Just saw this AP story about a recently released IUCN report that again highlights the contrast between working to protect and maintain intact ecosystems and healthy populations of birds, mammals, and other wildlife as can still be done in the Boreal as compared to the crucial last minute crisis efforts that must be enacted in most of the world to halt biodiversity decline.

Jeff

Here's the beginning of the AP story: 

"Group: World failing to halt biodiversity decline

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER -GENEVA (AP) — Governments are failing to stem a rapid decline in biodiversity that is now threatening extinction for almost half the world's coral reef species, a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals, a leading environmental group warned Thursday.

"Life on Earth is under serious threat," the International Union for Conservation of Nature said in a 155-page report that describes the past five years of a losing battle to protect species, natural habitats and geographical regions from the devastating effects of man.

IUCN, the producer of the world's Red List of endangered animals, analyzed over 44,000 species to test government pledges earlier this decade to halt a global loss in biodiversity by 2010."

Click here to read the whole AP story

To download the IUCN report and delve into the tons of background info go to this site: http://www.iucn.org/?3460/Wildlife-crisis-worse-than-economic-crisis--IUCN

Here's a video of a Whooping Crane in captivity - there are only around 500 total Whooping Cranes left in the wild today: