Interest in the common kestrel soared in Switzerland in 2008, when it was named the bird of the year.
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The bird protection organisation SVS/BirdLife Switzerland said on Tuesday that a webcam had made a breeding pair with five young famous well beyond the Swiss borders.
Internet users were able to follow events in the nest in Muttenz, near the German border, for several months. Up to 9,000 people visited the website per day.
The number of common kestrel has declined in Switzerland over the last 50 years, mainly because of changes in agricultural practices which have reduced both their food sources and suitable places for them to nest. The bird is now on the list of potentially threatened species.
Train vs plane: would you take a direct train between London and Geneva?
Eurostar is planning to run direct trains from Britain to Germany and Switzerland from the early 2030s. Would you favour the train over the plane? If not, why not?
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Sounding the alarm over mammal loss
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The report was drawn up for the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and presented at the world conservation congress in the Spanish city of Barcelona. The research team compiled data on 5,487 mammalian species, many of them for the first time. The experts found that 1,141 of them are in danger…
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The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Nature, suggest that songbird brains can somehow anticipate the notes they should be singing before they are actually sung. That has implications for how humans acquire language, says Richard Hahnloser, a professor of neuroinformatics and lead author of the study. “We could make a reasonably good analogy…
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Her research comes as conservationists sound the alarm over the increased threats to many amphibians around the globe, which led to 2008 being designated the “Year of the Frog”. Ursina Tobler, from Zurich University’s Zoology department, is researching the effects of the chytrid fungus, which has been implicated in mass die-offs and extinctions in some…
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