Migratory Birds Problematique in Indonesia

Wetland conservation vital for bird migrations
Features News - Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Trisha Sertori, Contributor, Melbourne

Wetlands across Indonesia and Australia are vital to the survival of the millions of migratory sea birds that take to the skies over those countries twice each year, covering a staggering 24,000 kilometers en route.

Called waders, the birds fly during March to May from Australia's feeding grounds in the southern hemisphere to breeding grounds in Siberia and Mongolia in the northern hemisphere, returning to the feeding grounds from September to November.

Traveling along the East-Asian Australasian Flyway, a chain of wetlands stretching across Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Korea and China, the waders are dependent on the environmental health of those wetlands, coupled with enforcement of hunting bans, to survive the journey, said Dr. Rosalind Jessop of the Australasian Wader Studies Group (AWSG).

As signatories to the international Ramsar convention that protects the migratory birds, Jessop says much can be done by Indonesia and Australia to conserve the needed wetland rest zones, and to understand the breeding success and health of the birds during their annual migrations.

"Waders such as Oriental Pratincoles, Bar-tailed Godwits, Curlew Sandpipers and Red Necked Stints have specific colored bands on their legs called flags. Each country has its own color scheme, so when people observe the birds in migration they know where the bird was flagged," said Jessop. "Receiving this feedback from countries such as Indonesia tells us a lot about the routes they are taking and the wetlands they are resting in during the flight."

Understanding the routes taken by the waders allows for better and more targeted conservation of the birds and their needed habitat, added Jessop. However, little information is received from Indonesia on the archipelago's leg of the flyway.

The AWSG is keen to have more Indonesian bird watchers contact the study group with sightings, according to Jessop. To date, just a handful of sightings of Curlew Sandpipers in Benoa Bay, Banuasin Delta and Bangai Percut on Snake River have been recorded, despite more than 120,000 waders of 50 different species being leg flagged in Australia during the past 26 years.

"There is an enormous amount of information we can establish from the flags, but we have very few reports from Indonesia and we are keen for feedback. The numbers of waders traveling the flyway over Indonesia is very high and the problems are the lack of observation and feedback on the birds, and illegal hunting of the birds for sale in bird markets," said Jessop.

She said hundreds of thousands of migratory birds are at risk from hunting, and greater awareness of the legally protected status of the birds was needed at the grassroots level.

She pointed to the most recent study in 1998 on the illegal capture of waders in West Java, where it is believed as many as 200,000 waders and resting water birds were hunted and sold in bird markets.

"One example is the Oriental Pratincole. It is believed as much as 20 percent of the migratory population is lost to hunting practices for sale in (Indonesian) bird markets. While that study was carried out nearly a decade ago, there has been little change in those numbers," said Jessop.

Aware of the dependence on hunting for subsistence farmers, Jessop said some work had been done to "try and divert hunting" of the waders. But the economic reality in areas such as Krangkeng in West Java show that the capture and sale of the birds brings in almost 50 percent of a family's annual income.

Writing in Inside Indonesia, John McCarthy of the Asia Research Centre at Perth's Murdoch University said up to 1.5 million shorebirds or waders, including several endangered species, were hunted each year in Indonesia. Of these, about 200,000 migratory and local water birds were hunted within a 60-kilometer coastal stretch of Krangkeng.

"From a national or an international perspective, bird hunting in Krangkeng degrades valuable components of the world's biodiversity -- the common heritage of all mankind. But from a local perspective, migratory water birds are an `open access' resource," writes McCarthy.

He continued: "Poor villagers are affronted by the thought that some people and organizations would care more about the migratory birds than they would about the impoverished villagers. Hunting of water birds in Krangkeng shows the wide gulf between conservation values most often associated with the West and the survival needs of the poor."

Tracking the waders on their journey across Indonesia through observation of their leg flags enables governments and conservation organizations to better target grassroots education on the importance of the birds and their protected status, said Jessop, while increasing understanding of the birds' behaviors.

"People can report sightings to the AWSG through our website. When people are watching for the migrations that start from Australia in March until May, then the return journey from September to November, they need to know the species and report the color of the leg flag," she said.

She added it was also valuable if people could count bird numbers by flock, starting with small flocks then extrapolating to include all the birds of each species observed.

"This method of counting is not highly accurate, but it gives us an idea of the numbers of birds, whether it is in the hundreds or thousands," she said.
Most commonly sighted species in Indonesia are the Oriental Pratincole, Red Necked Stint and Curlew Sandpiper.

Knowing the numbers of waders en route between feeding and breeding grounds gives biologists an indication of the health of wetlands along the flyway, she said. That information can in turn be used to target wetlands under threat.

"In some ways it (wader counts) is an index of the health of wetlands throughout the flyway. Each part of the flyway chain needs to be in good condition for the species to survive their migratory lifestyle," said Jessop, suggesting that if numbers of waders decreased in sections of the flyway, it was an indication of inadequate food or safe resting roosts for the birds -- and subsequently, that the wetland systems are under threat from development, hunting or pollution.

Global warming can also potentially be read through the success of failure of wader breeding, according to Jessop.
"Some people say waders are a good index of global warming because they breed in the Arctic. They suggest bad breeding years may be due to global warming, but this is still under investigation. It is hard to tell if breeding success or failure is part of a long-term cycle or due to a complete shift in weather patterns due to global warming," she explained.

"When the threats are understood they can be addressed. Hopefully, through science and people on the ground working together, we can safeguard these extraordinary birds well into the future."

The AWSG can be reached at www.tasweb.com.au/awsg/index.htm.

