Neonicotinoid impacts on birds

The catastrophic impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees has long been suspected but now it's becoming clear that they are hitting farmland bird populations too.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used insecticides in the world. They are toxic to most arthropods and they are widely applied as seed dressings because they act systemically, protecting all parts of the crop. Like so many pesticides used in the past they can persist and accumulate in soils and leach into waterways.

As a result of many studies, both in the laboratory and in the field, there is a widespread view among entomologists that neonicotinoid use has - in combination with the loss of flower-rich meadows, disease and mite infestations - contributed to the decline of bee populations. They are much less toxic to vertebrates and until recently evidence of any impacts on birds has been merely suggestive. However, a recent paper by Caspar Hallmann and his colleagues published in Nature has shown that decreases in bird numbers in the Netherlands shown by the Dutch Common Breeding Bird Monitoring Scheme have been most rapid in areas with highest environmental concentrations of neonics.

Read the paper here

Bird Atlas 2007-11 The breeding and wintering birds of Britain & Ireland

My copy of this outstanding, weighty tome was delivered yesterday evening and has been well worth the wait. It must weigh around 10 kilos! Hard bound with 720 pages.

• The book is the result of contributions from over 40,000 volunteers and a total financial investment of £1.4 million.
• The advent of online data capture means that this atlas captured 10 times more data than any previous national atlas. It includes over 16 million individual observations of 214 million birds of 502 species.
• Advances in mapping and modelling technologies have enabled the BTO to pull even more meaning from the data - species accounts include new maps that are easy to interpret and will be even more useful to a broader range of users.
• Over 8,000 copies of the book have already been sold, so this looks like being the best-selling BTO book of all time.
• The book highlights some really striking changes to our bird populations over a worryingly short time frame, particularly the breeding abundance change maps for migrant passerines, waders and farmland birds. We need to understand these changes better and we need to do this fast - before it is too late.

Every serious birder should have a copy of this momentous work in their library.

UK's Wild Bird Population Continues to Decline

The number of wild birds in the UK is still falling despite efforts to protect them by changing farming practices. Conservationists have urged the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, to use the money newly available from the EU's common agricultural policy to step up protection measures.

Since 2003 there has been a 13% decline in the population of farmland birds. In the five years to the end of 2012 the decline was 8% overall. The decline has slowed according to the Wild Bird Indicator statistics released by the government last Thursday and some species are in better health than they were in the 1970s when data began to be comprehensively collected. However, conservationists (including me) are concerned that the drop in numbers is continuing with a halving of farmland bird numbers in the past 40 years. Woodland bird numbers are down 17%.

Turtle Doves have had their lowest level of sightings since records began. Lapwing numbers are down by nearly two thirds since 1970, while Corn Buntings are down 90% in the same period and the number of Skylarks is down by well over half. These are truly alarming statistics.

Farmland birds suffer from intensive agriculture as farmers often remove or drastically cut back the hedges and trees where many of them live. Pesticides can leave them with less prey and a lack of wide field margins cuts down on habitat.

The decline in farmland birds has slowed and wildlife friendly farmers who put conservation measures in place on their land are to be congratulated for their hard work. But funding must be there for these measures to continue. Under reforms to the CAP that were agreed this summer our government has the ability to divert some of the millions of pounds available (which come ultimately from taxpayers) to environmental stewardship schemes to reward farmers for good practice. Needless to say, Owen Paterson has still not said how he intends to allocate the funding and given the governments freedom of action under the new rules, much of it could go to farmers not based on their practices but on the amount of land they farm, as other subsidies are.  Without Paterson's help farmland wildlife will continue to struggle along with those farmers trying to help.