Order of the Supreme Court in the matter of M K Ranjitsinh & Others Vs Union of India & Others dated 21/03/2024. The matter related to protection of Great Indian Bustard (GIB) and Lesser Florican. The SC order of April 19, 2021 imposed restrictions on the setting up of overhead …
THE US Army is not all about Stinger missiles and guerrilla warfare. Its Corps of Engineers are about to embark on what has been labelled as the 'the largest environmental restoration project ever' - to spend some us $7.8 billion to restore the Florida Everglades to their lost glory. Their …
MEMORIES. Mysteries of the human mind. Though the intricacies of our mind still remain confusing to researchers, they have some idea about how we 'remember'. What and where are some of the basic parameters that help us remember incidents. Controlled experiments, coupled with the experience of pet lovers, tell us …
A NEW look at a fossil discovered over a decade ago has strengthened the theory that bats evolved from flightless creatures that hung from tree branches by all four legs. Most paleontologists now believe that birds evolved from small ground-dwelling dinosaurs that had developed feathers for another purpose. The origins …
King penguin chicks are remarkably adept at hearing their parents' voices over the din of the colony, researchers have found. This ability, which is shared by humans, is known as the "cocktail party effect" - the human brain's capacity to filter out irrelevant background noise. King penguins breed in colonies …
THANKS to global warming, the Arctic is slowly melting. And this climate change is affecting wildlife, according to a US biologist. Rising temperatures, which allowed the black guillemots to gain a foothold here some two-and-a-half decades back, are now pushing these birds out.Black guillemots live right across the higher latitudes …
SHORE birds usually find prey by probing until they strike a clam or a crab. Some can even feel vibrations from buried animals with their bills. But now, researchers in the Netherlands have found one specie which takes advantage of the properties of wet sand to find deeply buried, motionless …
THE Rajasthan government has been asked by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Rajasthan, to find alternative sites to the Keoladeo Ghana National Park near Bharatpur so that the pressure of the visitors to the 2,900-hectare sanctuary can be reduced. According to the secretary of WWF, Harsh Vardhan, Kalakh …
CONSERVATIONISTS in the UK plan to use explosions and gunfire to scare migrant birds away from parts of a wintering site poisoned by an environmental disaster. They will lay down food in less polluted areas of a Spanish nature reserve that is home to thousands of birds flying south from …
But for a timely court order, 500 birds which were illegally captured would have been sold in Delhi on August 7. Following a tip-off, an eight-member team of the forest and wildlife department of the Delhi government raided a house in east Delhi and recovered the birds kept in six …
The Broken Arrows The relationships between plants and pollinators took thousands of years to develop. Human intervention has destroyed them in a very short period. Pollinator decline is also affecting the harvest. Therefore, it is vital to conserve them, but research in this field is lacking in India THERE are …
finally , the mystery of the disappearing Siberian cranes in the Keoladeo Ghana National Park, Bharatpur, Rajasthan, has been partly solved. And for those willing to learn in India's wildlife management community, there are several valuable lessons. The birds have either stayed out or arrived in significantly reduced numbers over …
Following exclusion of grazing animals from the Azraq Wetland Reserve in 1995, the wetland has become totally dominated by common reed ( Phragmites australis ). In an attempt to restore wetland community diversity, particularly that associated with open pools, exposed mud and low marsh, experimental reintroduction of water buffaloes has …
increasing silt load and spreading nets of prawn culturists are slowly throttling Chilka, Asia's biggest salt water lake spread over 1,100-sq-km. It is estimated that rivers and rivulets such as Nuna, Kusumi and Salia carry about 13 million tonnes of silt into the lake alongwith fresh water every year. The …
Hundreds, perhaps, even thousands of migratory birds are dying in the eastern US and Canada due to salmonella bacteria, the US National Wildlife Health Center (nwhc) announced recently. The organisation has found the bacteria in dead birds form over American 10 states since January this year and is in the …
the Great Indian Bustard, which is also the state bird of Rajasthan, is fast becoming extinct due to human encroachment on its habitat. The birds known as Maldhok in Maharashtra and Godawan in Rajasthan, are found in the dry grasslands of the region that are being brought under cultivation to …
Persistent organochlorines such as DDT and its metabolites (DDTs), hexachlorocyclohexane isomers (HCHs), chlordane compounds (CHLs), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were determined in whole-body homogenates of resident and migratory birds collected from South India. Organochlorine contamination pattern in birds varied depending on their migratory behaviour. Resident birds contained relatively …
rampant harvesting of nests has caused a decline in the populations of the Edible-nest Swiftlet ( Collocalia fuciphagia ), according to R Sankaran, scientist in the division of ecology at the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History ( sacon ) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Sankaran has undertaken a …
two reports about the fate of sea birds affected by oil slicks reveal a very sorry picture about their survival after they are released from captivity. In the uk , for example, only one per cent of guillemots (a sea bird) survived the first year of release. In the Netherlands, …
Lloyd Davis, zoologist at University of Otago, New Zealand, says that penguins use a practice similar to prostitution in order to obtain stones for their nests. Davis has made nine visits to Antarctica to study penguin behaviour. "They are not nearly as faithful as we thought,' he says. "They swap …
as long as those little, green men do not show up, the third stone from the sun - Earth - remains the only planet that can boast of life. In fact, life is in such abundance here that science can often lose track of all the various lifeforms that we …
