AFP

The first cold winds announce the arrival of winter in Uruguay’s jet setters’ playground, Punta del Este.

It’s time for “2TK” to set flight from the plush seaside resort and return to Canada, a feat of endurance that fascinates scientists and delights local birdwatchers.

Identifiable by a plastic band on one ankle bearing the name 2TK and a metal one with nine digits on the other, this ruddy turnstone (Arenaria interpres) has spent the southern hemisphere summer on the rocks off Uruguay’s Atlantic coast feeding off mussels, alongside oystercatchers and other birds.

When the food became scarce in Canada’s artic tundra as winter swept in, the turnstone migrated 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles) to South America.

By April, 2TK had become “fatter” and ditched his grey plumage for one tinged with brown and orange ahead of his return to his native lands to reproduce, said Alvaro Perez Tort, 48, an amateur photographer and member of the Punta del Este birdwatching society that has been documenting the bird’s trips to Uruguay since 2016.

“2TK stole my heart,” Perez told AFP.

Every year he waits for the male turnstone’s return to document him “as much as possible” to share on reportband.gov — the continental database for observing banded birds run by the United States Geological Survey.

“What’s interesting is that a banded bird has a history: there’s a city, a country or faraway place, a journey and people,” said Perez.

By photographing the bird “we feel like we’re a part” of that history, he added, noting he has seen 2TK eight times at Uruguay’s southernmost tip.

– Bird ‘jigsaw puzzle’ –

2TK is around 14 years old, according to the Bird Banding Laboratory, which organises the banding of one million birds annually in North America for conservation purposes.

He was banded in 2012 in Delaware Bay on the US Atlantic coast, an important stopover for many migratory species.

For laboratory chief Antonio Celis-Murillo, information provided by amateur birdwatchers is vital to “build the jigsaw puzzle” of each bird’s movements.

“Our work is successful thanks to the general public — every person who reports a banded bird,” he told AFP. 

“The reported information is so simple but valuable, because scientifically it tells us a lot.

“Especially those reports from South America that we lack,” he added.

These details allow scientists to plot the behavior of every species: their migration routes, where they stop, how long they stay there, how they live.

It all helps to refine conservation projects.

According to a 2019 study published in Science magazine, some 3,000 species of wild birds have disappeared from North America since 1970.

– ‘Lots of food’ –

Loss of habitat affecting all biodiversity “clearly shows its impact on migratory birds,” who face ever-greater difficulties in their extraordinary journeys, said Adrian Azpiroz, a biologist and ornithologist who promotes ecotourism initiatives.

And while turnstones are not threatened like other waders, their population is nonetheless shrinking.

Of the estimated 300,000 on the continent, only several hundred or thousand winter on the Uruguayan coast. Others prefer southern Brazil or Argentina.

Scientists believe these long-distance migratory birds have favorite winter retreats and are remarkably loyal, returning year after year — just like 2TK.

Uruguay’s many coastal lagunas are “very productive from a nourishment point of view” for waders, said Azpiroz.

That is why 2TK is likely to have traveled some 350,000 kilometers in his life — the equivalent of nine times around the planet.

That’s a truly staggering accomplishment for a bird measuring little more than 20 centimeters (eight inches).

Experts are still studying the sophisticated physiological and neurological mechanisms that allow him to recognize a location with such precision following a weeks-long air journey of thousands of kilometers.

Many Uruguayan birdwatchers like to think the same thing that attracts them to return time and again to Punta del Este is what also caught 2TK’s attention.

Hurricane Agatha, the first of the season, lashed a string of beach resorts on Mexico’s Pacific Coast as it barreled ashore Monday, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and flood warnings.

Agatha was the strongest storm to make landfall along Mexico’s Pacific coast in May since record keeping began in 1949, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

It touched land near Puerto Angel in the southern state of Oaxaca as a Category 2 hurricane — the second lowest on a scale of five.

Agatha later weakened to a Category 1 storm, but still packed maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers (80 miles) per hour, the NHC said.

“Rapid weakening is expected as the hurricane moves farther inland. Agatha is forecast to weaken to a tropical storm tonight, and dissipate over southeastern Mexico by late Tuesday,” it said.

Small landslides were reported in parts of Oaxaca, civil protection coordinator Oscar Valencia told the Milenio television channel.

Residents along the coast had stocked up on food and water and boarded up windows of homes and businesses as Agatha approached.

Seaports in the area closed and airlines canceled flights to the region.

Authorities opened around 200 storm shelters with room for up to 26,800 people, while hotels provided refuge to the estimated 5,200 national and foreign tourists in the danger zone.

“We are already on red alert. This is coming and it is coming strong,” Roberto Castillo, a civil protection official in Huatulco, told AFP as the storm neared.

A hurricane warning was issued for a stretch of coastline including Puerto Escondido and other surf towns popular with Mexican and foreign tourists, leaving normally busy beaches deserted.

“Storm surge is expected to produce extremely dangerous coastal flooding” and will be accompanied by “large and destructive waves,” the NHC said.

“Agatha will produce heavy rains over portions of southern Mexico through Tuesday night,” as well as “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions,” it predicted.

