I am away this week, so I am taking the opportunity to let colleagues tell you about some of our International Research. In today's guest blog, Paul Donald talks about the mystery of the charismatic Ethiopian bush-crow...Today was a great day – an email from the international Journal of Ornithology confirming that a scientific article by my colleagues and I has been accepted for publication. Not a massively rare event for an RSPB researcher as our department produces many such papers each year, but this one is a bit special for me because it answers one of the great mysteries of African ornithology, one that has intrigued me for years. The conundrum is this: why does the Ethiopian bush-crow have such a restricted distribution? Or, put another way, why should a smart and adaptable bird that eats almost anything, that can survive happily in even the most heavily degraded habitats, that likes hanging around villages, have a world range so small it would fit comfortably inside Norfolk? Surely it should be common and widespread, like so many others in the crow family? In 1946, the formidable ornithologist Constantine Benson concluded “The reason for this remarkably restricted distribution is not at all apparent to me. There seems to be nothing at all unique or distinctive about its environment”. He was stumped, and since then others have looked and failed to find an answer. But the reason they failed, we now believe, is that they were looking for a barrier invisible to the human eye, like a glass wall.
Ethiopian bush-crow family (Paul Donald)Increasingly desk-bound researchers like me love getting their boots dusty, and you don’t get dustier than by hacking through the bush in southern Ethiopia, recording the exact location of bush-crows and their nests. But it was only back in the lab that we spotted the big pattern that others had missed: the bush-crow’s range exactly follows the edge a unique bubble of cool, dry climate. Inside the bubble, where the average temperature is less than 20°C, the bush-crow is almost everywhere. Outside, where the average temperature hits 20°C or more, there are no bush-crows at all. A cool bird, that appears to like staying that way.
Bush-crow habitat (Paul Donald)Why is this species so completely trapped inside its little bubble? We don’t yet know, but it seems likely that it is physically limited by temperature – either the adults, or more likely its chicks, simply cannot survive outside the bubble, even though there are thousands of square miles of identical habitat all around. Whatever the reason, alarm bells are now ringing loudly, as the storm of climate change threatens to swamp the bush-crow’s little climatic lifeboat. And once gone, it's gone for good.
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Hi again Peter, Here's the promised response from our policy experts...
The losses of Rhinos and Elephants you describe are heartbreaking, especially after so much effort and money has been put into their conservation. Many people have put their lives on the line to protect these animals.
As you probably know RSPB is part of the BirdLife International Partnership. BirdLife is the official Listing Authority for birds for the IUCN Red List and contributes to the scientific reviews of proposals to change the listing of bird species on the CITES Appendices and to the ‘Review of Significant Trade’ process which results in recommendations and sanction. BirdLife delegations attend the Conferences of the Parties and with government and other NGO delegations work towards optimal decisions that will support the conservation of the world’s birds. RSPB supports BirdLife in such policy work. We also work to support the BirdLife Partners in several of the countries you mention, for example BirdLife South Africa and the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania. Those organisations are the real experts on the wildlife of their countries and we support them to be able to engage in such valuable policy work. I’m afraid I don’t know whether those BirdLife Partners are involved in the forthcoming conference of the parties you mention but I would be delighted to pass you their details.
I would love to say that we were able to be involved directly in discussions on Rhino, Elephant, Tibetan Antelope, Saiga Antelope, and Turtle populations, all of which are on the agenda, but unfortunately we don’t have the resources to engage directly on such broad agendas. However, we are 100% behind supporting BirdLife Partners in those countries to do work on the ground.
I very much agree with you that education is a key part of ensuring that wildlife is not used unsustainably but policing and enforcement are also crucial. Whilst CITES is certainly not perfect, it is essential to have some control over imports and exports of threatened species and we actively support the UK Police and Customs authorities in that respect. In addition, the RSPB campaigned to restrict the import of wild birds into the EU to those which had proven conservation benefits to the species concerned but we were actually quite content when the EU banned all wild bird imports on disease prevention grounds in 2007. As far as we can tell through our monitoring of birds in trade, this has not led to any appreciable increase in smuggling or circumvention of regulations.
I do hope this goes some way to answering your questions.
All good points that we'll look at as the research progresses – thanks redkite !
Hi Peter – will find out more from our policy experts on CITES and get back to you soon!
I should note that I appreciate that RSPB is "birds" limited but the scale of debate/action that I believe is needed re CITES is simply not happening at this time.
Very very interesting I have to say; never seen this particular crow although this landscape described much of my childhood and is now ravaged by increasing temperatures, variable rainfall increasing population and overgrazing; although recent droughts have reduced Kenya's cattle population by 80% so the latter may reduce.
Would it also be possible to have some sort of update on the RSPB's CITES position. There are key negotiations taking place later in 2012. Over 500 rhinos have been poached last year; the massacre of elephants in DRC Congo, Chad and west central Africa is continuing; elsewhere in Africa poaching is debilitating elephant families; taking out the older females and males as in Northern Kenya/ across Tanzania.
The Southern range states of the African elephant have too many elephants and they cause massive problems with habitat degradation and kill people when they incroach on "shambas" for crops ; they prefer watermleons to acacia ! (There is I believe a 500 year cycle between savannas habitat and elephant population nos which is disturbed by enclosure ie park fences and human population growth; trees crash and die and then elephant nos slump naturally).
Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe are calling for the ivory to be taken off and the trade in ivory to be legalised. They are threatening to leave CITES.
The Far East and China is at the root of all this. These countries are also implacted in tiger destruction for "medicinal" body parts but also Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are at the root of the trade in wild birds and animals.
I do not believe that prohibition ever works it drives criminality; we have to have a debate as to how these trades are policied as I believe the coherence of CITES is under severe threat at the moment. We really need to educate China, Vietnam, Thailand as to the impact of their traditions in medicine particularly; how can the extinction in the wild of species such as the rhino and tiger be good kharma ?
Another example of great work by the RSPB/Birdlife Int. Just a couple of suggestions as follows, I see the crow is quite pale/white, this should help to ameliorate against the heat of the sun as white tends to reflect heat while black absorbs it. I agree survival is therefore likely to centre around the chicks/ breeding, it may even be associated with the eggs as too higher temperature may render the eggs infertile. The other possibility is that high temperatures may render the sperm of the male infertile. I believe this was noted in some ground dwelling mammals in Russia two or three years ago when they had an exceptionally hot spring and summer and their wheat harvest failed. Anyway, just a couple of ideas.