Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli and President Ram Chandra Paudel greeted citizens on Saturday on the occasion of Vijaya Dashami and urged them to help the people affected due to recent disasters to return to normalcy.
President Paudel wished peace, prosperity and happiness to all Nepalis on the tenth day of Nepal’s largest Hindu festival Dashain while Prime Minister Oli called for cooperation and harmony among all citizens.
Urging all Nepalis to extend help at individual levels too to the disaster hit people to return to normalcy, Oli, in a statement, assured the disaster survivors of necessary assistance on the part of the government.
Nepal was recently hit by floods and landslides in different parts of the country due to incessant rain that saw as many 240 deaths and thousands other displaced.
The almost two-weeks long major Hindu festival of Vijaya Dashami, or Dashain as it is popularly known here, began on October 3, by sowing of barley seeds called Jamara in a mud vessel on the first day with the installation of water vessel known as Kalash, known as Ghatasthapana.
The festival extends till Kojagrat Purnima or the full Moon day, which falls on October 17 this year.
During the occasion, people receive tika, vermilion powder mixed with curd and rice, along with Jamara or barley leaves from their elder members of the family as blessings.
Meanwhile, every year, scores of people working in the Kathmandu Valley return to their remote homes across the Himalayan nation for Dashain. The Federation of Nepalese National Transport Entrepreneurs (FNNTE) had initially estimated approximately 1.8 million passengers would leave the Valley via road transport.
The Kathmandu Post quoted FNNTE president Bijaya Swar as saying that only 1.3 million have travelled to their native places since day one of the festival and said, “The lower figure is due to road disruptions caused by floods and landslides following heavy rains on September 27 and 28.”
“The roads are in poor condition, making travel difficult. Despite this, 1.3 million people have left to celebrate Dashain with their families,” Swar said.
Avian enthusiasts try to counter the deadly risk of Chicago high-rises for migrating birds
Chicago, Oct 11 (AP) With a neon-green net in hand, Annette Prince briskly walks a downtown Chicago plaza at dawn, looking left and right as she goes. It’s not long before she spots a tiny yellow bird sitting on the concrete. It doesn’t fly away, and she quickly nets the bird, gently places it inside a paper bag and labels the bag with the date, time and place.
“This is a Nashville warbler,” said Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, noting that the bird must have flown into a glass window pane of an adjacent building. “He must only weigh about two pennies. He’s squinting his eyes because his head hurts.”
For rescue groups like the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, this scene plays out hundreds of times each spring and fall after migrating birds fly into homes, small buildings and sometimes Chicago’s skyscrapers and other hulking buildings.
A stark sign of the risks came last fall, when 1,000 migrating birds died on a single night after flying into the glass exterior of the city’s lakefront convention center, McCormick Place. This fall, the facility unveiled new bird-safe window film on one of its glass buildings along the Lake Michigan shore.
The USD 1.2 million project installed tiny dots on the exterior of the Lakeside Centre building, adorning enough glass to cover two football fields.
Doug Stotz, senior conservation ecologist at the nearby Field Museum, hopes the project will be a success. He estimated that just 20 birds have \died after flying into the convention’s centre’s glass exterior so far this fall, a hopeful sign.
“We don’t have a lot of data since this just started this fall, but at this point, it looks like it’s made a huge difference,” Stotz said.
But for the birds that collide with Chicago buildings, there is a network of people waiting to help. They also are aiming to educate officials and find solutions to improve building design, lighting and other factors in the massive number of bird collision deaths in Chicago and worldwide.
Prince said she and other volunteers walk the streets downtown to document what they can of the birds that are killed and injured.
“We have the combination of the millions of birds that pass through this area because it’s a major migratory path through the United States, on top of the amount of artificial lighting that we put out at night, which is when these birds are traveling and getting confused and attracted to the amount of glass,” Prince said.
Dead birds are often saved for scientific use, including by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Rescued birds are taken to local wildlife rehabilitation centres to recover, such as the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Centre in suburban Illinois.
On a recent morning, veterinarian Darcy Stephenson at DuPage gave a yellow-bellied sapsucker anesthetic gas before taping its wings open for an X-ray. The bird arrived with a note from a rescue group: “Window collision.”
Examining the results, she found the bird had a broken ulna - a bone in the wing.
The centre takes in about 10,000 species of animals annually and 65 per cent of them are avian. Many are victims of window collisions and during peak migration in the fall, several hundred birds can show up in one day.
