Australia’s culture of killing native animals
Tag Archives: John Gould
Australia’s culture of killing native animals
Charles Darwin’s finches on the brink of extinction
The birds naturalist Charles Darwin saw on the Galapagos Islands during his famous voyage around the world in 1831-1836 changed his thinking about the origin of new species and, eventually, that of the world’s biologists.
On his visit to the Galapagos Islands, Darwin discovered several species of finches that varied from island to island, which helped him to develop his theory of natural selection.
The 13 major islands of the Galapagos are home to an amazing array of unique animal species: giant tortoises, iguanas, fur seals, sea lions, sharks, rays, and 26 species of native birds––14 of which make up the group known as Darwin’s finches.
It was Darwin’s job to study the local flora and fauna, collecting samples and making observations he could take back to Europe with him of such a diverse and tropical location.
The research performed there and the species Darwin brought back to England were instrumental in the formation of a core part of the original theory of evolution and Darwin’s ideas on natural selection which he published in his first book On the Origin of Species.
Their beaks had adapted to the type of food they ate in order to fill different niches on the Galapagos Islands.
Wide, slender, pointed, blunt: The many flavors of beak sported by the finches that flit about the remote Galápagos Islands were an important clue to Darwin that species might change their traits over time, adapting to new environments. The Galápagos finches are ideal subjects for observing the drama of evolution. The islands kept them isolated from competition with other birds on the South American mainland, and each island became its own little world.
But Darwin failed to note which islands each particular finch came from. He tried to make up for the deficit by borrowing some finch notes taken by the Beagle‘s Captain Robert FitzRoy, but Darwin hardly mentioned the finches in his later writing. It was not until Darwin’s Finches were properly identified and studied by the famous ornithologist, John Gould, that Darwin began to realize that a more complex process was going on. Some developed stronger bills for cracking nuts, others finer beaks for picking insects out of trees, one species even evolving to use a twig held in the beak to probe for insects in rotten wood. Each small adaptation gave a competitive advantage and so the characteristic spread through the population.
Darwin himself used the finches in the The Voyage of the Beagle to quietly announce the theory of evolution.
“Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”
(image: Small Ground Finch Geospiza fuliginosa, from the island of Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands.)
Parasitic flies could wipe out the Galapagos Island birds in just 50 years.
An estimated 270,000 medium ground finches live on the island of Santa Cruz, and it is thought 500,000 live throughout the archipelago. Researchers were able to document how the flies have damaged finch reproduction between 2008 and 2013. The fly, known by the scientific name Philornis downsi, lays its eggs in finches’ nests. The flies lay their eggs inside the birds’ nests, and the hatching maggots feed on the young birds.
A frog named for Darwin has already gone extinct!
However, the researchers also found the problem could be solved by more advanced and widespread pest-control efforts. Using insecticides, including placing pesticide-treated cotton balls where birds can collect them to self-fumigate their nests, may be used to counteract the parasites.
The threat the finches face as a result of the invasive flies illustrates how “introduced pathogens and other parasites pose a major threat to global diversity,” especially on islands, which tend to have smaller habitat sizes and lower genetic diversity, researchers write.
Surely, we can do something for the very birds that the famous Charles Darwin studied, in a protected and isolated highly conserved and protected archipelago?
The culture or vilification of kangaroos, as “pests” and their killing has become engrained into our history as a macabre type of environmental “management”. It’s rationalized as a human responsibility to control their numbers, as we have changed the environment so much, due to infrastructure and agriculture, to such as way as to encourage their overpopulation and breeding! They thus are condemned for over-populating and causing mayhem, including environmental damage and threats to other species!
The great Canberra “cull” of kangaroos is being considered again, in our so-called “Bush Capital”. It’s an oxymoron, and it’s using kangaroos as a scapegoat for mismanagement and human-caused environmental destruction.
In July 2015 Canberra activist Chris Klootwijk, 70, was arrested for blowing a whistle during the ACT Government sanctioned kangaroo cull which hindered the annual shooting operation. Klootwijk is accused of hindering the cull workers by making loud noises, which included blowing a whistle.
It is alleged that his actions were designed to scare off kangaroos, making it difficult for them to be shot, and halted the cull for about 45 minutes.
Chris faces fines of up to $30,000 and up to two years in jail if found guilty because the ACT government is positioning the blowing of a whistle as a crime. Whistles are not weapons, like firearms!
Borobi the blue koala has been announced as the official mascot for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Koala numbers have plummeted by more than two thirds in less than 20 years in south-east Queensland.
One of Australia’s leading koala experts has labelled this week’s unveiling of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games mascot an embarrassment. The sad irony is that koala numbers have plummeted. They like the symbolism of our native animals, but not the actual animals!
Tweed Heads ecologist Steve Phillips said the use of a koala as the Gold Coast’s mascot was frustrating. “What we’ve seen is that progressive development, and the end result is that decline [of koalas] is proceeding at pace,” he said. High human population growth on the Coast has seen koala numbers plummet, due to urban sprawl. Some critics hit out at what they believed was state government hypocrisy in using a “vulnerable” species as the Games’ emblem but conservationists said it could actually work in favour of helping the threatened animals.
Federal threatened species commissioner Gregory Andrews denied the outlook for koalas was as dire as conservationists believed.
“I would disagree that the future is so bleak. The future is much rosier than it has been for a long time,” he said. Human population on the Gold Coast.
Over the past five years, the population of the Greater Port Macquarie region has been growing at an average rate of 1.62% per annum – driven largely by Australia’s massive immigration rates.
By the mid-nineteenth century as the European settlements grew significantly, a lucrative trade in Koala skins sprung up. Koala hunters shot, poisoned or snared these animals off their tree perches and bludgeoned them to death and sold their skins for export. The main export markets were the US, Canada and Europe where the Koala’s soft waterproof fur was used to make hats, gloves and fur linings for coats. (http://panique.com.au/trishansoz/animals/koala.html)
Due to huge public outcry, Koala hunting was banned throughout Australia by 1927. The importation of Koala skins into the US was also banned in 1927 by President Herbert Hoover while he was Secretary of Commerce.
Today’s threats to koalas are more pedestrian, of deliberate land clearing for urban sprawl. They are seen as an inevitable victim of our housing-based economy.
Our “environment” department in Victoria, DELWP, plans to “cull” 25,000 kangaroos on public land this year, under permits issued by the Victorian Government. They plans to kill 8560 red kangaroos and 5170 western grey kangaroos by Parks Victoria in the Murray Sunset National Park, 3000 eastern grey kangaroos by the Commonwealth Department of Defence at Puckapunyal, and 200 eastern grey kangaroos by Gippsland Water at Dustson Downs. DELWP said kangaroo populations were managed to “prevent crashing — or dying in large numbers from starvation during droughts — to prevent damage to vulnerable native vegetation and habitat from overgrazing, to allow heavily grazed areas to regenerate or to protect water catchments”. Rather than magnanimously prevent kangaroos from over-populating and “starving”, its really a thinly mask commercial kill, to keep up the supply of pet food, being trialed in Victoria! (Weekly Times, April 15th, 2016)
The Colonial culture of ignorance, human domination, land clearing, and killing is deeply embedded in Australia’s culture.