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Millions of birds passed through Virginia this spring, and the National Wildlife Federation says many are in trouble. Sandy Hausman traveled to the Eastern Shore to report on one species -- the rust- colored sandpipers known as red knots (Calidris canutus). Each year, they fly about 10,000 miles – from the tip of South America to their nesting grounds in the Arctic – stopping in Virginia to refuel. Bird watchers in North America used to see red knots as far north as Cape Cod, but today they’re most often seen in Virginia and in states around Delaware Bay. In the 80’s, experts counted more than 100,000, but over the last 20 years their numbers have fallen to an estimated 25,000.

First, for the bad news. Last fall and winter Kansas pheasant hunters shot about 230,000 pheasants. That’s the lowest since about 154,000 in 1957, the first year harvest records were kept. A rare sight last season…a hunter with a rooster pheasant. Last season’s harvest was the lowest in about 55 years. Second, for the really bad news – this coming season could be worse in some areas, according to spring surveys. Jim Pitman, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism upland bird biologist provided the harvest estimates. He also furnished the results of the agency’s annual spring pheasant counts. It’s an annual event where agency staff run prescribed rural routes, stopping at prescribed locations to listen for rooster pheasants crowing. “This is horrific compared to where we were just a few years ago,” said Pitman. “When you’re as low as we are this year, it means you’re pretty much going to have (very low populations) this fall, even with good production. We just don’t have many bird out there.”

Pesticide use has sharply reduced the regional biodiversity of stream invertebrates, such as mayflies and dragonflies, in Europe and Australia, finds a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1]. Previous research has shown similar decreases in individual streams, but the study by Mikhail Beketov, an aquatic ecologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues analysed the effects of pesticides over broad regions. The team examined 23 streams in the central plains of Germany, 16 in the western plains of France and 24 in southern Victoria, Australia. They classified streams according to three different levels of pesticide contamination: uncontaminated, slightly contaminated and highly contaminated. The researchers found that there were up to 42% fewer species in highly contaminated than in uncontaminated streams in Europe. Highly contaminated streams in Australia showed a decrease in the number of invertebrate families by up to 27% when contrasted with uncontaminated streams. Moreover, the authors say that diversity decreased at pesticide concentrations that European regulations deem environmentally protective. "It shows our risk assessments don't work," says Beketov. "I think we should care about this because invertebrates are an important part of the food web."

Conservationists are highlighting the plight of another rare bird in Surrey to raise awareness of the scale of decline in the county's woodland wildlife species. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) says that the willow tit Parus montanus, which was once widespread across the UK, has plummeted in number over the last 30 years. The charity said now recorded sightings have all but ceased in Surrey. And it pointed to the plight of the country's smallest woodpecker, the lesser spotted woodpecker Dendrocopos minor, too, saying it is also an increasingly rare sound in the South-east and the rest of the UK. Previously, the RSPB has drawn attention to arguably Surrey's rarest bird, the Dartford Warbler, which was once regularly spotted in the region's heathland areas, including Reigate Heath, but is now a very rare sight since a crash in its numbers in recent years.
The RSPB was presenting the findings in the wake of last month's State of Nature report.

A new State of Nature report by 25 conservation groups including the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and the Mammal Society is predictably depressing: most British species are struggling and one in three have halved in number in the past half century. Hedgehogs have disappeared even more dramatically. Even if the 30 million population estimate from the 1950s is a massive over-exaggeration, hedgehogs have declined by more than 90%. Numbers have fallen by more than a third since 2003 and fewer than a million roam our countryside today. The quiet disappearance of this much-loved mammal – currently performing strongly in a BBC Wildlife Magazine poll to find a national species for Britain – may rarely make the headlines but it is a tragedy, and another small way in which we are all becoming more estranged from the natural world.

More than half the wildlife species found in our islands are declining, under an assault of development, air pollution and chemical attack. Bumblebees, wildflowers, songbirds and butterflies are among the more obvious casualties. Perhaps even more troubling than freefall declines in red squirrels, harbour seals, hedgehogs, starlings and all the others, is the fact that the crisis facing the living fabric of our environment is hardly mentioned in politics. And not only have ministers recently turned their attention away from the protection of nature, they have presented efforts to protect it as the enemy of growth, development and business. George Osborne's claim that laws to protect rare species are a 'ridiculous burden on business', Owen Paterson's championing the cause of Bayer and Syngenta in opposing the moratorium on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and Michael Gove's attempts to downgrade education about our relationship with the natural environment are recent cases in point. With this in mind we can confidently guess that the government's on-going review of EU environmental laws is not intended to strengthen the protection of nature in these islands.

