The water vole is heading back to Kielder

The water vole is a step nearer being reintroduced back into the Kielder Forest in Northumberland thanks to a £40,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The money will go towards the Forestry Commission and Tyne Rivers Trust’s ongoing work to improve rivers in Kielder Forest so they are ready for the water voles. Once this preparation work is completed, an application for further funding will be made for the second phase of the project: to reintroduce water voles to the Kielder area.

Kevin O’Hara, Senior Conservation Officer at Northumberland Wildlife Trust, said: “Building on many years' success in otter conservation, it is right that we now focus on the water vole and its current plight. After a long decline, this funding gives us real hope of reversing the situation and bringing this charismatic little animal back to our riverbanks where it belongs”.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/Kielder%20water%20vole.html

Two new river turtle species described

Date:

April 24, 2014

Source:

University of Vermont

Summary:

The alligator snapping turtle is the largest river turtle in North America, weighing in at up to 200 pounds and living almost a century. Now researchers have discovered that it is not one species -- but three. By examining museum specimens and wild turtles, the scientists uncovered deep evolutionary divisions in this ancient reptile.

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Australia's native wildlife under threat as land stewardship declines

Feral invaders and the disappearance of outback land management practices driving species extinction

Oliver Milman

theguardian.com, Thursday 24 April 2014 04.49 BST

The steady urbanisation of Australia’s population is having an unexpectedly negative impact upon native wildlife left behind in wilderness areas, a leading conservationist has warned.

Dr Barry Traill, a zoologist and director of Pew Australia, said that land management practices in Australia’s outback, which covers around 70% of the country, have been stripped away as people depart for towns and cities.

Indigenous land management, which stretches back for more than 50,000 years, is credited for helping the environment regenerate, with Traill saying that several Australian species have evolved as a result of these practices.

Traill told Guardian Australia that animals such as bilbies, the burrowing bettong and the Rufous hare wallaby have been wiped out in areas of central and northern Australia as people move away from remote areas.

Around 90% of Australians live in some sort of urban area – two thirds within a major city – with the rate of urbanisation estimated at 1.2% of the population per year.

Traill said: “People often perceive that high populations of people will push out wildlife, which is a true generalisation for the planet, but that can obscure a bigger truth for Australia.

“When there are few people in the Australian outback, the country starts to degrade. The bush may look intact but species are dropping out.”

Traill said Indigenous fire management ensure small areas of land were burned through, allowing for some species to thrive and even co-evolve with land practices.

Now, huge wildfires, sparked by lightning, are tearing through large swathes of the outback, causing some species to become locally extinct. Feral invaders are also a problem for struggling native animals.

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New app tracks Africa’s great wildebeest migration

A tailor-made safari operator, Discover Africa, has developed an app which enables the spectacular wildebeest migration to be tracked in real-time.

HerdTracker is a real time Google map, which shows instant updates of the exact location of the migrating herds. This is coupled with a migration map, which gives monthly migration predictions, based on data from people on the ground in the Serengeti – local pilots who fly over the Serengeti and Masai Mara, safari guides, Tanzania National Parks Authority rangers and lodges in the Masai Mara in Kenya.

The migration map gives people planning to go to Africa on safari and hoping to see one of nature’s greatest spectacles, access to a month-by-month prediction, so that they can get themselves to the right place at the right time.

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Canada's downgrading of humpback whales could put them at risk

Increasing numbers of humpback whales (North Pacific population) has led the Canadian Government to change their conservation status from endangered to species of special concern it was announced in the Canadian Gazette.

This move follows the 2011 conclusion by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) that there had been no evidence of a population decline of humpbacks since the 1960s, which is around the time that commercial whaling ended. They also found that the population has been increasing at about four per cent per year since the early 1990s (when records began), and that they have increased by more than 50 per cent over the last three generations.

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