Safety Nets To Arrest Bird Freefall

Every monsoon, hundreds of Asian Openbill storks build small colonies atop sal trees in Arrearjhar in Dhubri district of Assam, India, and by the time the season draws to a close, dozens perish from falls or are struck by lightning during storms.
Environmentalists have long racked their brains for a plan that would help reduce the death toll, but without success. So, when some 50-odd openbill stork chicks were found dead after a heavy downpour on October 7, 2007, forest officials decided to do what immediately struck them as a possible solution. They decided to place safety nets under every sal tree so that the birds do not fall and die.
Openbill storks are listed under Schedule IV of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. They are commonly sighted in various parts of Assam but the current death rate is a cause for worry. Every year, the birds build at least 300 nests in Arrearjhar, of which very few manage to survive the monsoon. For now, the nets look like the only saviours.
A project was submitted to the Rapid Action Programme of the Wildlife Trust of India, which has agreed to provide the nets, the forest official said. He added that the project was urgent because some chicks have already emerged and the remaining will come out in the next few weeks. The official said that death from a fall is natural; but the rain and storm this year have resulted in an alarmingly high mortality rate.
The nets, however, are only a partial and temporary solution. "Even if some chicks survived the fall, there is little expertise available to hand-rear the birds. Every attempt by villagers to hand-rear the chicks has failed so far," a forest official said.

Space Technology 'Invaluable for Development'

Space technology has enormous potential to help developing countries progress, an international meeting has been told by Karl Doetsch, chairman of US-based firm Athena Global.
Doetsch told a plenary session of the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Hyderabad, India, on Friday, 28 September 2007, that sustained poverty reduction needs the application of space technology and that space scientists should play a larger role in policymaking.
India uses satellite technology to invigorate development by improving communications and the management of natural disasters and resources such as water, and for weather forecasting, long-distance education and telemedicine services. It is a model other countries should follow, Doetsch says.
At the conference, Jason Hay of the US-based Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University pointed out that developing countries are increasingly turning to space technology to speed up their development.
Space technology, he said, can also improve technical skills, infrastructure and knowledge capital, and provide services such as global positioning information.
His team has developed an analytical model of the Indian space experience and applied it to Kazakhstan and South Africa to gain insight into features that could make satellite technology as effective as in India.
Remote-sensing satellite images are useful for monitoring volcanoes, forest fires and earthquakes in Indonesia, says Harijono Djojodihardo, professor at Universitas Al Azhar in Jakarta and former head of Indonesia's space agency.
It is now the "challenge and responsibility" of space agencies to use their technology for sustainable development of Sub-Saharan Africa, said Simona Di Ciaccio from Italy's space agency, ASI.
ASI is running a project with Kenya's Marine and Fisheries Research Institute to use ASI's remote-sensing satellite for information on fish locations for Kenya's fishermen, to locate degraded land and to detect oil spills.
Di Ciaccio told reporters that ASI plans to start two new projects in October this year, setting up a remote-sensing regional centre in Kenya and launching small satellites designed for Kenya's needs.
Meanwhile, the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa is working on the design of a small satellite equipped with high- and medium-resolution cameras to monitor equatorial forests that are hard to visualise because of widespread cloud cover.
This kind of assessment is important due to the impact of climate change on equatorial forests, said Stellenbosh scientist Keijo Nissen.