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More than half of Scotland’s upland birds, including the curlew and lapwing, have suffered a “significant long-term decline”, according to official statistics published yesterday. Scottish Natural Heritage’s latest Index of Abundance for Scottish Terrestrial Breeding Birds, reveals that ten of the 17 upland species fell in numbers between 1994 and 2016, contributing to an 16 per cent decrease among upland birds over the period.

The phenylpyrazole insecticide fipronil is used in Dutch agriculture in seed coating of cabbage, onions and leek, but was also illegally used as treatment against poultry red mite. Crustaceans and aquatic insects have been shown to be highly sensitive to fipronil and its stable degradation products. An environmental quality standard (EQS) for fipronil in Dutch surface water has been set at 0.07 ng / L.

Over the past 20 years or so, Texas waterfowlers have witnessed - and waterfowl managers have documented and wrestled with - some dramatic shifts and trends in abundance and distribution of the ducks and geese that each autumn pour down the Central Flyway to winter in the state. That perspective is strikingly underscored by results of Texas' 2018 Mid-winter Waterfowl Survey. That aerial population survey, conducted in early January each year and covering all of the state except for the waterfowl-poor Edwards Plateau and Trans-Pecos ecological regions, produced some sobering findings.

The Asian Waterbird Census (AWC) 2018 conducted in Kollam district by the WWF-India, a conservation organisation, with the support of Social Forestry wing of Kerala forests and wildlife department has found a drastic fall of around 40 per cent in the total count of birds. The AWC held in nine different bird rich sites accorded a count of 5,697 birds belonging to 61 species in place of the previous year’s count of 9,378 from 65 species. The number of migratory bird species has also fallen to 22 from last year’s 32.

There has been decline in the population of birds in Athagarh forest division in Cuttack. At least 16,948 birds were sighted in the forest division during the bird census which was carried out in the first week of January. The number of birds counted this year is much less against last year's 19,476. Adding to it, not a single migratory bird has been spotted in the region this time.

Imidacloprid (IMI) is the largest selling insecticide internationally. Little is known about the toxicokinetics of IMI in fish, however. In vivo time-course studies were conducted to study the distribution and elimination of IMI in rainbow trout. Animals confined to respirometer-metabolism chambers were injected with a low (47.6 ìg/kg), medium (117.5 ìg/kg) or high (232.7 ìg/kg) dose directly into the bloodstream and allowed to depurate.

Readers are being asked to regularly clean out their bird baths and feeders – to help stop the decline of chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs),and greenfinch (Chloris chloris) numbers in the Falkirk district. In recent years, the RSPB has been worried about the decline of both species in its annual Big Garden Birdwatch poll. Last year’s results were no different. In 2016, chaffinch was fifth in the poll in Falkirk, with an average of 2.3 birds being spotted in 47.6 per cent of gardens.

There has been a further decline in corncrake (Crex crex) numbers recorded during the 2017 breeding season, according to a National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) cited by nature conservation group Birdwatch Ireland. In the past three years, the number of breeding pairs has dropped dramatically from 230 in 2014 to 140 in 2017. Conservative estimates put the population at the beginning of the 20th century in the tens of thousands. However, this fell to an estimated 4,000 by the 1960s..

The number of monarchs wintering in California has dropped to a five-year low, despite more volunteers counting more sites in search of the orange-and-black insect that is arguably the most admired of North American butterflies, a report said on Friday.