In Oaxaca and neighboring Chiapas state, “life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides may occur,” the NHC added.

The region is home to several major rivers and Mexico’s meteorological service warned of possible overflows and landslides.

Mexico is regularly lashed by tropical storms on both its Pacific and Atlantic coasts, generally between the months of May and November.

The deadliest storm to hit Mexico last year was a Category 3 hurricane called Grace that killed 11 people in the eastern states of Veracruz and Puebla in August.

A Mexican judge has indefinitely suspended construction of part of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s flagship tourist train project in the Yucatan peninsula on environmental grounds, campaigners said Monday.

The ruling follows a legal challenge brought by opponents, including scuba divers, who are concerned about the impact of the Mayan Train on wildlife, caves and water-filled sinkholes known as cenotes.

The indefinite halt to work on the 60-kilometer (37-mile) section between the resorts of Playa del Carmen and Tulum goes a step further than a provisional suspension order issued in April.

The federal judge cited the “imminent danger” of causing “irreversible damage” to ecosystems, according to one of the plaintiffs, the non-governmental group Defending the Right to a Healthy Environment.

Authorities were found to have failed to carry out the necessary environmental impact studies before starting construction of the section, one of several being built by the military, it said in a statement.

The National Fund for the Promotion of Tourism, the government agency overseeing the project, said that it expected the work to be allowed to continue after the environmental impact statement is finalized.

It said the document would contain “numerous mitigation actions in favor of the environment.”

Lopez Obrador hopes to inaugurate the roughly 1,500-kilometer (950 mile) rail loop linking popular Caribbean beach resorts and archeological ruins by the end of 2023.

The original plan for the disputed section was for an overpass over a highway, but the route was modified early this year to go through jungle at ground level.

Opponents fear that the construction will cause irreparable damage to a subterranean network of caves, rivers and freshwater sinkholes connected to the Caribbean Sea.

Lopez Obrador has insisted the railroad will not affect the cenotes and alleged that environmentalists have been infiltrated by “impostors.”

The tobacco industry is a far greater threat than many realise as it is one of the world’s biggest polluters, from leaving mountains of waste to driving global warming, the WHO charged Tuesday.

The World Health Organization accused the industry of causing widespread deforestation, diverting badly needed land and water in poor countries away from food production, spewing out plastic and chemical waste as well as emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. 

In its report released on World No Tobacco Day, the UN agency called for the tobacco industry to be held to account and foot the bill for the cleanup.

The report, “Tobacco: poisoning our planet”, looks at the impacts of the whole cycle, from the growth of plants to the manufacturing of tobacco products, to consumption and waste.

While tobacco’s health impacts have been well documented for decades — with smoking still causing more than eight million deaths worldwide every year — the report focuses on its broader environmental consequences.

The findings are “quite devastating,” Ruediger Krech, WHO director of health promotion, told AFP, slamming the industry as “one of the biggest polluters that we know of.”

The industry is responsible for the loss of some 600 million trees each year, while tobacco growing and production uses 200,000 hectares of land and 22 billion tonnes of water annually, the report found.

It also emits around 84 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, it said.

– 4.5 trillion cigarette butts –

In addition, “tobacco products are the most littered item on the planet, containing over 7,000 toxic chemicals, which leech into our environment when discarded,” Krech said.

He pointed out that each one of the estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts that end up in our oceans, rivers, sidewalks and beaches every year can pollute 100 litres of water. 

And up to a quarter of all tobacco farmers contract so-called green tobacco sickness, or poisoning from the nicotine they absorb through the skin.

Farmers who handle tobacco leaves all day consume the equivalent of 50 cigarettes worth of nicotine a day, Krech said.

This is especially worrying for the many children involved in tobacco farming.

“Just imagine a 12-year-old being exposed to 50 cigarettes a day,” he said.

Most tobacco is grown in poorer countries, where water and farmland are often in short supply, and where such crops are often grown at the expense of vital food production, the report said.

Tobacco farming also accounts for about five percent of global deforestation, and drives depletion of precious water resources.

– Plastic pollution –

At the same time the processing and transportation of tobacco account for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions — with the equivalent of one-fifth of the global airline industry’s carbon footprint.

In addition, products like cigarettes, smokeless tobacco and e-cigarettes also contribute significantly to the global build-up of plastic pollution, WHO warned.

Cigarette filters contain microplastics — the tiny fragments that have been detected in every ocean and even at the bottom of the world’s deepest trench — and make up the second-highest form of plastic pollution worldwide, the report said.

And yet, despite tobacco industry marketing, WHO stressed that there is no evidence filters provide any proven health benefits over smoking non-filtered cigarettes.

The UN agency urged policy makers worldwide to treat cigarette filters as single-use plastics, and to consider banning them.

It also decried that taxpayers around the world had been covering the towering costs of cleaning up the tobacco industry’s mess.

Each year, China for instance dishes out around $2.6 billion and India around $766 million, while Brazil and Germany pay some $200 million each to clean up littered tobacco products, the report found.

WHO insisted that more countries should follow the so-called Polluter Pays Principle, as in France and Spain.

It is important, Krech said, that “the industry pay actually for the mess that they are creating.”