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The emergence of Hexagenia limbata mayflies, throughout the Great Lakes and parts of the mid-Atlantic region, is nearly a religious event in angling circles. Each year in early June, these enormous mayflies blanket the landscape, emerging by the billions each night, smothering waterways, riverbanks, roadways and more with thousands of tons of trout-candy biomass. Not long ago, these historic and essential emergences were almost wiped out. By 1970, Hexagenia were gone from large swaths of the Midwest.

The breeding bird population in Germany declined by around 14 million or eight percent over the period between 1992 and 2016, the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) said on Wednesday. The "significant decline" in the number of native birds in meadows, pastures and fields has been continuing, according to an evaluation of thousands of data sets by the agency. "In the open agricultural landscapes, the population of breeding pairs has declined by about two million over a quarter of a century," BfN President Beate Jessel said.

The May 2019 newsletter of the Saitama Ecosystem Conservation Society describes how, before the introduction of neonicotinoids in the 1990s, numberless brilliant red akiakane or autumn darter dragonflies could be seen around rice fields in the fall. Experiments by Japanese dragonfly expert Tetsuyuki Ueda of Ishikawa Prefectural University showed how the pesticides reduced the number of surviving dragonfly nymphs to a small fraction, and that the chemicals persist for years in the soil of rice paddy fields.

Recent studies have shown that arthropods—insects, arachnids and other small, hard-bodied animals—are in trouble, from massive declines in the biomass (total weight) of flying insects to regional extinctions in a number of insect groups, such as butterflies. A new large-scale study across a number of habitats in Germany has found that the problem may be more extensive than previous research suggests.

Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus L., 1758), the largest and most size-dimorphic species of grouse, is decreasing in number throughout its man-modified range in the boreal forests of the Palaearctic. Poor reproduction owing to direct and indirect effects of commercial forestry is considered a main cause of the decline. We studied brood habitats in a pristine forest in northwestern Russia to identify key elements in habitat selection in the natural environment of this species.

In the summer of 2010, Henk Tennekes from Experimental Toxicology Services Nederland at Zutphen warned that the accumulation of neonicotinoids in the environment would not only decimate useful insects but also have a knock-on effect on other species, including birds (Curr. Biol. (2011) 21, R137–R139). At the time, Tennekes did not find much support for his views and went on to publish his warnings as a book — The Systemic Insecticides: A Disaster in the Making.

Steve Gillam, Starved Rock volunteer Tom Williams and Starved Rock State Park natural resource coordinator Lisa Sons exchanged jokes and friendly chitchat as they trudged over a muddy path along a field edge, wetland and woods at Matthiessen State Park. They were not seeing many birds, despite sunny, breezy conditions and diverse habitat, during their after-lunch hike over their territory in the Starved Rock Audubon Society Christmas bird count. And they said they had not seen many birds in the morning among the oak trees and canyons in the Matthiessen Dells area.

Monarchs in California form a distinct group from the larger, eastern population. Separated by the spine of the Rocky Mountains, the two clusters have different migration routes. While eastern monarchs pass through the central U.S. to overwinter in Mexico, western monarchs ride out the cold in coastal California between Mendocino County and Baja California. The Xerces Society coordinates groups of volunteers to perform annual counts throughout the western range each Thanksgiving.