<
https://www.audubon.org/news/after-years-captivity-these-rescued-harpy-eagles-are-flourishing-wild>
"Swaddled in a sniper-style ghillie suit, Gabriela Tavera watched from the
shadows as the blue-gray blur of the Harpy Eagle swooped in for the kill.
Within seconds, the eagle’s enormous talons had eviscerated the opossum that
Tavera had just released. The conservation biologist was wrestling with pangs
of guilt over sacrificing one animal to feed another, but something changed
when the raptor fixed her in its fearless, obsidian gaze. “I’d been an
emotional wreck and was questioning the live feeding,” she says. “But at that
moment, I realized it was for something much bigger.”
Tavera was feeding the bird as part of a project to which she and her
colleagues had dedicated several grueling years: an effort to return a pair of
rescued Harpy Eagles to the wild. In September 2023, their perseverance paid
off with the first such rehabilitation of the world’s most powerful eagle in
Bolivia—a triumph that, at times, seemed unlikely.
Balefully beautiful with its tyrant’s-crown crest, smoky plumage, and colossal
claws, the Harpy Eagle once occupied a vast range that stretched unbroken from
the tropical lowland forests of southern Mexico to northern Argentina. An apex
predator perched precariously at the top of the food chain, the species was
never very abundant; a breeding pair might need 20 square miles or more of
healthy forest to find adequate prey and sites for nests, which they build in
the canopy of the tallest trees. As agricultural expansion and selective
logging razed its home forests in Central and South America, and persecution by
humans followed in its wake, the species was among the hardest hit and the
first to disappear. Listed as vulnerable by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature, the raptor has already lost around 41 percent of its
historic habitat and is locally extinct across much of its former distribution.
In Bolivia, one of the few South American countries still lacking a census of
the species, the Harpy Eagle’s status remains unknown. “We believe their
population has declined, but without an estimate, we don’t know how many are
left,” says Kathia Rivero, curator of zoology at the Noel Kempff Mercado Museum
of Natural History."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/goodnews-meals-brazil-rewild-denmark-mangroves-pakistan/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