People I value: Prof.David Orr of Oberlin College

Ancestry and Influence: A Portrait of David Orr
By Marci Janas

SEPTEMBER 17, 1998--David Orr barnstorms the country for the environment. Every year, three or four dozen colleges and universities invite him to lecture, often as keynote speaker for conferences and symposia. Reporters covering global warming flip through their Rolodexes for his name. Several dozen journals have published his articles about biophilia, sustainability, and, as he described it to Jay Parini in the New York Times, "environmentalism [as] a question of ethical design." Two of Orr's books, Earth in Mind and Ecological Literacy, have sold more than 10,000 copies each--bestsellers, by the accounting of academic publishing.

Meanwhile, back home in the parallel universe that is Oberlin, Orr chairs the Environmental Studies Program, teaches and advises students, and oversees the Adam Joseph Lewis Environmental Studies Center's evolution from charrette to groundbreaking. He raised most of the funds for the project, too.

One might ask if the man ever sleeps. But more to the point: Who is David Orr to preach?

His predications are largely the result of ancestry.

"I come from a long line of preachers," he says laughing, tucking into a veggie burger at the Foxgrape. "My daddy was a preacher, I have uncles who are preachers, my grandfather was a preacher . . . ." His paternal grandfather, in fact, identified in Linda Lear's biography of Rachel Carson as "the famous Reverend W. W. Orr of Charlotte, North Carolina," earned a cameo appearance in the book by dint of offering the christening prayer at Carson's baptism.

Silent Spring, Carson's seminal and cautionary treatise about the proliferation of pesticides, was published the year after Orr graduated from high school. A crucial title on his formative reading list, he calls it "a lightning flash in a dark night."

Anyone inclined to dismiss the Carson anecdote as a trifle would do well to understand that for Orr, religion connects to ecology in ways far more compelling than coincidence. And his take on religion has less to do with doctrine or dogma than with the fact that "we are all meaning-seeking creatures--a small part of a much larger pattern."

"It is no accident," Orr told Parini, "that connectedness is central to the meaning of both the Greek root word for ecology, oikos, and the Latin root word for religion, religio." Orr, who wrote that "most of us do what we do as environmentalists and profess what we do as professors . . . because of an early, deep, and vivid resonance between the natural world and ourselves," puts connectedness at the hub of his philosophy. His vocation--our responsibility and relationship to the earth we've inherited and the earth we will bequeath--has an ancestry that runs as deep as any bloodline.

Like Rachel Carson, Orr grew up in Allegheny country. His first vantagepoints: a hilltop home in a western Pennsylvania college town and a summer cabin nestled in the Allegheny Mountains. His was, he concedes, an "unusual childhood, with a lot of time spent in forests and fields." Rivers and streams, hills and hemlock trees, and "rocks the size of a typical house" provided the backdrop for imaginative play. Place and landscape exist for him as interior bedrock, what he would call "mindscape."

Not everyone, not even the affluent, has the advantage to come of age in such a natural setting. Orr knows this. "Children raised in ecologically barren settings . . . are deprived of the sensory stimuli and the kind of imaginative experience that can only come from biological richness."

Out of the verdant land of Orr's youth grew an insistent love and respect for the earth. He likes to quote Stephen Jay Gould: "We will not fight to save what we do not love."

Orr believes that what he loves is at grave risk and in dire need of salvation.

He welcomes readers to Earth in Mind with a litany that includes these statistics:

• Male sperm counts worldwide have fallen by 50 percent since 1938, and no one knows exactly why.
• Roughly 80 percent of European forests have been damaged by acid rain.
  U.S. industry releases some 11.4 billion tons of hazardous waste to the environment each year.
• Ultraviolet radiation reaching the ground in Toronto is now increasing at 5 percent per year.
  

"We are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere at a rate that is awesomely fast," he says. "We simply don't know what we are doing."

This sense of a race against time is part of what motivates him to motivate others, to "roll up our sleeves and get to work." Oberlin--its students, faculty, staff, and community members--has indeed rolled up its institutional shirtsleeves; the environmental studies center project--itself a model of collaboration--teams local talent with some of the most knowledgeable environmentalists in the country.

Orr wears his own considerable knowledge lightly; his is not a buttoned-down intellectualism. Alert to the next good laugh or congenial colleague, his easy manner belies the depth of thought, the passion and fervor with which he writes and talks about the environment; belies how seriously he takes his role as standard-bearer--the iconoclastic voice of our collective ecological conscience. What gives up the game, finally, is a gaze of lapidarian intensity.

Because he puts his faith in our proclivity for seeking out meaning, it is no surprise that he views education as the door out of the maze. But he wants to take the door off its hinges and re-frame it. Institutional reform is perhaps his greatest cause--he advocates nothing less than a new paradigm for higher education--if, that is, we are brave enough to take the "long-term human future seriously." In an essay published in the January 30, 1998, Observer, he writes:

We have a model in the continuing effort to develop and upgrade our computer literacy. We have other models having to do with gender, sexual orientation, and racial equality that have been institutionalized in policy guidelines and administrative procedures. The planning question is how we might institutionalize the capacity to think and act across discipline boundaries as if evolution, ecology, thermodynamics, and the long-term future really mattered.

"Our goal as educators is to present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope," he says. "That's different from wishful thinking--ignoring problems or assuming that somehow technology or some mythical 'they' is going to figure it out. We will have to figure it out. A whole set of diverse disciplines, for example, came together in the building project, suggesting a very different curriculum and pedagogy."

Orr's realism, never more than a stone's throw from his idealism, yields this parting shot:

"Our job is not to depress students but to tell them the truth as best we see it. And that's always going to be through a glass, darkly."

Catching himself slip so easily into the biblical allusion, he chuckles, adding: "See? My ancestral influence."

The groundbreaking ceremony for the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is September 25, at 4:30 on the lawn of South Hall, Elm Street.--Ed.