The plight of the bees serves as a warning that we still may not quite understand ecology. Ecological farming is part of a larger paradigm shift in human awareness. The corporate denialists appear just like the Pope's shrouded inquisitors in 1615, who refused to look through Galileo's telescope to see the moons of Jupiter. Today's denialists refuse to recognise that Earth's systems operate within real limits. However, the state religion in this case is money, and the state religion won't allow it. The denialists cling to the presumed right to consume, hoard, and obliterate Earth's great bounty for private profits. But hoards of money won't reverse extinction, restore lost soils, or heal the world's bee colonies. Earth's delicately balanced systems can reach tipping points and collapse. Bees, for example, work within a limited range of marginal returns on the energy they exert to collect nutrition for their colonies. When winter bee deaths grow from 10% to 50%, the remaining bees are weakened by toxins, and the wild habitats shrink, that thin, ecological margin of energy return can be squeezed to zero. Surviving bees expend more energy than they return in honey. More bees die, fewer reach maturity, and entire colonies collapse. This crisis is a lesson in fundamental ecology. Rachel Carson warned of these systemic constraints 50 years ago. Ecologists and environmentalists have warned of limits ever since. Bee colony collapse now joins global warming, forest destruction, and species extinctions among our most urgent ecological emergencies. Saving the world's bees appears as one more necessary link in restoring Earth to ecological balance.

Neonicotinoids are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. They act systemically, travelling through plant tissues and protecting all parts of the crop, and are widely applied as seed dressings. As neurotoxins with high toxicity to most arthropods, they provide effective pest control and have numerous uses in arable farming and horticulture. However, the prophylactic use of broad-spectrum pesticides goes against the long-established principles of integrated pest management (IPM), leading to environmental concerns. It has recently emerged that neonicotinoids can persist and accumulate in soils. They are water soluble and prone to leaching into waterways. Being systemic, they are found in nectar and pollen of treated crops. Reported levels in soils, waterways, field margin plants and floral resources overlap substantially with concentrations that are sufficient to control pests in crops, and commonly exceed the LC50 (the concentration which kills 50% of individuals) for beneficial organisms. Concentrations in nectar and pollen in crops are sufficient to impact substantially on colony reproduction in bumblebees..Although vertebrates are less susceptible than arthropods, consumption of small numbers of dressed seeds offers a route to direct mortality in birds and mammals. Major knowledge gaps remain, but current use of neonicotinoids is likely to be impacting on a broad range of non-target taxa including pollinators and soil and aquatic invertebrates and hence threatens a range of ecosystem services.

Isolated human genes may not be patented, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday (June 13, 2013). The case concerned patents held by Myriad Genetics, a Utah company, on genes that correlate with increased risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. The patents were challenged by scientists and doctors who said their research and ability to help patients had been frustrated. The particular genes at issue received public attention after the actress Angelina Jolie revealed in May that she had had a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she had inherited a faulty copy of a gene that put her at high risk for breast cancer. The price of the test, often more than $3,000, was partly a product of Myriad’s patent, putting it out of reach for some women. The company filed patent infringement suits against others who conducted testing based on the gene. The price of the test is expected to fall because of Thursday’s decision.

A traditional hay-meadow, reaching its peak in June, presents a startling superabundance of floral life. There are so many blooms of so many colours, mixed in with so many waving grasses, that they blend into a rainbow mix that seems to be fizzing, a sort of animated chaos. From the bright golden haze of the buttercups and yellow rattle, to the white of ox-eye daisies, the mauves and maroons and purples of clover, knapweed, wood cranesbill and spotted orchids, there can be as many as 150 species in one spot, and it’s the coming-together of them all which is extraordinary. It makes for a quite incomparable display of the sheer exuberance of the natural world.
Yet this is a human construct: for thousands of years, farmers took grazing animals off the meadows in early spring, so the grass and the herbs could flower and grow tall and be harvested in July as hay, the farm animals’ winter fodder. But then the tradition came to an end in the 20th century, and between 1930 and 1980, 97 per cent of Britain’s traditional hay meadows disappeared.