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Article: Where Eagles Try to Dare.(efforts to save the Philippine eagle )(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Animals
- Article date:
- March 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On just four islands of the Philippines a rare raptor struggles.
The Philippine Archipelago hosts one of the world's richest faunas--especially when it comes to birds. In a country with a burgeoning human population and masses of rural poor, the Philippine eagle is the wildlife equivalent of the downtrodden, as good as homeless and barely eking out a living.
The species never lived on more than a handful of the more than 7,000 Philippine islands. Today it survives only in the forests of Mindanao, Luzon, Samar, and Leyte. In 1910 there were 1,200 eagles in Mindanao alone. A census there in 1973 found 309 birds, with an annual loss of 5 to 10 percent by ...