Bits for Pets Blog

A woman from East Sussex who bought an emu egg sold as a novelty food item on a farm on the Isle of Wight has managed to hatch a chick from it.

Gillian Stone, from Bexhill, who breeds chickens, brought home three large green emu eggs from a holiday and put them in an incubator in her kitchen.

Two turned out to be infertile, but after 52 days little Osborne hatched.

He needed to be hand fed at first, but at nine days old he is now thriving and Ms Stone is hoping to get him a mate.

“We decided to risk putting the eggs in the incubator and, after a little bit of help Osborne arrived,” she said.

“He was destined to be an omelette [but] now he’s an emu.”

Osborne will grow to over 6ft tall and will soon move from Ms Stone’s home to her smallholding nearby.

Family friend Jenny Cosham said nothing Ms Stone did surprised her.

“She turns up with all sorts of things,” she said.

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Fewer puffins are going to breed at the UK’s largest colony of the species, on the Isle of May, scientists report.

Numbers are down to about 41,000 breeding pairs this year from almost 70,000 pairs in 2003.

Researchers believe the decline is linked to changes in the North Sea food web, perhaps related to climate change.

Birds are also arriving underweight, which the RSPB describes as “worrying”, because puffins are generally able to feed on a range of creatures in winter.

The Isle of May, in the Firth of Forth, is home to the UK’s largest single puffin colony, although more birds overall nest in the St Kilda archipelago.
Map

Mike Harris, from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has been monitoring and studying the Isle of May population since the 1970s, labelling individual birds with rings to follow their progress.

After decades of spectacular growth, he now believes the colony is in decline.

The five-yearly count of nesting pairs, which Professor Harris’s team completed in April, revealed the decline.

“Also, we found some birds were coming back later than expected and others were coming in underweight,” he told BBC News.

“And a lot that we knew were alive last year have not turned up at all, so we assume they’re dead - although it’s possible they knew it was a bad year for food and decided not to come back at all.”

The numbers recorded would indicate a population fall of 40%, though because not every single nest can be counted the scientists believe it is more accurate to give a figure of “at least 30%”.

Puffins spend the winters at sea, floating, swimming and diving for food, coming to land only during the nesting season.

In the winters they catch fish, squid, worms and other much smaller marine organisms, which means they are more flexible feeders than other seabirds.
Puffin. Image: MP Harris
Puffins are counted every five years by looking into holes where they nest

“So whatever the problem is, it’s got to be a widespread one,” said Professor Harris.

The suspicion is that climate change is altering the distribution of plankton across the North Sea.

This disrupts the entire food web, including predators such as puffin.

“This fits in with other evidence that North Sea birds have been desperately short of food over several seasons,” said the RSPB’s Grahame Madge.

“But these have been birds such as the Arctic tern and kittiwake which only feed in the top part of the sea.

“This is probably the best adapted seabird that the UK has; they’re deep divers, they’re specialists in going down deep into the water column to find fish, so it’s troubling to find that they’re encountering a shortage of food.”

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THE decline in numbers of farm ponds has left the threatened great crested newt with fewer places to breed and struggling to survive in Scotland.
Now Scottish Natural Heritage is calling on individuals to help out, through the simple act of helping to build a pond in their garden or community.

The great-crested newt, also called the warty newt due to the lumps on its skin, is the largest of Britain’s three newt species and is dark in colour, with a vivid orange belly covered in black spots. The handsome creature has been put on SNH’s Species Action List, as needing conservation action.

In the most recent survey, the newts were discovered in just 100 ponds across Scotland. Although they live most of their life on land, preferring rough grassland and woodland, they need ponds in which to breed.

Before the advent of tractors and taps, farms used to be covered in ponds to provide water for animals, but today there is a shortage of places for the great crested newt to breed.

As part of Scottish Biodiversity Week, SNH is asking animal lovers to help out by getting involved in projects to build ponds for the newts in their town or village, or by simply building a pond in their own garden.

John McKinnell, species management adviser at SNH, said: “They are threatened across Europe due to loss of habitat. A major thing is breeding sites. They breed in ponds rather than streams or lochs.

“They like farm ponds, but agricultural practices have changed over the last century and now there are not the same number of ponds as there used to be. People can help to a certain extent by building ponds in their gardens. The new ponds have got to be close enough to the places where newts live for them to commute.”

He said one of the best ways to help out was by joining a local group such as those within an umbrella organisation called the Amphibian and Reptile Groups of the UK.

They carry out survey work to discover the locations of the newts and build ponds nearby in time for them to breed in spring. The newts usually live within 250 metres of the breeding ponds.

The Lothian Amphibian and Reptile Group and the Clyde Amphibian and Reptile Group have been actively getting involved in surveying newt populations and building new habitats for them and they rely on help from volunteers.

Starting to build a pond now should mean that it will be ready in time for next year’s breeding season. Even if it does not turn out to be near enough to a newt population for it to be used as a breeding site, it will still help plenty of other species of wildlife.

Most great crested newts in Scotland live in Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders, as well as across the Central Belt from Fife to Lanarkshire and around Inverness.

Female great-crested newts lay about 300 eggs, attached to vegetation in the pond. Larvae develop over three months, before leaving the pond and moving on to land.

As well as changing agricultural practices, newt habitats have been threatened due to neglect and mismanagement of ponds. The introduction of fish to a pond is catastrophic for its newt population.

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AN ANIMAL rescuer is warning pet owners to be on their guard after a dog she rehoused was stolen from a home in Bournemouth.

Lytchett Matravers-based Jayne Gooderson, 46, has been saving all sorts of animals from pounds and rehousing others that their owners can no longer look after for 11 years.

Last week a Staffordshire bull terrier named Tyler that she had found a home for was taken from a garden in Winton.

Jayne, whose Pound Puppy Animal Rescue organisation rescues animals from across the country, said dog theft was rapidly increasing as it was a quick and easy way for crooks to make several hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds.

She said: “People should be made aware that if they buy a dog from someone on the street the chances are it’s stolen.

“It’s a major problem. I had a couple in Southampton who had a German Shepherd stolen from their car on a Saturday and a bloke was trying to sell it to a friend of mine in Ringwood the next day.”

Jayne said that in a lot of cases she gave dogs to people who were vulnerable and the animals provided much-needed companionship for them.

She added: “They’re normally sold within five miles. They just take it to the next village and knock on a few doors.

“If somebody pinched my car I wouldn’t care because it’s insured, but if somebody stole my dog it would be emotional.

“There’s so much emotion involved, people will do anything to get their dog back.”

Kaye Fitzgerald-Gorham, of Lurcher Search UK, which reunites lost and stolen dogs with their owners across the country, added: “It’s always been a problem with lurchers.

“I think it’s become more widespread with other breeds now because people have cottoned on to the fact that people will pay to get their dogs back, so it’s quite a nice little earner.”

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