Image: Zapata railDrawing by Allan Brooks
One of many videos of the flooding in Texas resulting from Hurricane Harvey shows a herd of deer looking disoriented as they move through the water. As I was watching that, in the background, the radio was reporting on Hurricane Irma. The location of Irma’s landfall is still a guessing game, with such places as Puerto Rico, Cuba and other islands, southern Florida, and anywhere up the east coast, clearly at risk. Friends of mine in British Columbia were being warned to be ready to evacuate at short notice due to raging wildfires, the largest such fire in its history.[teaserbreak]
It all paled in compared to the news from Sierra Leone, where floods and mudslides killed over a thousand people, the damage exacerbated by deforestation and lack of infrastructure. In southern Asia, the death toll from flooding and other ecological disasters was over 12,000 people!
It’s hard for many to muster concern for animals amid such staggering amounts of human misery, but there was that photo of a dead tiger killed by floods in India, and of an Indian rhinoceros swimming in floodwaters at the Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam, on August 17. I’ve been asked several times these last few weeks about how wildlife copes with such disasters. I believe the short answer is that plants and animals evolve within their environments, independent of the kind of technological infrastructure humans depend upon. Individual animals will be killed, but the populations, and the species to which they belong, usually will survive… until now.
Now, so many other factors are at work, including the increasing incidence of such events, and warnings by scientists about climate change. In British Columbia, there is an effort to put a moratorium on at least bear hunting, as much of the range of the brown bear has gone up in flames. As I write, Hurricane Irma threatens the Florida Keys, home of the unique, pint-sized Key deer, which has already had its population severely reduced by collisions with cars. In the thousands of years those animals lived in the Keys they must have endured many very powerful storms, but not while also facing motor traffic and development.
In Cuba, there are 28 bird species found nowhere else in the world. Some, like the critically endangered Zapata rail, are found only in a small region—in its case, the marshes on the Zapata peninsula of southern Cuba. There are numerous other species of animals in the West Indies with similarly restricted ranges, like the beautiful little Montserrat oriole, with a population comprised of, at most, a few hundred birds found only in a small part of Montserrat, in the Lesser Antilles. Critically endangered, the Montserrat oriole has already lost much of its essential habitat from Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, and from the smothering effects of ash from volcanic activity between 1997 and 1997. The pretty little Barbuda Warbler, found only on the tiny island of Barbuda, may have ceased to exist last week when Irma’s full might swept the island.
Add in the talk of nuclear weapon proliferation and the increasing number of stories of so many forms of pollution, and it becomes clear that we must do all we can to protect both people and animals—and the world that supports us all.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry