Nature News, Vol. 6, Issue No.5 (May 2017)
BIRDS
The Hindu 10 May 2017KGF welcomes an Amur falcon: Satellite-tracked bird’s route from Somalia throws new light migration. On May 1, perched on a lookout in Somalia, the Amur falcon named Long leng prepared to fly towards India, the mid-point of a nearly 22,000-km journey to Northern Mongolia. The project has provided new evidence on altered flight patterns of the species. Read more...
The Hindustan Times 15 May 2017
Endangered bustards fitted with radio-tags to track flight to Pakistan : India has fitted a small backpack with radio-tags on two Great Indian Bustards (GIBs) with an aim to track their flight to Pakistan, where according to wildlife experts they are being hunted down.
In a first of its kind move, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) fitted the tracking machines on two birds Read more
CLIMATE CHANGE
The Pioneer 18 May 2017Insure farmers against climate change: How India’s agricultural policy has made us structurally vulnerable to climate change. Bundelkhand is where India’s marginal farming dream died. Known for the dacoits of Chambal and the Rani of Jhansi, the arid region, occupying districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, has experienced drastic variation Read more
The Pioneer 18 May.2017
Dream of a Greener and Cleaner India: Switching to renewable sources of energy is the global preference now and an environmental priority. As the second-largest coal user, India needs to perfect its infrastructure a whole lot better to replace the use of coal completely. A recent Niti Aayog report has put full and comprehensive focus on environment Read more
The Hindu 23 May. 2017
An unequal burden: The Paris Climate Agreement recognises that all countries have responsibilities. However, the developed world needs to shoulder the major funding requirement. The Paris Climate Agreement (PA) was signed in December 2015 in an attempt to limit the release and the effects from greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere Read more
ENVIRONMENT
The Hindu 14 May 2017Traffic pollution reaches the Himalayas: India’s notorious traffic pollution is no longer an urban malaise; its impact is now being felt 4,000 meters above sea level, in the Himalayas.
Geologists have found high levels of sculpture from diesel emissions along the Manali-Leh highway that snakes through the northwestern Himalayas. Read more
HUMAN – WILDLIFE CONFLICT
The Hindustan Times 14 May 2017Its man vs wild as roads, power lines, farms and homes creep into the wild: Two people a day that’s the average death count from man-animal conflict in India. It’s been this high for seven years; higher than terror attacks, higher than malaria. Elephants, tigers, leopards, lions and snakes cause most of these deaths, across urban and rural India. That’s over 6,000 deaths in seven years Read more
FOREST AND BIODIVERSITY
The Times of India 22 May 2017This village shows there's money in saving forests: Dudhai's villagers may be the first in India to have got financial benefits under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.They have also used its provisions to end rampant illegal mining on the Swarna riverbed which had been destroying agricultural field and forests. Read more
WETLANDS, RIVERS & WATER
Indian Express 12 May 2017Once upon a river: In the third week of March, while welcoming the rivers Ganga and Yamuna as legal persons, Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice Alok Singh of the Uttarakhand High Court observed that they were inspired by lawmakers in New Zealand. Barely a week earlier, the New Zealand Parliament had conferred legal personhood to the country’s Read more
The Indian Express 22 May.2017
Why Ken-Betwa link may have to wait: Of the three gatekeepers in the Environment Ministry, the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) and the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) recommended the Ken-Betwa Link Project (KBLP) for clearance in 2016. Now with a favorable report tabled at a meeting of the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) last week, the stage is set for statutory green nods for the project. Read more
The Pioneer 15 May 2017
Aquatic life flourishes in a stretch of Ganga: survey - The Centre has stumbled upon a few encouraging nuggets while studying the Ganga, with the discovery of a flourishing aquatic life in a single stretch of the river, considered one of the most polluted in the world. After 70 years, the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII), which is enumerating aquatic life in the Read more
WILDLIFE & ENDANGERED SPECIES
The Indian Express 9 May 2017Tiger population up in Manas, Orang; Kaziranga hopes to cross the 140 mark: The Tiger count in at least two of Assam’s four reserves has registered a growth since the tiger census conducted last year, and the authorities expect a similar trend in the remaining two reserves for the big cats in the state. Manas National Park has recorded the presence of Read more
The Hindu 12 May 2017
How to count every elephant in Karnataka: Over 500 citizens have volunteered for the 2017 elephant census, up from 100 in 2012. Next week, over 533 ordinary citizens will join 92 resource persons to spend four days scouring the forest floor for elephant dung or waiting, sweating, for hours, for the pachyderms to show up at waterholes. They are all part of the All India Read more
The Hindustan Times 18 May 2017
Delhi zoo records highest mortality in India, 171 animals dead within a year: The National Zoological Park in Delhi has recorded the highest mortality 171 animals among all major zoos across the country in the past one year. It is also the highest death toll in the Delhi zoo in recent times. Sources said the animals that died in the Delhi zoo in 2016-17, include mostly birds. Read more
The Hindu 22 May 2017
Leopard safaris put Rajasthan on tourist map: Pali has become a popular hotspot for spotting the big cat, which is known to be a very shy and elusive animal otherwise
For over a decade, Patik Patel, an Ahmedabad-based wildlife photographer, has been a regular visitor to Sheoganj in Rajasthan. The area dotted with low hills Read more
The Hindu 23 May. 2017
Time in camera-trap data throws more light on tiger behaviour: New methodology is said to be a crucial addition to wildcat’s conservation. Time in camera-trap data, which could help us, learn more about the behaviour and movement of tigers was rarely used. A new model, however, has incorporated the time and location of photo-capture to estimate the abundance and spatial distribution of tigers. Read more
