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Bringing back the Black-breasted Button-quail

2021-2030 is the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration – a global call to heal our planet and A Rocha projects around the world are making a significant contribution.

In Australia, A Rocha is working with Friends of the Escarpment Parks (FEP) Toowoomba at Redwood Park – a 243-hectare property on the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range – to tackle invasive weeds that threaten to destroy endangered ecosystems like the semi-evergreen vine thicket by climbing and smothering the trees. On the forest floor, it can become difficult for ground-foraging animals and birds to feed, like the nationally vulnerable Black-breasted Button-quail Turnix melanogaster. This button-quail has a characteristic feeding habit: it turns on alternate legs as it scratches in the leaf litter to make a circular feeding scrape. Fresh scrapes are a good indicator that button-quail are present in the area.

In late 2020, a small team of A Rocha Australia volunteers started working alongside FEP to control major weeds at Redwood Park. Every month, they have been working at the site to weed out the invasives in the vine-thicket. The benefits for button-quail have sometimes been immediate, with fresh feeding scrapes being seen throughout the weeded areas the following day. Remote cameras have also confirmed that the button-quail are breeding in the park!

The challenge now is to complete weeding in a sizeable section of the scrub and establish a longer-term plan to maintain the habitat for button-quail and other animals.

Photo: Black-breasted Button-quail (Aviceda, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
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New species to science discovered in Atewa

The Atewa Forest campaign was boosted last month by the publication of a formal description of a new species of frog, known only from Atewa. Discovered in the forest in 2006, for some time it was believed to be the Togo Slippery Frog Conraua derooi. However, subsequent studies have concluded that it is a species in its own right. It has been given the English name Atewa Slippery Frog and the scientific name Conraua sagyimase, which honours the local Sagyimase community that has helped its conservation. The Akan common name for the new species is kwaeɛ mu nsutene apɔnkyerɛne, meaning the ‘frog of the forest streams’.

One of its distinguishing features is its loud and distinctive call. A Rocha International is working with A Rocha Ghana and the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana to survey Atewa’s streams for the frog, using passive sound recorders to record their nocturnal calls. Read A Rocha Ghana’s press release and the academic paper published in Zootaxa.

[Photo: Atewa Slippery Frog Conraua sagyimase by Dr Caleb Ofori Boateng]
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Securing a future for Dakatcha

Dakatcha Woodland, on the coast of Kenya, is home to a number of globally threatened species, including Africa’s smallest owl, the Sokoke Scops Owl. Yet this woodland is being destroyed at an alarming rate due to rampant charcoal burning and the uncontrolled expansion of pineapple plantations. Now with COVID-19 hitting the local economy hard and people losing their jobs, the pace of forest destruction has picked up, making the situation even more urgent.

With help from others, A Rocha Kenya has been buying blocks of forest from willing sellers and creating a nature reserve to conserve this unique landscape and safeguard its precious inhabitants. But the recent initiation of land adjudication by the government has led to intensified demand and a rapid escalation of land prices.

Already A Rocha Kenya has acquired 1,517 acres of the planned 10,500–acre A Rocha Dakatcha Nature Reserve, but there is an urgent need to secure 500 acres immediately before they are bought to be burnt for charcoal or ploughed for marginal agriculture.

Throughout the process and as part of A Rocha Kenya’s community conservation approach, the team are involving people adjacent to the reserve in the sustainable management of their land, teaching in schools and churches and introducing restorative farming and income-generating activities such as honey production.

Read more about Dakatcha and how you can help.

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Wildfires, logging and climate change

With over 5 million acres (2.25 million hectares) burned in three coastal states and fires dotting the US West, many communities have evacuated, and a few have burnt down – over 1,000 homes are gone. Smoke has created very unhealthy air quality and has been detected in Europe.

Mark McReynolds is the Director of SoCal A Rocha. He previously led a federally funded, three-year effort to educate teachers on forest issues and has a PhD in Environmental Studies. He says, ‘People want answers. The logging industry is calling for “fuel reduction”, aka logging, which sounds reasonable, but diverts attention from climate change (the driver of increased intense wildfires), from practical steps to save communities, and from evidence that logging makes fires worse.’

Chad Hanson, a fire ecologist with the John Muir Project and friend of A Rocha, argues that logging does not stop fires. Fires burn hotter and faster in logged forests and do not tend to burn more intensely in dense forests¹ or in forests with high numbers of dead trees². Logging also creates local environmental problems and annually emits more carbon in the USA than residential and commercial sectors combined³ – creating more climate change.

Unless there is change, more and larger fires are likely a new normal. A Rocha USA is encouraging people to ask their elected officials to address climate change and assist communities to develop protective housing construction and zoning regulations that minimize wildfire effects on people.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash