in Española, where it will be prepared for release into the wild.

It’s good the cub was caught quickly, said Kathleen Ramsay, a veterinarian who oversees the clinic’s wildlife rehabilitation center, because cubs that wander through neighborhoods raiding bird feeders often don’t learn to eat the foods necessary to survive in the wild.

“What she has to learn to eat is important,” Ramsay said.

At the center, all but the most essential human contact with bears is avoided, she said, explaining if bears become comfortable with people, they are more likely to approach them in outdoor settings, which is dangerous.

The cub has been named Bonita and is paired with one named Pooh Bear, recently picked up in Jemez Springs, Ramsay said. The two will be trained together to live in the wild, and then they’ll be released in tandem, she added.

Typically, two cubs that have bonded like this will stick together for about a year, alerting one another to any approaching threat — the biggest one being adult bears — before parting ways, Ramsay said.

“If we can release them in pairs for their first year of life, they do so much better,” Ramsay said.

Like hibernation, bears’ mating and birthing run like clockwork in New Mexico, she said. Cubs are born between late November and early December, which makes it easy to pin down their ages.

Ramsay said she takes the place of a cubs’ mother in teaching them what to eat.

She prunes acorn and chokecherry branches and hangs them in the cubs’ cages to mimic trees they’ll encounter.

She also put plants with rose hips in their pens and leaves rotting logs in a field so the cubs can tear them apart to find bugs, a prime food source for bears.

“We work very hard to make sure these bears get training on what they need to do to stay alive,” Ramsay said. “And our success has been quite good.”

One year, radio tracking was done on 56 yearlings that were released, and all but two made it to at least 2 years of age, she said.

She generally releases cubs in early January, after hunting season has ended and the yearly hibernation has begun. That way, the bears will crawl into a den until May.

The Santa Fe cub might be turned loose in January if it reaches at least 110 pounds, giving it enough girth to get through June, when bear food is more scarce, Ramsay said.

As for the mother bear that was killed, the carcass was sold to a local buyer to use for the fur and meat, said Tristanna Bickford, a spokeswoman for the state Game and Fish Department. Some of the fur was placed in live-capture traps in an attempt to lure the cubs, Bickford added.

The agency is still searching for the second orphaned cub but hasn’t heard of any sightings, she said. A cub isn’t likely to roam as far as an adult bear, increasing the chance it’s still in the Santa Fe area.

“But you can never quite guess with wild animals where they’re going to go and why they go there,” Bickford said.

Christy SomosCTVNews.ca Writer

@C_Somos ContactPublished Tuesday, September 14, 2021 9:16PM EDT

Green tree python (Pexexls/Pixabay)

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TORONTO — A new study from the University of Bath in the U.K. suggests that all modern snakes evolved from a few species that managed to survive the giant asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and most living things at the end of the Cretaceous period, between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago.

The Cretaceous period marked the last period of what’s known as the Mesozoic Era, following the Jurassic period and ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, says that the mass extinction event of the asteroid strike was a form of “creative destruction” that allowed snakes to diversify their evolutionary processes, and that snake species began to diversify around that time.

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• Read the full snake evolution study

Researchers, led by scientists at the University of Bath with collaborators from Bristol and Cambridge in the U.K. and Germany, used fossils and analysis of genetic differences between modern snakes to build a reconstruction of snake evolution, which helped pinpoint the time where modern snakes evolved.

The study results show that all living snakes, more than 4,000 species, trace back to a handful of species that survived the asteroid impact of 66 million years ago.

Researchers posit that snakes’ abilities to shelter underground and forgo food for long periods of time assisted them in surviving the destructive effects of the impact. The subsequent destruction of their competitors at the time from the strike allowed snake species back then to spread to new habitats and continents – spurring evolutionary processes.

That advantage allowed snakes to produce lineages like vipers, cobras, garter snakes and pythons, the study says, and notes that modern snake species, including tree snakes, sea snakes, cobras and boas, only emerged after dinosaurs’ extinction.

The study notes that there is a distinct shift in the shape of snake vertebrae in fossils from the period following the asteroid strike, which fed into the appearance of new species groups, including giant sea snakes up to 10 metres long, according to a release.

“It’s remarkable, because not only are they surviving an extinction that wipes out so many other animals, but within a few million years they are innovating, using their habitats in new ways,” said lead author Dr. Catherine Klein in the release.

The study also suggests that snakes began to spread across the globe during this time, and although the ancestors of living snakes “probably lived in the Southern Hemisphere,” snakes appear to have spread to Asia after the extinction event of the asteroid strike.

