Poaching and Illegal Logging Are Wiping Out Ghana’s Birds

[Omaha Steve]

X post in GD

Researchers find the African country’s bird population has fallen by half since 1995 while deforestation has increased 600 percent.



Illegal logging in the Krokosua Hills Forest Reserve in Ghana. (Photo: Nicole Arcilla)


http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/09/17/ghanas-birds-are-being-wiped-out-illegal-logging

SEP 17, 2015 John R. Platt covers the environment, technology, philanthropy, and more for Scientific American, Conservation, Lion, and other publications.

The biodiversity-rich forests of Ghana should be full of the cries and chirps of dozens of native bird species. Instead, the only sound you hear at night is gunfire.

“You feel like you’re in a war zone,” said Nicole Arcilla, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University who spent weeks in Ghana’s forests studying and counting the country’s birds. The bullets, she said, weren’t aimed at people. “It’s not humans versus humans,” she said. “It’s humans versus all other life.”

Poachers and illegal deforestation have taken a terrible toll on Ghana’s wildlife. Previous studies have shown dramatic declines in many of the country’s mammals. Now, a new paper by Arcilla and other researchers has found that the situation is just as bad for Ghana’s birds. According to their research, the number of forest birds has declined by more than 50 percent since 1995. The number of species has also fallen.

During that same period, the level of both legal and illegal logging has increased 600 percent.

FULL story at link.


The population of the olive sunbird in Ghana has fallen 50 percent since 2000. (Photo: Nicole Arcilla)

[shenmue]

1. Birdees!

[Curmudgeoness]

2. There are no easy answers.

This sounds like a crisis, and it is, but the only way to stop actions like this is to make it more profitable to save the forests, wildlife, and birds than to destroy them. Desperate people do desperate things to survive. I am heartbroken to see this.