Again
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http://reliefweb.int/node/485142
" Highs: The number of Goldfinches in gardens has reached an all-time high. This meteoric rise has seen Goldfinches rocket from number 20 in the garden bird 'league table' to number 10. England topped the podium for Goldfinches in 2011, with 58% of gardens visited during a typical week, compared with 53% in Wales and 49% in Scotland. Meanwhile, Welsh gardens boasted the highest reporting rate for the handsome Bullfinch, which is coming into gardens increasingly.
Scottish gardens were best for both Starling and Greenfinch, although numbers of these species in gardens across the UK last year were at their lowest in almost a decade.
Lows: After a succession of cold winters, numbers of the diminutive Wren visiting gardens have dropped. Compared with the long-term Garden BirdWatch average, as calculated from 1995–2010, around one in three householders have now lost this beautiful songster. Another cherished voice that is ebbing away is that of the Song Thrush, with half as many gardens visited during a typical week last year compared with 1995.
Through the year-round recording of BTO Garden BirdWatchers, fascinating seasonal patterns have emerged. These volunteers keep simple weekly records of the birds in their gardens. During late winter in 2011, Brambling numbers soared, up by almost 250% on the same period in 2009 and 2010. Spring 2011 saw numbers of Goldfinch and Bullfinch in gardens rise well above the average of the previous two years, while numbers of Siskins spotted in gardens during last summer were up by a quarter. Gardens were relatively quiet during autumn and early winter last year, with thrushes particularly notable by their absence: Blackbird numbers, for example, were down by 41% compared with the same period in 2009 and 2010. "
Dr Tim Harrison of BTO Garden BirdWatch has commented thus:
"With the Olympics just around the corner, it is appropriate that Goldfinches are leading the race into gardens.
Improved foods and feeder designs, coupled with feeding pressures in the wider countryside, appear to be driving this and other farmland species, such as Bullfinch, Reed Bunting and Lesser Redpoll, into gardens. Every season and every region has its garden bird highlights. The size of the influx of Brambling last winter, for instance, exceeded all previous Garden BirdWatch records. "
English gardens are said to be the better place in which to find Blackcap and Long-tailed Tit, in Welsh gardens its Blue Tit and Robin, and Scottish gardens Coal Tit and surprisingly Tree Sparrow.
For every 'garden bird' whose visits have increased — such as Goldfinch and Bullfinch — there are species that appear to be "faring less well".
Mistle Thrush, for example, seems to be dying out. During 2011 the percentage of gardens visited by Mistle Thrush was at its lowest point in the 16-year history of BTO Garden BirdWatch, and it is now largely absent from gardens in Greater London.
What do we infer from all these figures?
If done properly, no matter whether to a Blindman, or a silly old Birdman, one's "countryside", if you are lucky enough to still have one, should be filled in 'spring' with singing birds, and hence may feel beautiful and boundless!
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2012/world/drought-food-crisis-plague-africas-sahel/
by Codi Yeager
Gambia has become the latest African nation to appeal for food aid after the government announced last week that 70 percent of food crops in the country had failed due to poor rains.
In asking for $US 23 million in seeds, fertilisers and food aid, Gambia joined a string of other countries in Africa’s sub-Saharan Sahel region, where about 10 million people are facing a food crisis this year on the back of poor crops and high food prices. Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Mauritania and Niger have already declared emergencies and appealed for international assistance.
Droughts have failed many of the harvests of rice, groundnuts, millets, maize, sorghum and other staple crops, and have left little food to be stored in granaries in the region. Aid agencies and governments are now bracing to reach remote communities before the situation deteriorates into a famine.
The Sahel strip, which runs along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, is no stranger to droughts. But the dry spells here have occurred more frequently in the last decade, leaving communities little time to refill their food stocks before the next poor harvest hits.
