Grassland birds

Birds living and breeding on the UK’s farmland have seen numbers decline by almost a tenth in five years, official figures show. Farmland bird populations have declined by 56% since 1970, largely due to agricultural changes including the loss of mixed farming, a switch to autumn sowing of crops, a reduction in hay meadows and the stripping out of hedgerows.

Im Kanton Zug haben sich die Brutvögel in den Naturschutzgebieten während der letzten vier Jahrzehnte unterschiedlich entwickelt. Am meisten unter Druck gekommen sind die Vögel der Moore. So ist der Kiebitz vom Aussterben bedroht. Sein Bestand ging von zehn Paaren auf ein einziges zurück. Eine mehrheitlich negative Entwicklung ist auch bei den Vögeln der Nadelwälder zu beobachten, wie die Direktion des Innern am Dienstag mitteilte. Dies zeigen Daten, die zwischen 1979 und 2016 erhoben wurden.

The yellow-breasted bunting (Emberiza aureola), a once common migratory bird, has been driven to the brink of extinction in recent years. The species was reclassified as“critically endangered” on the red list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on Tuesday. The status is one step from the highest level of“extinct in the wild”. Back in 2000, the species was listed under“least concern”, the lowest level on the six-grade alert system.

Bird numbers in Ely and Cambridgeshire have declined around British farmland by almost a tenth, according to new figures released by Defra. The latest figures released on Thursday (23rd November) by the government's environmental department reveal that wild bird numbers have dropped 9% from the years between 2010 and 2015, and by almost 70% by 1970. The figures have led the RSPB to call for a shift in how the UK operates its farming policies after it leaves the EU, to a more environmentally and sustainable friendly system.

The latest data on European common birds, brought together by the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS), shows a continued decline of European farmland birds. While the common forest birds are more or less stable over the last 10-15 years, the farmland birds show a staggering decline of 55% since 1980.

The lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) belongs to the grouse family of birds so iconic to prairie culture. This brown-barred, stocky species nests in shrubbery and grasses of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado. David Hunter, owner of Hunter’s Livestock Supply in Woodward, recollected that the prairie-chickens were often spotted on his family’s 120-year-old farm in eastern Woodward when he was young. “There were just thousands of them everywhere,” the 57-year-old told me.

Things aren’t looking good for wild pheasants in California, where populations of the colorful game birds have fallen to less than 10 percent of what they were in the late 1990s. With pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) hunting season opening Saturday, state officials note populations of the bird have fallen dramatically over the past 19 years. Hunters reported shooting 4,828 pheasant roosters in 1998 on public lands in the Central Valley. But that number fell to 461 last year, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.