Timber worth millions of rupees was destroyed due to wildfires in more than 200 community and national forests in the Chure and Mahabharat areas in the district within the past two weeks.

The District Forest Office (DFO) said forest fires engulfed more than 100 community forests in Alitali, Sirsha and Jogbuda VDCs in the inner Madhes and Chure area while a dozen of forests at Salla in the Mahabharat area caught fires.

Union minister of state for forests Jayanthi Natarajan on Wednesday announced a recovery programme for saving critically endangered species and their habitats.

Under the initiative, 16 species have been identified for support. This includes snow leopard, bustards (including floricans), dolphin, hangul, Nilgiri tahr, marine turtles, dugongs and coral reefs, edible nest swiftlet, Asian wild buffalo, Nicobar megapode, Manipur brow-antlered deer, vultures, Malabar civet, Indian rhinoceros, asiatic lion, swamp deer and jerdon’s courser.

Small, busy and overcrowded, England might seem the last place in the world to have room for one of the planet's largest inhabited areas of unspoiled, natural darkness when night falls.

But if plans by Kielder Forest and the adjacent Northumberland national park are realised, the country will be home to an official "dark sky preserve" equalled only by two lonely areas in Quebec and Texas.

A wildlife official says that about 5,000 elephants have been killed by poachers over the past five years around the Nouabale Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Thomas Breuer, a senior technical official of the Wildlife Conservation Society project in the park, says that authorities must take action and double guards around the park.

Breuer says that while poaching around the park is intensifying, poaching inside is not as prevalent.

Bhubaneswar: Forest and environment minister Debi Prasad Mishra on Tuesday said that a legislation on biodiversity is soon to be considered by the State Legislative Assembly. Addressing a workshop on ‘Biodiversity conservation in Odisha: Challenges and Opportunities’ organised by the Regional Plant Resource Centre (RPRC), Bhubaneswar to celebrate the International Day for Biological Diversity-2012, Mishra said that biodiversity is important for our survival. Maintaining the equilibrium of biodiversity should get priority.

PANJIM: The sword hangs over 44 mines as the clock ticks on the report on buffer zone for wildlife sanctuaries and national park which is due to be submitted on May 31. Indications are that the government appointed committees, are likely to propose three to five kilometers as buffer zone for the sanctuaries.

Senior forest department official said that the committees, which were due to submit their report on May 12, have now sought extension till May 31.The department is expecting the report to be submitted before this deadline, the implementation, of which will be done from next mining season, beginning October.

NEW DELHI: Expressing concern over recent tiger deaths in the country, Environment and Forests Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said her ministry is constantly looking into the reasons for it. "We will have to take a look at the reasons. 17 are natural deaths, and we will look into the other deaths. We are constantly looking at the reasons. Well, poaching, you know, is an important reason which we are actively considering. The other reasons if it is a man- animal conflict we are already addressing those causes," Natarajan told media.

With the mercury on a steady upward drive, officials of the forest department are back to solving the poser thrown up at them every summer: How to provide water to the animals and birds in the state’s forest areas and, more importantly, protect them from poachers and hunters. With 22 wildlife sanctuaries and four national parks covering 12,579.205 sq km, or 4.57 per cent of the state’s area, the work is not exactly child’s play.

BOKAKHAT, May 2 – Camera traps have recorded the presence of 118 tigers in Kaziranga National Park in the last three years, reports PTI. The annual monitoring of tigers in the KNP using camera traps during 2009, 2010 and 2011 recorded a total of 118 adult, sub-adult and cubs, according to a report ‘Tigers of Kaziranga National Park’ which was released on Sunday.

The figure includes six identified tigers that died during the period of study, the report released by Assam Forest and Environment Minister Rockybul Hussain said.

There was a time when the national park rangers did not need visuals to monitor the deer population in the Margalla Hills – a significant number of footprints around water bodies indicated that their population was steady if not growing rapidly. But this was four to five years back.