Fauna of Nicaragua Many of Nicaragua's birds are brilliantly colored, including various species of parrots, toucans, trogons, and hummingbirds. guardabarranco is the national bird of Nicaragua. Natural range for the scarlet macaw has been vastly reduced by the pet trade. Most of the Pacific region of Nicaragua no longer is inhabited by the species. Nicaragua is home to many nesting populations of sea turtles, including the hawksbill sea turtle, leatherback sea turtle, loggerhead sea turtle, olive ridley sea turtle, and the Pacific green turtle ("Chelonia mydas agassisi"). All of these are endangered or critically endangered species, with declining global populations. Extensive efforts are
Varieties of Chinese their own standard languages. In China, however, Literary Chinese maintained its monopoly on formal writing until the start of the 20th century. The logographic writing, read with varying local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary and idioms for the local varieties. The new national standard, Vernacular Chinese, the written counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese, is also used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances