Bird populations in French countryside 'collapsing'

[sue4e3]

Bird populations across an eerily quiet French countryside have collapsed, on average, by a third over the last decade-and-a-half, alarmed researchers reported on Tuesday.

Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists detailed in a pair of studies, one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.

"The situation is catastrophic," said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at France's National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies.

"Our countryside is in the process of become a veritable desert," he said in a communique released by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), which also contributed to the findings.

The common white throat, the ortolan bunting, the Eurasian skylark and other once-ubiquitous species have all fallen off by at least a third, according a detailed, annual census initiated at the start of the century.

A migratory song bird, the meadow pipit, has declined by nearly 70 percent.

The culprit, researchers speculate, is the intensive use of pesticides on vast tracts of monoculture crops, especially wheat and corn.

The problem is not that birds are being poisoned, but that the insects on which they depend for food have disappeared.



Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-bird-populations-french-countryside-collapsing.html#jCp

[NickB79]

1. Congratulations France, you've caught up to the US Midwest

I've lived in rural areas of Minnesota my whole life, and I can honestly say that it is noticeable how much bird populations have shrunk in the past 25 years.

Anyone remember swallows? I remember we had so many swallows on our farm in the last 80's, hundreds of them building mud nests and sitting on the power lines. As a kid I even shot a few with my BB gun, because they were everywhere. What was the harm, right? Same goes for all the other native bird species. Red-winged and yellow-winged blackbirds, grosbeaks, song sparrows, meadowlarks, red-headed woodpeckers, etc.

I don't think I saw a swallow all last summer. It's been years since I've seen yellow-winged blackbirds or meadowlarks. All I see now are starlings, house sparrows, crows and pigeons. Survivor species, the ones that will pass through this bottleneck and re-speciate the forests and grasslands of the future, after we're dead and gone.