The III SEO/BirdLife Atlas includes four species that are on the verge of extinction and two that have disappeared
Climate change, pesticides, the decline of the rural environment, the abandonment of traditional agricultural activities, poaching, power lines, wind towers, pollution and intensive agriculture are the main causes of the decline of birds in Spain . A quarter of the species present in the country are included in one of the risk categories, and almost twenty are critically endangered.
The III Atlas of Birds in the Breeding Season in Spain, recently published by SEO/BirdLife, reveals the situation of the 450 species of birds registered in Spain. Four of them are one step away from disappearance: the Cantabrian capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus cantabricus)marbled teal (Marmaronetta angustirostris), the lesser shrike (lanius minor) and the kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla). Y two are already extinct: Andalusian torillo (Turnix sylvaticus) and the common guillemot (Uria Alge).
cantabrian capercaillie
The distribution area of this emblematic bird has been reduced by 36% in the last 20 years. And its population, by 45%. In the Cantabrian mountain range, from being present in 1974 from Galicia to Cantabria and Palencia, it has come to occupy only small areas in northern León and western Asturias.
A study conducted last year by experts from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), SEO/BirdLife and the Biodiversity Foundation concluded that there were only about 290 copies leftwith the aggravating circumstance that two thirds were male and only one third female.
Another investigation also published last year concluded that 79.5% of capercaillies are found in Castilla y León, distributed throughout the Alto Sil and Omaña counties, and the remaining 20.5% on the Asturian slope, mainly in the park natural of the Sources of the Narcea, Degaña and Ibias. Already no indications of presence were then found in eastern areas of the Cantabrian mountain range.
marbled teal
It is Europe’s most endangered duck. This bird, with a massive presence in wetlands like Doñana a few decades ago, has contracted its distribution area in Spain by 40% in the last twenty years. The new atlas certifies its disappearance in the Region of Murcia and the Canary Islands.
The result of all this is that its presence is limited to a few Mediterranean coastal wetlands in Andalusia and the Valencian Community and to a single interior locality with very scarce and sporadic reproduction in the Tablas de Daimiel National Park. In the Balearic Islands a small reproductive nucleus is located in the island of majorca.
Since the approval of the National Strategy for its conservation in 2014, a very important fraction of the breeding pairs come from specimens of the Captive Breeding Program released both in the Doñana area and in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands.
Lesser Shrike
After ascertaining the extinction of the reproductive nuclei of Girona (2002) and Huesca (2010)all pairs have bred within a radius of just 10 kilometers: Currently it only nests in Lleida, in the Segrià region.in the southeast sector of the Ebro depression.
After a sharp decline in the number of pairs in the early 2000s (since 2002 the lesser shrike has suffered a decline of more than 85%), the population has remained between one and seven couples, thanks to the annual releases of chickens hatched in captivity started in 2009.
Since 2018, all the individuals that return to the breeding area have been previously released through hacking or have been born in wild nests in the same area of adults released in previous years. As the Atlas reveals, no unbanded specimens have been detected again.
kitty gull
This species has always had a very small distribution area, being restricted since its appearance as a breeder in the seventies of the last century to two locations on the coast of A Coruña. In fact, in the period 1998-2002 there were only two coloniesthat of the Sisargas Islands and that of the Cape Vilán islets.
However, in this last area the species disappeared as a breeder between 2008 and 2012. In such a way that At present, its presence as a breeder is strictly limited to the colony of the Sisargas Islands..
“The breeding population of the Kitten Gull in Spain is on the verge of extinction, if it has not already occurred”, warns the latest edition of the SEO/BirdLife Atlas. Because since 2017 the reproduction of this species in Spain has not been confirmed again.
common guillemot
The two colonies of this species that existed in Galicia in the II Atlas of Breeding Birds (1998-2002), have disappeared, in such a way that the breeding population of common murre is currently extinct in Spain.
The nesting of the species on the Galician coast is documented at least since the end of the 19th century. Yet in the middle of the 20th century it was an abundant species in Galiciawith a total population of around 3,000 specimens, distributed in at least eight colonies, from A Coruña and Pontevedra.
Nevertheless, From the 1960s all the Galician colonies entered a marked process of decline, which led to the total disappearance of most of them in a few years. The decline was probably due to several factors, but it has been suggested that the introduction and popularization of nylon nets (very difficult for guillemots to detect in the water) played a very prominent role.
Andalusian Torillo
Its presence in Spain has not been registered for a few years. Its distribution was restricted to the lowlands of Andalusia, mainly coastal, in the provinces of Huelva, Seville, Cádiz, Málaga and Granada. It occupied grasslands and low scrub in areas with an oceanic climate on the thermo-Mediterranean floor.
The latest records refer to birds hunted in the area of El Rocío (Doñana region) in 1981. Since then, there have been some undocumented observations in the provinces of Cádiz and Huelva, so it seems likely that the species survived, at least, until the 1990s.
In 2018; that is, 37 years after the last documented record, the Andalusian bullfinch was cataloged by the Spanish environmental authorities as extinct in the national territory. According to SEO/BirdLife, given the current situation of the taxon, it is urgent to take conservation measures in the known population (Morocco) and to investigate and locate the populations that may survive in Algeria.
III Atlas of Birds in the Breeding Season in Spain: https://atlasaves.seo.org/
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