I feel quite sad & depressed by this news, zosterops.
When I was involved with the Orange-bellied Parrot recovery programme there were about 400 of the birds in the wild. It has now slipped to 70 or even less over a period of 30 years. To think that I might have seen a species which is now likely to become extinct is both a profound privelege & a cause for anger.
I note that some, at least, of the birds killed in this latest travesty were affected by beak & feather disease. It would be interesting to learn of how the birds came to be affected with this disease which is often transmitted at bird feeding tables.
I seem to remember a couple of years ago there was a report of rats in the ranks of Orange-bellied Parrots in a breeding facility, presumably in Tasmania. This latest report suggests that humans have yet to learn from past experience, a common phenomenon in so many spheres of human life, I fear.
Perhaps the saddest & most anger-provoking thing of all is that it should have ever come to this. Trapping, the building of a rat-attracting dump in their winter habitat, other human developments in & near their habitats &, yes, our cat culture, I suspect, are all things which could have been avoided but weren't due to our species' greed, thoughtlessness, divorce from Nature & plain lack of soul.
I feel quite sad & depressed by this news, zosterops.
When I was involved with the Orange-bellied Parrot recovery programme there were about 400 of the birds in the wild. It has now slipped to 70 or even less over a period of 30 years. To think that I might have seen a species which is now likely to become extinct is both a profound privelege & a cause for anger.
I note that some, at least, of the birds killed in this latest travesty were affected by beak & feather disease. It would be interesting to learn of how the birds came to be affected with this disease which is often transmitted at bird feeding tables.
I seem to remember a couple of years ago there was a report of rats in the ranks of Orange-bellied Parrots in a breeding facility, presumably in Tasmania. This latest report suggests that humans have yet to learn from past experience, a common phenomenon in so many spheres of human life, I fear.
Perhaps the saddest & most anger-provoking thing of all is that it should have ever come to this. Trapping, the building of a rat-attracting dump in their winter habitat, other human developments in & near their habitats &, yes, our cat culture, I suspect, are all things which could have been avoided but weren't due to our species' greed, thoughtlessness, divorce from Nature & plain lack of soul.