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Koala rescued from Australia's wildfire wasteland

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© APLocal CFA firefighter David Tree shares his water with an injured Australian Koala at Mirboo North after wildfires swept through the region on Monday, Feb. 9, 2009.

Sydney - It was a chance encounter in the charred landscape of Australia's deadly wildfires: A koala sips water from a bottle offered by a firefighter. David Tree noticed the koala moving gingerly on scorched paws as his fire patrol passed. Clearly in pain, the animal stopped when it saw Tree.

"It was amazing, he turned around, sat on his bum and sort of looked at me with (a look) like, put me out of my misery," Tree told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I yelled out for a bottle of water. I unscrewed the bottle, tipped it up on his lips and he just took it naturally.

"He kept reaching for the bottle, almost like a baby."

The team called animal welfare officers to pick up the koala Sunday, the day after deadly firestorms swept southern Victoria state.

Bizarro Earth

Birds Shifting North as Planet Warms

Finch
© iStockPhotoAn Audubon Society study found that more than half of 305 birds species in North America are spending the winter about 35 miles farther north than they did 40 years ago.
When it comes to global warming, the canary in the coal mine isn't a canary at all. It's a purple finch.

As the temperature across the U.S. has gotten warmer, the purple finch has been spending its winters more than 400 miles farther north than it used to.

And it's not alone.

An Audubon Society study to be released Tuesday found that more than half of 305 birds species in North America, a hodgepodge that includes robins, gulls, chickadees and owls, are spending the winter about 35 miles farther north than they did 40 years ago.

The purple finch was the biggest northward mover. Its wintering grounds are now more along the latitude of Milwaukee, Wis., instead of Springfield, Mo.

Bell

Drought-hit China to divert waters from two longest rivers: report

China will divert water from its two longest rivers to help farmers hit by the country's worst drought in decades, state media said Sunday.

Water from the Yangtze River, the country's longest, will be diverted to the northern areas of eastern Jiangsu Province, the Xinhua news agency reported, citing Zhang Zhitong, a senior Ministry of Water Resources emergency official.

The announcement came after Beijing last week raised its drought emergency to the highest level for the first time and sent relief supplies and technical specialists to eight major drought-hit regions.

Floodgates will also be opened in Inner Mongolia along the Yellow River, the country's second longest river, to increase water supply for central Henan and eastern Shandong provinces, Zhang according to the report.

China has released more than five billion cubic meters (177 cubic feet) of water from the Yellow River to fight the drought that has hit most of its north since November, Xinhua said.

The drought is also affecting central and southwestern rice-growing provinces.

Bell

Texas Drought Conditions Becoming Historic

Heard the one about the Texas farmer whose land was so dry, his cow was giving powdered milk? The lack of rain in the state is quickly becoming no laughing matter as a drought has a firm grip on most of Texas and there appears to be little or no relief in sight, contends a Texas A&M University professor who says conditions could even get worse.

Bell

Drought: "Australia is where America could be in a few years"

Atlanta, Georgia - Paul Dalby traveled to Atlanta from Australia with stories of a drought so severe that rivers stop flowing, lakes turn toxic and farmers abandon their land in frustration. Dr. Dalby's message, delivered as metro Atlanta struggles to map strategies for coping with severe water shortages, focused on his country's past and America's future.

"Australia is where America could be in a few years," said Dr. Dalby, a consultant with an Australian-funded institute, the International Center of Excellence in Water Resource Management.


To read more see the original article on the Global Atlanta website.

Bell

California water watchers cast a wary eye

Water experts are having a hard time finding the right words to describe what lies ahead, after recording a dismally dry January in California.

"Scary," "grim," and possible "conservation mandates" are offered up.

Yet it's easy for the experts to sound out a clear warning: This may become, simply, the worst drought California has ever seen.

"Our worst fears appear to be materializing," said Wendy Martin, drought coordinator at the state Department of Water Resources. "It's going to be a huge challenge."

Bell

Food Production Chaos Looms in Africa as Soil Quality Worsens

African farmers and climate change are combining to damage soil at a rate that may plunge the continent, home to about 1 billion people, into chaos as food production declines.

"The situation is very severe and soil fertility is declining rapidly," Jeroen Huising, a scientist who studies soils at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, said today in an interview. "Many countries like Kenya already don't have enough food to feed their population and soil degradation is worsening an already critical situation."

Bell

Chinese military tackles drought crisis

The Chinese government brought out the big guns over the weekend to help fight its worst drought in 50 years.

Soldiers loaded rockets with cloud-seeding chemicals over the weekend and fired them into the sky over drought-stricken areas.

The clouds opened and it rained briefly in some of the hardest hit provinces in northern and central China, but not enough end to the drought. The clouds were too thin and moving too fast to do much good.

Cloud Lightning

Windstorms batter France, Britain on flood alert

Severe windstorms left hundreds of thousands of homes without power across parts of France on Tuesday and forced authorities to shut down Paris' two main airports while Britain went on flood alert.

Hurricane-force gusts of up to 140 kilometres (87 miles) per hour battered France's west coast late Monday as the second major storm in two weeks barrelled in from the Atlantic.

Bracing for severe winds, authorities shut down Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports overnight for the first time in 34 years, cancelling more than 200 flights.

The airport reopened at 10:00 am (0900 GMT) but Air France reported major delays for all incoming and outgoing flights.

The storm left some 900,000 homes without electricity late Monday and by midday Tuesday 400,000 households were still without power in central, eastern and northern France, the grid operator ERDF said.

Bizarro Earth

Animals the forgotten victims of Australian fires

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© UnknownSheep search for any patch of fresh grass left after a fire raged through the community of Kinglake, northeast of Melbourne on February 9, 2009.

Overlooked amidst the human tragedy, thousands of animals -- kangaroos and koalas as well as cattle and sheep -- also perished in the scorching fires that have swept through southeast Australia.

At least 130 people died in the flames, official figures showed, but nobody was prepared to venture an estimate on the animal losses.

"It's been absolutely devastating," the president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, Pat O'Brien, told AFP.

"We've lost huge numbers of wildlife in the forest. By all reports we've got animals dying even before the flames reach them.

"Kangaroos, wallabies, all the animals that live in the trees -- the possums, koalas -- just gone, it's been a terrible, terrible thing for wildlife, total devastation," he said.

"There have been huge losses of farm animals as well, but those reports are still coming in."