PRELIMS BOOSTER 2018
Baer’s pochard and Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
Baer’s pochard
- Critically endangered — IUCN
- Diving duck found in eastern Asia
- The name commemorates the Estonian naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer
- Habitat
- It breeds around lakes and other freshwater habitats (including artificial habitats such as fishponds) with rich aquatic vegetation, typically but not exclusively in dense grass or flooded tussock/shrubby meadows
- It breeds in southeast Russia and northeast China, migrating in winter to southern China, Vietnam, Japan, and India
- Threats
- Habitat loss and degradation
- Unsustainable harvesting
- Trapping of birds
- Poisoning of birds
- Collection of eggs
- Low water levels or complete drying up of water bodies
- Development for tourism and recreational watersports pose a threat to the species’s habitat
- Conservation
- Appendix I of CITES
- A Single Species Action Plan was adopted by the East Asian – Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP)
Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
- It’s common market area of Carribean countries
- Established – 1973 under Treaty of Chaguaramas
- secretariat headquarters — Georgetown, Guyana
- CARICOM is an official United Nations Observer
- objective
- promote economic integration and cooperation among its members
- ensure that the benefits of integration are equitably shared
- coordinate foreign policy
- Members — 15 members
Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago
- CARICOM Secretariat — principal administrative organ of the Community and is headed by a Secretary General who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Community