“Our research suggests that extinction acted as a form of ‘creative destruction’- by wiping out old species, it allowed survivors to exploit the gaps in the ecosystem, experimenting with new lifestyles and habitats,” said study author Nick Longrich in the release.

“This seems to be a general feature of evolution – it’s the periods immediately after major extinctions where we see evolution at its most wildly experimental and innovative,” he continued. “The destruction of biodiversity makes room for new things to emerge and colonize new landmasses. Ultimately life becomes even more diverse than before.”

Researchers also found evidence of a second diversification event around the time the earth shifted from a warm “Greenhouse Earth” into a cold “Icehouse” climate, which fomented the beginning of the Ice Ages and saw the formation of the polar icecaps.

The study says that the pattern researchers found in snakes’ evolution hints at how global catastrophes with severe and rapid environmental disruptions can drive evolutionary change. 

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/all-snakes-evolved-from-a-few-species-that-survived-cretaceous-period-asteroid-strike-study-suggests-1.5585724

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Most Farm Subsidies Are “Harmful” to People and the Planet, Says UN

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In a new report, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) sounded the alarm over the consequences of hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies that are “harmful to nature and health.” The joint report from multiple agencies within the United Nations comes on the eve of the intergovernmental organization’s Food Systems Summit 2021.

Around the world, $540 billion in support is given to the agricultural sector each year. But the new findings detail that 87 percent of this funding results in food products and practices that “distort food prices, hurt people’s health, and degrade the environment,” while exacerbating inequitable access to nutritious foods.

As the planet faces a worsening climate crisis, one that is accelerated by animal farming and other forms of industrial food production, the new report makes it clear that governments continue to subsidize harmful agricultural practices. Most of the support given worldwide, according to the UNEP, incentivized products with high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including beef, milk, and rice. In high-income nations, the largest subsidies among meats went to beef production. Poultry meat, or meat from chickens, ducks, geese, and other birds, was the number three most incentivized product, receiving support in 36 countries. 

This support comes despite the fact that factory farms are a major contributor to harmful GHGs in our atmosphere, worsening climate change, as well as air pollution. In fact, a recent study concluded that 17,900 U.S. deaths per year are caused by air pollution from factory farms. Of the 15,900 directly related to food production, 80 percent of deaths are linked to animal-based foods.

The impacts of government funding for the agriculture sector do not stop at harmful GHGs, the UNEP warns. It also negatively affects the ability of soil to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, preservation of forests and fresh water, and the prevention of biodiversity loss across land and sea. The new report warns that “the most potentially harmful types of support,” those that came without constraints on farming practices to protect the environment, accounted for around 50 percent of agricultural support. 

“The increased clustering and growth in the confinement of animals has led to growing environmental problems in many communities,” the report notes, adding that in areas where factory farms are located, an estimated 30 percent of particulate matter is produced by emissions from livestock. Yet, while animal products were among the commodities given the largest incentives between 2005-2016, “the production of more nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, such as tomatoes and bananas, was penalized” with less support.

Damage is also likely being done to farmers, already caught up in an inequitable system of industrial agriculture. The UNEP reports that price distortions caused by our current agricultural funding can widen the income gap that exists between small- and large-scale farms and reduce competitiveness in the food industry. Small farmers already hold very little power, contracted by large corporations that control much of their supply chains.

Consumers and communities, too, are impacted when prices are distorted by this misguided funding, which can “hinder consumers’ access to nutritious food, particularly for the poorest.” Food insecurity is already a global crisis. It claims the lives of nine million people every year. Corporate agriculture, on the other hand, promises to feed the world, but instead contributes to the growing food waste problem faced by many developed countries, leaving millions of people hungry.

While this funding is now made more visible to the public, the report cautions that there are more “hidden costs of global food and land-based agricultural systems to the environment and public health,” estimated at $12 trillion per year and growing. These costs include impacts from obesity and undernutrition, pollution, food waste, and inequitable income distribution.

With agricultural incentives projected to reach $1.8 trillion by the year 2030, the UN report calls for changes and declares the imminent Food Systems Summit “a momentous opportunity to generate a groundswell of support for repurposing” of support.

The report notes that “repurposed support policies can incentivize producers to avoid or reduce certain practices (e.g. intensive ploughing, overgrazing) and the use of some inputs (e.g. fertilizers and pesticides) which can damage soils, and to adopt regenerative agricultural practices instead.” 

The time to act is now. The agencies conclude that the decisions made at the Food Systems Summit and in the months and years ahead will either further or hinder 12 or more of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.Read More

Not All Food Waste Is Created Equal

The Food We Feed Farmed Animals Has a Massive Environmental Impact

The Hidden Cost of Italy’s Meat Industry