Happy turtle news

While I almost all the time feel tat I get bad news about the turtles, there are some surprises. And what kind of surprises, because I was not even looking for news about turtles, I was checking a birding community from Birdlife International. On the page it was a map with some news from around the worls. Curious as I am, I had to see what it was. One was the news about some work for one of the most endangered warblers ( birds,, what a shock ), the next I was looking at was; yeah, good news about a turtle, The numbers of nesting hawkbills turtles has increased. It is now considered to be eight times as high as it was in the early seventies.

So it's really true conservation works, at least some places. The hawkbill turtle is one of the turtles where it has been a large international trade. The trade has been for it's raw shell and the meat. Later there has been a ban on this international trade. Even if this hazard have been minimized there are many other hazards; bycatch from the fishing industries is one of them. Destruction of their nesting habitats is another. Even this, the population in the reserve has inclined with really good numbers.

 The hawksbill  is regarded by the IUCN redlist as crically endangered and the world population has decreased with 80% during the last three turtlebill turtle generation. So even though the population are increasing in some protected area this was reall not so good news in the end :-(