Wildlife
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1992:
The World Wildlife Fund and
the National Wildlife Federation on
November 13 asked Interior Secretary
Manuel Lujan to impose trade sanctions on
China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Yemen
for permitting traffic in rhinocerous horns.
The wild black rhino population has plunged
from 65,000 to 2,000 since 1970.
The California condor who was
found dead October 8 suffered kidney fail-
ure from drinking antifreeze, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service has determined. The
condor was one of the first two to be
released into the wild after an intensive cap-
tive breeding program. Sixty-two California
condors remain in captivity, six of whom
are scheduled for release this month.
A two-year-old pallid sturgeon
was briefly captured in early November in
the Mississippi River north of Baton
Rouge––the first evidence the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service has found in 20 years that
the ancient species is still breeding. The
sturgeon was tagged and implanted with a
microchip for future identification, then
released. The discovery could affect Army
Corps of Engineers flood control measures,
since the pallid sturgeon was added to the
federal endangered species list in 1990.
Florida plans to reintroduce
endangered whooping cranes to the wild,
60 years after the last native whooping
cranes were killed by hunters. Twenty birds
taken from captive breeding programs in
Wisconsin and Maryland will be released
each year for the next decade.
Friends of the Wild Swan, the
Swan View Colation, and the Alliance for
the Wild Rockies have asked the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service to add the bull trout to
the federal endangered species list. An esti-
mated 10,000 of the trout remain, 4,000 of
them in the northern Rockies, where log-
ging, grazing, and development jeopardize
spawning streams.
The International Primate
Protection League claims to have received
information that 110 macaques arrived dead
at the Miami Airport on August 20, aboard
a Lufthansa flight from Jakarta, Indonesia.
“The monkeys’ bodies were burned. The
shipping crates were destroyed. The press
was not told,” IPPL president Shirley
McGreal charged. Hurricane Andrew hit
Miami days later, over a thousand monkeys
escaped from various facilities, and those
who were killed were also burned, so con-
firming the account even if physical evi-
dence is discovered may be difficult.
The Nature Protection Service of
the once-notorious Spanish Civil Guard
has all but put an end to illegal wildlife traf-
ficking in Spain, according to Miguel
Angel Valadares of the Association for the
Defense of Nature, an independent affiliate
of the World Wildlife Fund.
The hooded pitohui, native to
New Guinea, has been found to have poiso-
nous feathers, making it the only bird
known to use a chemical defense.
