FIRECREST TOURS : Guided Birdwatching & Wildlife Days

BirdWatch Ireland has warmly welcomed the recent announcement by Minister for Agriculture, Marine and Food Simon Coveney that farmers undertaking actions to conserve critically-threatened farmland birds will get priority access to substantial funding within Ireland's new Rural Development Programme. If properly implemented, this offers hope of halting declines and restoring bird populations in parts of their range. Ireland's biodiversity is facing very severe threats, as evidenced by declining populations of many farmland birds and losses in extent and quality of many semi-natural habitats in the mosaic of Ireland's farmed landscapes. There has been extensive research in the UK, in particular, which has related farmland bird declines to changes in agricultural practices since the 1970s. Specific causes for these changes included a variety of farming practices, including increased use of pesticides and fertilisers, increased mechanisation and losses of hedgerow extent an...

Following the recent revelation in a review of systematic pesticides that neonicotinoids are  causing significant damage to invertebrate species and their populations  a new study, published in the science journal Nature  has revealed that the pesticides are also having a significant negative impact on bird species. Researchers in The Netherlands measured the effect of widespread use of a popular neonicotinoid, imidacloprid, discovering that when the chemical was highly concentrated in surface water supplies, local bird populations showed a significant decline. Birds most affected in the sites sampled included  Starling ,  Tree Sparrow  and  Swallow . These declines were able to be tied in with the introduction of imidacloprid in the country in the mid-1990s, even when allowing for the effects of changing agricultural methods such as the intensification of farming. Tree Sparrow  reproductivity relies on the abundance of insect life, on wh...