Ingham’s W RLD

LOVERS of wildlife often have every reason to feel despondent. Barely a week goes by without one species or another finding itself on a fast track to extinction, usually thanks to man’s unhelpful intervention. So the other day I had the rare pleasure of being given hope in a beautiful setting.

The focus was a rare bird worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, which is no longer going the way of the dodo and its revival is thanks to man’s helpful intervention.

I was a guest at BirdLife International’s unveiling of the latest Red List from the International Union for Conservation of Nature at a lovely dinner in the stunning Old Hall of Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Here I learned that the Northern bald ibis is the latest bird to have edged away from extinction.

In virtually any tomb of the pharaohs you will find hieroglyphs accurately depicting this bald wader with a curved bill.

Not so long ago it was found across North Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe.

However, by 1998 habitat loss, pesticides and hunting had reduced it to just 59 pairs, mostly in one colony in Morocco. It was classed as critically endangered with extinction the next stop.

Yet BirdLife, with the Moroccan government and sister groups, hired local fishermen to protect the colony from human disturbance and predators.

Numbers have risen to a modern record of 147 breeding pairs and it has spread to two new breeding sites. So the bald ibis has climbed out of the pit of oblivion and is now classed as endangered.

The Pink Pigeon – which lives on Mauritius where the Dodo went extinct in 1662 – has gone one better, having been downlisted from endangered to vulnerable.

As recently as 1990 there were just 10 individuals left in the wild. A captive breeding programme, habitat restoration and the removal of invasive species such as the black rat have fostered a population boom with 400 individuals in the wild.

BirdLife’s Dr Ian Burfield said: “We can save these species from the very edge of extinction.”

The catch is that worldwide 1,500 bird species are threatened in some way – 13 per cent of the planet’s 11,000 species.

Even in Britain one-in-four breeding birds are on the national

Red List. They include familiar birds such as house sparrows and starlings, still numerous but in the grip of unexplained declines.

Yet the ibis and the pink pigeon give hope. They prove that we can reverse these appalling declines if we really want to. Extinction isn’t inevitable. It’s our choice. FOR a few days last week I was let loose on New York. In Central Park two of our exports – house sparrows and starlings – were thriving even while declining here. Then I spotted one of America’s most successful exports – grey squirrels – frantically gathering nuts while they may. They looked so much bigger than ours. Everything is bigger in America.

FISH and chip suppers are threatened by climate change, says Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute. Cod need cold seas to spawn and if warming busts the 1.5C target of the Paris climate agreement, they will struggle, says Science Advances. Even a small rise in temperature can kill cod eggs or deform larvae. Enjoy cod while you can.

GREEN TIP: Use bags for life when you do your Christmas shopping to cut down on plastic pollution. MOTHER’S love is strong even for spiders, say Chinese researchers. Some jumping spiders rely on mother’s milk. It is so rich that it has nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk, reports the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The mothers suckle their young for 40 days – until they are teenagers.

YOU can’t get much more remote than the Falkland Islands. But their seas have as much plastic pollution as ours, say Anglia Ruskin University researchers. Microplastics – small, eroded pieces – are carried there by ocean currents, they tell Marine Pollution Bulletin. In the summer I saw the same pollution in the High Arctic in Svalbard. Nowhere escapes the plastic tide.

SOME may not care a hoot if some species become extinct. They will claim that it is part of the natural order. Yet man is now disturbing this natural order as never before.

Imagine if birds vanished. BirdLife magazine says you could expect millions more mosquitoes because birds eat pests. They also help plants grow by spreading seeds while their droppings help fertilise coral reefs while the hummingbird, left, also pollinates plants.

Put simply, birds are part of the many networks supporting life including the food chain. They and their songs are beautiful, too, and that’s priceless.