English

The state pheasant population has dropped by 45 percent since 2016 — 65 percent lower than the 10-year average. Results from hunting have mirrored the decline. In 2007, the estimated pheasant bag was more than 2 million birds. In 2017, it was just more than 1 million, according to South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks. “Looking at the weather right now, we’re off to a record cold April,” said Travis Runia, senior upland game biologist for Game Fish and Parks. Many factors contribute to the last decade of pheasant decline, Runia said.

Bees tend to get the most attention as pollinators critical to the survival of plant species. But lizards, mice, bats, and other vertebrates also act as important pollinators. A new study finds that fruit and seed production drops an average 63 percent when vertebrates, but not insects, are kept away from plants.

Pesticides can act as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in animals providing characteristic multiphasic dose-response curves and non-lethal endpoints in toxicity studies. However, it is not known if neonicotinoids act as EDCs in bees. To address this issue, we performed oral acute and chronic toxicity studies including concentrations recorded in nectar and pollen, applying acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam to bumble bees, honey bees and leafcutter bees, the three most common bee species managed for pollination.

The neonicotinoids insecticides expose pregnant women to hormonal disturbances which could affect the unborn babies, according to a Quebec scientific study. If the effects of neonicotinoid insecticides have been studied on bees, they have been little studied on humans. However, a Canadian research organization, the National Institute for Scientific Research, has decided to study the impacts of these products on human health.

THE number of smaller birds across Hampshire represents a “worrying trend” according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. According to the charity, there are almost 30 per cent fewer blackbirds in the county, which follows the national crash in numbers of the house sparrow and starling. Across the south east, blackbirds are down 22 per cent, and robins dropped 18 per cent, while sightings of the tiny wren went down 14 per cent in the region.

When Lonesome George died in June 2012, it was the end of an entire species. He was the last surviving Pinta giant tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii), a Galapagos conservation icon who had lived for more than 100 years. But Lonesome George was not alone in his fate. More than 50 percent of the world’s 356 known species of tortoises and turtles are currently threatened with extinction, or are nearly extinct, a new report warns.

Most Britons remain blithely unaware that since the Beatles broke up, we have wiped out half our wildlife. Yet we are not alone. Last week, the French woke up in a dramatic way to the fact that their own farmland birds, their skylarks and partridges and meadow pipits, were rapidly disappearing: Le Monde, the most sober of national journals, splashed the fact across the top of its front page.

Europe’s crisis of collapsing bird and insect numbers will worsen further over the next decade because the EU is in a “state of denial” over destructive farming practices, environmental groups are warning. European agriculture ministers are pushing for a new common agriculture policy (CAP) from 2021 to 2028 which maintains generous subsidies for big farmers and ineffectual or even “fake” environmental or “greening” measures, they say.

There has been a steep decline in bird populations in Balochistan (one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Its provincial capital and largest city is Quetta), said conservator of forests and wildlife Balochistan Sharifuddin on Wednesday. The official confirmed that there has been a decline in the overall population of sparrows among other birds in Quetta and other parts of Balochistan. The revelation comes just a day after bird lovers marked the World Sparrow Day on Tuesday (March 20). “Even crow, which was a common bird, has decreased in number,” he remarked.

Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last fifteen years, researchers have said. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.