“We do see that there are more and more climate-related disasters, with numerous years of drought becoming more and more frequent,” Rene McGuffin, a senior spokesperson for the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), told Circle of Blue. “Because of the increasing frequency of droughts, communities have very little time to recover. Many families have not recovered from the food crisis in 2010 — maybe they lost assets, had to sell livestock — but they haven’t been able to rebuild.”
–Rene McGuffin,
World Food Programme
USAID’s Famine Early Warning System predicts that crisis-level acute food insecurity will persist in regions of the Sahel until September, with the effects becoming most evident by April. Crisis-level food shortage, the so-called phase three on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), means that households might experience short-term instability, significant food consumption gaps and high malnutrition, and may cope by selling assets and diverting money from essential non-food items.
“Selling assets that will enable them in the future to be self-sustainable is what we don’t want them to do,” McGuffin said.
Food Prices
But selling livestock and other assets is often the only way families can scrape by when droughts destroy subsistence crops and send regional food prices soaring.
“Food prices have risen dramatically for staple foods like cereals,” McGuffin said. “Food prices normally fall after the harvest because there is more supply, but because of the drought, they have actually risen during this time.”
In Niger, one of the hardest-hit countries, millet prices are 36 percent higher than last year and well above their 20-year average. Sorghum prices are up 34 percent, and maize prices have increased 24 percent from 2011 and will continue to rise, according to McGuffin. Food prices remain high but stable in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Reaching Communities in Time
The situation echoes back to last year’s humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, when despite early warning forecasts going back to 2010, the international community did not scale up its relief efforts until three areas of Somalia were declared famine zones in July 2011.
This year, governments and aid agencies have mobilized early to try to mitigate the food shortages before the situation deteriorates into a famine. The United Nations called a meeting of aid organizations in mid-February to organize a response to the crisis, and the WFP has been collecting donations with the hopes of raising $US 650 to 700 million. Last Friday, the charity Oxfam International also launched a $US 36.3 million emergency appeal for west Africa.
Famine conditions developed in Somalia last year in large part because the Islamist militant group the Shabab was blocking most aid agencies from accessing the regions it controlled. “In the Horn of Africa, it was the worst drought in decades, but we only had famine in an area where aid organizations couldn’t reach,” McGuffin said.
She added that the poor infrastructure across the Sahel region could hinder efforts to reach remote communities in the next weeks and months. “We can do a lot, but the time to act is now in order to avoid a real crisis,” McGuffin said. “It will take time to respond, but we know what needs to be done.”
Sources: Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Reuters
Identifying the 'chief drivers', or are they the 'chief stakeholders', in our ever more frequent famines is not so very hard.
"The United Nations? They can't see the wood - for the lack of trees"
Sahel 2012 - a further unfolding of the Global Ecological Debt
We hear the grumblings of wise-man, and see spluttering spikes of concern, watch rattlings out of USAIDs. They course back and fore, through the blue sky vastness of our mother Africa.
Wave disturbances of increasing frequency issue from the air-conditioned offices of national and UN relief agencies. They are transmitted by the usual engines of in-country NGOs.
News is spreading slowly, quite unlike that punchy video, for lost soul Joseph Kony, across the ether of the world.
http://reliefweb.int/node/481298
There's:
"great alarm about the coming Sahel famine. A serious food and nutrition crisis threatening the Sahel region, over ten million people already facing food insecurity, over one million children at risk of severe acute malnutrition."
After over half a century, almost resting, great death begins his march, a long march of mass recruitment.
He's starting out from the nations that constitute Africa's Sahel. A huge seasonally-arid region that lies between thronging Guinea life (humid) and the emptiness of Sahara's barrens (dry).
" Alarming food security statistics in the Sahel are pushing humanitarian stakeholders to launch an urgent appeal to donors. A crisis is expected to hit the region in March 2012 if the international community and local actors do not take further action."
Old news?
