Asian birds on the brink: 3The biggest innovation in this new book, and one reason for its size, is the use of maps to illustrate the ranges of the threatened birds. This was a major undertaking by Rudyanto and Mike Crosby (who in their non-BirdLife lives are OBC rep for Indonesia and an OBC Conservation Committee member respectively). So far as I know this is the first time a significant body of species from any class of animal has ever been mapped by virtue of fully referenced point localities. The British Museum's wonderful atlases of speciation in African birds used point localities but did not reference the dots (nor did they go for full coverage of the records). Point-locality maps are the most accurate basis for identifying distributions, since they simply express the known sites of each species (the problem of species mapping was highlit in Bulletin 32: 46-47). Basically, you get a skeleton or a foundation: you know there must be (or must have been) connectivity between the dots, but you don't know exactly what form it takes or took, or what discontinuities exist today-but you do have the best basis for the dangerous business of extrapolation (for just how dangerous, see Bulletin 32: 50-52), and the least misleading body of evidence from which to begin. You also have a chart by which field investigations can be oriented: knowing for certain where a bird was once found is a major incentive to going and looking again. The maps may not always be very revealing, especially when the range of a species is small, but often they are striking. Moreover, by giving three kinds of dot to convey different time-periods, you can distinguish old from new records, and the fate of species and populations can more easily be discerned. Thus the retreat of the Indian Skimmer from the eastern sectors of its range is strongly brought home, as is the tenuousness of the Graceful Pitta's Pitta venusta hold on life. The map of the Straw-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus zeylanicus evokes more eloquently than the 14 pages of accompanying text the staggering manner in which this remarkable songster has been trapped out of existence in its once-sprawling Indonesian range. The Green Peafowl Pavo muticus reveals three roughly north-south population centres which are rather neatly aped by the White-winged Duck Cairina scutulata, albeit with a several-degree shift westwards. The mysterious Swinhoe's Rail Coturnicops exquisitus presents a weird diaspora of records old and new. The enormous, empty range of the Pink-headed Duck, and the still more enormous and almost as empty range of the Crested Ibis Nipponia nippon, set your mind racing. Indeed these maps also offer many real challenges: the unevenness, for example, in the distribution of Bornean lowland forest birds is intriguing-why does the Short-toed Coucal have so many records focused in northern Sarawak and adjacent western Sabah and so few elsewhere, why are records of Large-billed Blue-flycatcher Cyornis caerulata all concentrated in the top half of the island, and why are there so few northern records of Black Partridge Melanoperdix nigra?
It would be wrong to imply that nothing is being done for the threatened birds of Asia; on the contrary, the RDB is full of details of the good work that is under way at all levels to promote the conservation of species in the region. But there is still so much to do. Back in 1994 we knew that, of the top five countries in the world for numbers of threatened birds, Asia had four (Indonesia, Philippines, China and India). We knew, too, that if you took all the countries in the world and ranked them by number of endemic threatened species in the higher categories of threat (Critically Endangered and Endangered, leaving out Vulnerable) the Philippines came way top of the list. But I like the idea that the Chinese word for crisis is also their word for opportunity, even if it isn't true. It is easy to be depressed by the situation, but you may as well get excited by it instead. On the formal side of things, BirdLife is developing a Strategy for threatened birds in Asia to reinterpret all the detail of the RDB into a clear, simple plan of action. This will be taken forward by the BirdLife Asia Partnership, which commissioned the RDB, but also by the wider BirdLife family, particularly in its policy areas, and through the agendas of other global, national and local conservation organisations and even, with luck and advocacy, some government agencies and donor institutions. (Some of it, of course, is already being taken forward by the Oriental Bird Club, and when the Strategy appears there will be further opportunities for OBC engagement.) BirdLife's main conservation tool is its Important Bird Areas Programme, which is directly fed by the Red Data Book and will be greatly advanced by (and itself advance) the Strategy. Moreover, BirdLife has launched an Asia Bird Fund to help pay for some of the actions the Strategy identifies. On the informal side, the list of things that birders can do to help is enormous. Our understanding of the distribution, abundance and ecology of so many threatened birds in Asia is still incredibly primitive. Of course birders do a lot just by keeping the wheels of local tourist-geared economies mildly oiled, but for those with the resources (and I appreciate this cannot mean everybody) getting beyond the stake-outs is ever more urgent. Looking for birds in new areas has got to be one of the big things birders can set themselves to do, even if it sometimes causes logistical nightmares. Trying to get a handle on numbers of birds in an area is, admittedly, more fraught because of demands of methodology, but even so birders can always record the number of encounters and the distance between them, log the altitude, make subjective assessments of habitat, watch how birds feed and what they take (photograph the food plant for someone else to identify), record their foraging height and position in the vegetation, look out for nests and simply record their voices (often the key to determining how abundant they are). All these things help build the profile of the species in question; and the Strategy proposes to establish a website on which birders can post all these observations. Acknowledgements Related links |
