Pickled Snake | Vulture Sleuths | Rare Plant Hotspots | Alarm Clock Bird
Pickled snake kept for 40 years is a new species that might be extinct
Scientists have for the first time identified the DNA of a hooded, venom-spitting snake that was pickled in alcohol and stored in a jar at a museum in Zimbabwe for 40 years.
The team behind the study reveals that it’s a new species, and gives it a name – the Nyanga rinkhals – but the problem is it may have gone extinct. The snake gets part of its scientific name, Hemachatus nyangensis, from Nyanga, the region in eastern Zimbabwe where the tallest mountain – Mount Nyangani – towers above the snakes’ woodland and grassland habitat.
The pickled specimen, a female, was collected after she was run over by a car in 1982. She was originally identified as belonging to a different species of rinkhal that exists in South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini to the south.
The two populations are separated by 700 kilometres (435 miles), and the analysis of the Zimbabwean snake’s ancient DNA proves it is an entirely separate species.
The last time a Nyanga rinkhals was seen alive in the wild was in 1988, and there are real fears it could now be extinct.
Nyanga National Park, at the foot of Mount Nyangani, has been invaded in many places by alien tree species such as wattle and pine, which the snakes aren’t adapted to live in.
“In view of its recognition as a highly distinct lineage, urgent action is required to determine whether any populations survive, and to safeguard remaining habitat,” states the research team.
The Nyanga rinkhals are closely related to true cobras. Unlike cobras, though, they don’t lay eggs but give birth to live young.
A Nyanga rinkhals displays its hood in the wild, circa. 1975 | Donald Broadley
Tracking device leads rangers to scene of illegal vulture killing
South African vulture conservation group, VulPro, says a GPS tracking device attached to a white-backed vulture recently led game rangers in Zimbabwe to the scene of a crime: the burial site of the mutilated bird that had been poached by a villager.
VulPro says the bird was killed to supply the demand for vulture body parts among some Zimbabwean traditional healers. The group was alerted to the crime after its GPS device – monitored from South Africa – showed the vulture was not moving from a village in Zimbabwe’s southern Fort Rixon district.
VulPro contacted game rangers from a safari ranch near Fort Rixon who went in search of the bird at its last-known location. They found and arrested a man in possession of the vulture’s head. He confessed to killing the bird and burying its body and the GPS device in a bid to conceal the crime. He is now being prosecuted.
It was a tragic end to a hopeful story that began a year ago. Last October the vulture was found dehydrated and emaciated in South Africa’s Gauteng Province. VulPro rescued the bird and released it after two weeks of intensive care. In the subsequent months the bird flew across five international borders.
“After leaving its release site in South Africa, it ventured across our borders into Mozambique, then up into Zimbabwe, onto the edges of Botswana, then up into Zambia and back down to Zimbabwe before the tragic end of its life,” said VulPro in a statement.
White-backed vultures are listed as critically-endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The life of every individual bird counts.
BirdLife Zimbabwe, a conservation group, is holding regular meetings with many of the country’s traditional healers to try to dissuade them from using vulture body parts in traditional medicine.
White-backed vultures in Amanzimtoti, South Africa | Bob Adams | Wikimedia Commons
Team pinpoints Mozambique's rare plant hotspots and calls for their protection
A new study identifies important populations of threatened plants in Mozambique.
These populations occur in 57 Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAs) identified over the past six years by Mozambican researchers in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
The bad news is that only 18 of these recently-identified TIPAs occur within Mozambique’s network of protected areas. The rest are in vulnerable places like Mount Namuli, in the centre of the country, where farmers are clearing forest to grow potatoes.
Mount Namuli is especially rich in plants, including the red-petalled Streptocarpus myoporoides that grows on the vertical cliff faces of the massif and nowhere else.
Even the plants that do occur within some reserves aren’t safe.
Take for instance Hartliella txitongensis, which was only described last year from the Lake Niassa Reserve in northern Mozambique. This small plant with striking purple flowers only grows on the red loamy soils of the reserve’s Chitonga Mountains, where illegal gold miners are cutting down woodlands, eroding gullies, and polluting rivers.
The research team says the TIPAs they’ve identified cover just 3% of Mozambique’s entire land area. Including all of them in protected areas run by the National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC) would go a long way towards safeguarding the country's plant diversity.
“You can protect a lot with very little,” says the team.
Gilé National Park, in the centre of the country, is an example of a former reserve recently upgraded and now better-protected and managed by ANAC and its international partners.
Threatened plants unique only to restricted parts of the country include the Ncuri, a deciduous hardwood tree that only grows on sand dunes in northern Mozambique, and a flowering shrub in a sacred forest in Bilene-Calanga region in southern Mozambique where encroachment by wood harvesters is chewing away at the edges of its only refuge.
The wetlands of Bilene-Calanga also host more species of the near-endemic Raphia australis palm than anywhere else on earth.
Raphia australis palms in Maputo Province, Mozambique | Ton Rulkens | Wikimedia Commons
Nature Notes: ‘Tap, Tap, Tap… It’s the Alarm Clock Bird’
On the first day we moved into our new rented house in northern Harare we heard a loud tapping sound coming from the roof. We were intrigued to discover the sound was made by a crested barbet.
The crested barbet is a bird with vivid yellow, red and black plumage and an untidy crest on its head.
The bird was attacking its own reflection in the shiny metal of the solar geyser tank that sits on top of the roof.
In the months that have followed, the barbet has held a daily battle against his image.
After a while he gives up and perches on top of the heater’s feeding tank to give his victory song — a long drawn-out trilling call. My bird book describes it in rather unflattering terms. It is “penetrating” and “unmusical”, the book says, likening it to an “alarm clock with [the] bell removed”.
It’s for this very reason that one of our friends, a wildlife artist, nicknames the crested barbet the alarm clock bird.
She says it’s a fitting description for a bird that has the slightly rumpled appearance of someone who’s just staggered out of bed, and hasn’t yet brushed his hair.