Animals
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Cloud Lightning

UK: Jersey seabird death toll 'at least 600 and growing'

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Cris Sellares said there were a total of 136 birds found on Sunday
More than 600 dead seabirds have now been found on Jersey's beaches, wildlife experts have confirmed.

The National Trust for Jersey organised a second count on Sunday to track the impact of recent storms.

For the second week about 130 birds were discovered dead. Experts put this down to them struggling for food in heavy wind and rain.

Wildlife experts are calling for the Channel Island governments to work to assess the scale of bird loss.

Dozens of volunteers answered a call to scour the island's coast on Sunday to collect some of the hundreds of dead birds which have washed up during the extreme weather early in February.

Cris Sellares, from the National Trust, said there were a total of 136 birds found and some specimens, such as local shags, an oiled razorbill, a kittiwake and some puffins were saved for post-mortem analysis.

She said: "It is one storm after another, after another, they can't feed in this weather, they get weak.

Black Cat

Leopard on the loose in Indian city sparks terror as it runs wild in a hospital, cinema and apartment block

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On the loose: A shocked man watches a leopard leap past him in Meerut
A leopard was discovered prowling the streets of Meerut, near Delhi

The animal evaded capture and authorities closed schools and colleges

The efforts of officials to capture it were hampered by crowds of onlookers


A leopard sparked panic in a north Indian city when it strayed inside a hospital, a cinema and an apartment block while evading captors and injured at least two people.

Authorities closed schools and colleges in Meerut, 60 kilometres (37 miles) northeast of the Indian capital, after the leopard was discovered prowling the city's streets on Sunday, a senior city official said.

'Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to track the leopard down. We have launched a massive hunt for the beast,' said additional district magistrate S.K. Dubey.

Cloud Lightning

Thousands of puffins wiped out in storms: Record numbers wash up dead on coasts of Spain and France

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Normal winters would have brought 3 or 4 puffins to the Bay of Biscay, but this winter saw 35, with countless more thought to have drowned in the ocean
* Record numbers of puffins have been washed up on Bay of Biscay

* A few die each year, but recently many more have died due to storm weather

* Drowning is common cause of death for the puffins

* They are often swept away in strong storms while hunting at sea


Thousands of puffins are feared to have been killed in the recent storms that have hammered the UK for the last month.

The British Trust for Ornithology said today it's received a record number of reports of puffins, wearing uniquely-numbered metal rings showing they are from the UK, being washed up dead on the coasts of France and Spain.

It's feared they have been wiped out in their thousands while hunting far out to sea in the storm-lashed Bay of Biscay for their favourite food, sand eels.

BTO spokesman Paul Stancliffe said: 'Sadly, the sight of a puffin, beak full of sand eels, might be a little harder to come by this summer as they struggle to survive the recent storms that have rocked the Bay of Biscay.'

In a normal winter, the BTO would expect two or three ringed puffins to be found in the Bay, which covers western France and northern Spain, but during the last few weeks, more than 35 have been reported and countless more are feared to have been drowned and lost forever far out at sea.

Cloud Lightning

Number of dead seabirds found on the French coast increases to 15,000

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© Maxppp A puffin found dead on a beach.
Numerous birds storm victims: the slaughter continues on the beaches of Charente-Maritime

For the third consecutive weekend, the LPO Charente-Maritime asks its volunteers to identify bird flood victims, some may still be saved if they are caught early.

Since the early storms in January, 15,000 dead birds or more were found all along the coast of the Atlantic. They number in the thousands in Charente-Maritime for over a fortnight. They were mostly guillemots and puffins, birds of the high seas who found no food in the sea due to bad weather .

At Charente-Maritime, those who are found alive on the beach are supported, warmed and fed, the Centre for the Protection Departmental Dolus-D'Oléron the only department. Since January 29, 275 birds are often very weak were housed, only a third survived.

Wolf

The urban hyenas that attack rough sleepers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

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Urban hyenas are becoming a dangerous problem in the Ethiopian capital, where they attack rough sleepers.

It is late evening in Addis Ababa. Stephen Brend, a zoologist with the Born Free Foundation, is driving me to the airport to catch a flight back to London.

"Have you got time for a ten-minute detour?" he asks, as we passed the British embassy. "Of course," I reply.

So he turns off the road and up a dirt track between some rough shacks and a collection of battered old jalopies that passes for a taxi rank in Ethiopia's capital.

"There! Look there!" Stephen exclaims. In the beams of his headlights I see several pairs of eyes glinting in the darkness like tiny mirrors. As we drive closer I begin to make out the shapes of the animals behind those eyes. They are hideous beasts, as large as the largest dogs, with coarse spotted brown fur, elongated necks and front legs much longer than their back ones so their backs taper away from their powerful shoulders.