"Decades passed and the regional ecological fabric began to fray, for this was the Sahel zone. Unbeloved of Man. Unblessed by God. And thus it suffered immeasurably. Then surging increases, throughout the late twentieth century, in its human population. Ecologically dependent people, utterly dependent people. Dependent upon local resources. Then in time, with foreign donor's cash, and bore hole technologies, they improvised an explosive increase among their flocks of goats and sheep. And between them they all but cleared the land of trees. Understandable enough, because they needed to cook their daily meal on wood. And it was only one meal. Millions more families, billions of folk in all, each household cooking on wood - not just in the Sahel of Africa. It was a huge pan tropical problem, one that was ignored, in effect it was a monster appeased, and for far too long."
In the words of Fidel Lantana.
Now I am here in Africa as an ecological observer. With each successive "dry year", as it afflicts one zone or another, it becomes harder and harder to avoid bringing into consideration all the issues - becomes harder not to assign some proportional human responsibility for yet another spiralling ecological crisis. Whether a crisis in the Sahel, or in the Greater Horn, or elsewhere in the Saharo-Sindian semi-arid lands that now stretch from the Atlantic at Banjul almost to the Bay of Bengal.
Identifying the 'chief drivers', or are they the 'chief stakeholders', in this year's famine Sahel 2012 is not so very hard. Despite so many apparently complex trends of interconnection and of competing socio-ecological concern. It's just that most people just can't see the wood for the lack of trees. Anyway, sitting quietly looking at trees was not something that 'traditionally-minded NGO folk' or main stream journalists appeared keen to do.
And as for our global birders? Twitch-on!
How very different this looming famine - when compared with that 'nice and wet' situation which held sway across the Sahel this time last year? Whilst the Greater Horn was spun inside out by the winds of drought.
Some of my UK birding colleagues may recall much email correspondence, and blogging-on, even by yours truly, about a "Sahelian rainfall rebound" and its potential long term effects on birds. For example, an increase in the number of northbound Great Snipe occurring in western Europe, as in spring 2011. Or by the unprecedented late-ness of migrants heading out of East Africa, a vast area afflicted by drought, in the same spring period.
Many of the bird species that migrate each spring from tropical Africa to the European peninsula have been declining at an alarming rate.
Once familiar species have been disappearing, not only from large swathes of the British Isles, but from across much of the European Union also.
This suggests the following options:
1) the cause of these declines was 'changes' in Europe
2) the cause of these declines was 'changes' in Africa
3) the cause of these declines was 'something bad' happening in both continents
Unlike resident birds, and short-distance migrants, intercontinental migratory bird populations are prey to ecological degradation in many locations and across vast areas. They are vulnerable to changes in their breeding range, across their winter quarters, and at their chosen stop-over sites everywhere between. They are particularly vulnerable to environmental change brought about by human activity because their health is dependent upon finding land of "high environmental quality" in so many widely separated areas. In lands under the control ['socioeconomic jurisdiction'] of widely differing peoples.
Because of such a great geographical spread of vulnerability ascertaining "the exact causes" of any change in one population has been considered very difficult. Although nowadays I am not so sure it is! Having said that even those most circumspect of 'bird enthusiasts', the staff at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in England for example, will acknowledge that:
" The rapid and widespread intensification of agricultural systems and habitat loss in Europe has undoubtedly driven the declines of some species and global climate change is implicated in the declines of others.''
written by Dr. Roderick Nash when Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dust storm envelopes KIA Lodge & JRO Airport
As I sit waiting for my wageni (guests) a dust storm, the first for two weeks at this location, obliterates the view at KIA a very birdy lodge, located right beside the ungrazed international airport, itself close below Mount Kilimanjaro.Minutes prior to this duizzard a flock of 100+ European Bee-eaters, on their way north, swung vigorously east to avoid the great wall of gritty brown particles.
With much excited calling these magical Merops swooped and looped away toward the greatest free-standing mountain on 'our' planet.
I imagine they were exchanging ecological insights. Perspicacity way beyond that which our oh so-corporate-friendly politicians are capable of, in these dismal-outlook days, days of gathering dust clouds.