A Manitoba First Nation says it will no longer allow non-Indigenous hunters on its land, after years of alleged moose overhunting and meat w
A Manitoba First Nation says it will no longer allow non-Indigenous hunters on its land, after years of alleged moose overhunting and meat wastage left the community's traditional hunters with a dwindling animal population and few opportunities to hunt.
Bloodvein First Nation, located just over 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg along the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg, erected no-trespassing signs on Saturday.
The First Nation is calling on the province to stop issuing hunting licences in Bloodvein territory.
The traveller Vsevolod Stepanitsky, Honored Ecologist of Russia, Advisor to the Director General of the Amur Leopards Autonomous Non-Profit Organization, tells how they managed to save these magnificent animals
“People have a very direct bearing upon the extinction of many species of plants and animals. In the second half of the 19th century, the population of the Amur leopards was relatively large. Their habitat covered a significant part of the Primorsky Territory, the adjacent areas of China, Manchuria, and the Korean Peninsula. But from the beginning of the 20th century, the situation began to change not in favor of the magnificent cats. In the middle of the last century, they completely disappeared from the Korean Peninsula, at about the same time, people practically forced them out of Manchuria - so, the leopards remained only few in the border area with Russia. In Russia, the leopards disappeared from the southern Sikhote-Alin, northwest of the Primorsky Territory.
Today, the last refuge of the Amur leopard is, in fact, the southwest of the Primorsky Territory where about 100 adult leopards inhabit, as well as the adjacent part of China, with at least 10 of them. And that's all! The leopards inhabiting North Korea are not documented by experts in any way, although theoretically, they could be found there.
I can say the situation was much worse. About 20 years ago, the population of the Amur leopards fell to fifty individuals, the subspecies was on the verge of extinction. Of course, at that time, such advanced monitoring methods were not available and it can be assumed that there were slightly more of the Amur leopards, but still, the situation was extremely tense and rather alarming.
The key factors in the low number of the Amur leopard population are the death of the animals at the hands of humans, lack of the hoofed mammal resources being the leopards’ food base, the destruction and loss of habitats due to economic activities, deforestation, and the forest fires. As a result, the leopard’s habitat was shrinking steadily.”
The Bornean crested fireback is a medium-sized, up to 70 cm long, forest pheasant with a peacock-like dark crest, bluish black plumage, reddish brown rump, black outer tail feathers, red iris and bare blue facial skin. The female is a brown bird with short crest, blue facial skin and spotted black-and-white below.
The crested fireback is found in lowland forests of the Thai-Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra. Their diet consists mainly of plants, fruits and small animals. The female usually lays between four and eight creamy white eggs.
Due to ongoing habitat loss and over hunting in some areas, the crested fireback is evaluated as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. source
Conservation groups paint a grim picture of the road ahead for a wide variety of vertebrates.
Nearly three-fifths of all animals with a backbone -- fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals -- have been wiped out since 1970 by human appetites and activity, according to a grim study released Thursday.
On current trends, stocks of global wildlife could plunge two-thirds by 2020, an annual decline of two percent, conservation group WWF and the Zoological Society of London warned in their joint biennial Living Planet report.
There is no mystery as to why: our own ever-expanding species -- which has more than doubled in number since 1960 to 7.4 billion -- is simply eating, crowding and poisoning its planetary co-habitants out of existence...