Bizarro Earth

Tide of dead seabirds keeps rolling in on Southern England beach

Dead Seabird
© Dorset EchoOne of the dead seabirds.
Dead seabirds are continuing to be washed up on Chesil Beach.

A combination of storms and pollution are thought to be to blame because some of the birds are covered in oil.

The weekend saw an overnight tide wash up more dead seabirds on Portland including razorbills, guillemots and gannets and lumps of what is thought to be palm or vegetable oil.

Concerned Wyke Regis resident Peter Minter said: "On Saturday morning people visiting Chesil Cove discovered that a lot of dead seabirds had been washed up.

"There were huge amounts of an oily, sticky white substance which after tests may be confirmed as palm oil also washed ashore early this month.

"The substance emits a pungent, overpowering odour."

The Echo reported last week that Dorset Wildlife Trust officers rescued distressed sea birds that washed up on Chesil Beach following a spell of storms and wild weather. Most birds washed up dead.

Attention

Officials probe death of 30-foot whale in Chesapeake Bay

Officials are investigating the death of a 30-foot-long whale found in shallow water near a Chesapeake Bay island at the Maryland-Virginia line.

Joan Barnes, a spokeswoman with the Virginia Aquarium Stranding Response team, said Sunday morning that experts conducted a rare on-boat necropsy, or animal autopsy, of the animal as its body rested in shallow water.

The whale was unable to be towed to land or taken ashore.

Investigators got as close to the animal "to conduct a necropsy as best they could," Barnes said.

Officials with the Smithsonian Institution and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries also are involved in the investigation.

Part of the challenge, Barnes said, was the inaccessibility of the whale. It could only be approached by a shallow-draft boat and is on a remote island.

Attention

Remains of dead whale removed from Portsmouth beach, UK

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@DarkQueen_xxx Twitter
The removal of a decomposing whale from Eastney beach took 12 hours.


The dead animal was found on the shoreline by dog walkers on Monday afternoon.

Portsmouth City Council was assisted by Cosham Plant Hire, Veolia Environmental Services, Colas and the University of Portsmouth to remove the whale yesterday.

Despite previous suggestions it was blubber, the council said marine biologists from the university took DNA samples during the move to confirm it was a whale.

Colas cordoned off the road by the Royal Marines Museum in order to begin the operation, which consisted of transferring the rotting corpse from the bottom of the shoreline up to a nearby skip.

Info

Killer starfish threaten Great Barrier Reef

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The starfish have a voracious appetite
Waves of carnivorous starfish are eating their way through Australia's Great Barrier Reef - and sugar cane farming is being blamed.

Researchers at Australia's Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), just outside Townsville, Queensland, in north-east Australia, have mapped the pattern of destruction.

"Coral cover is half of what it was 27 years ago, coral cover is going down at an alarming rate." Dr Katharina Fabricius, coral reef ecologist and AIMS principal research scientist, told the BBC World Service programme Discovery.

She said the biggest culprit was the Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTs).

"There are three main sources for the coral decline, one is storms, however 42% is attributed to Crown of Thorns Starfish - and just 10% due to bleaching. This compares with 70% due to bleaching for reefs elsewhere in the world , such as in the Caribbean."

Bleaching occurs when corals are stressed by changes in conditions such as temperature, light, or nutrients. They expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues, causing them to turn completely white.

Arrow Down

800 pigeons used in Santeria rituals stolen in Florida County

Pigeons
© Wikimedia Commons
Pigeons are much more than dirty park pests to Maria Morales. She's cashing in on them as part of her retirement plan.

But Morales and her husband, Alberto, suffered a financial setback over the weekend when thieves stole more than 800 valuable homing pigeons from their Marion County farm, and slaughtered 100 more.

Their loss - nearly $20,000.

The Moraleses have been breeding pigeons and selling them mostly to people who use the birds in Santeria religious rituals. Given the migration of people from the Caribbean who practice Santeria, Morales said, it's not surprising that thieves would see the value in her flock.

But neither she nor deputy sheriffs can understand why they would have killed 100 of the birds.

The Moraleses realized on Tuesday evening that nearly half of their inventory of pigeons was missing from a coop behind their home.

"There is a huge demand for them," Maria Morales said. "We have live-animal auctions (in Marion County). Every time you go to an auction, if you have pigeons you know for sure you will sell them out."

While the birds are often bought by people interested in breeding or racing them, Morales said, her top customers are people who practice Santeria, which blends Catholic and Yoruba religious beliefs and is practiced in parts of Mexico, the Caribbean and South America.

"(Alberto Morales) advised the unknown person(s) who stole his pigeons would have to have known their value and where to sell them," deputies wrote in an incident report.