The “catastrophic” decline in French farmland birds signals a wider biodiversity crisis in Europe which ultimately imperils all humans, leading scientists have told the Guardian.

A dramatic fall in farmland birds such as skylarks, whitethroats and ortolan bunting in France was revealed by two studies this week, with the spread of neonicotinoid pesticides – and decimation of insect life – coming under particular scrutiny.

With intensive crop production encouraged by the EU’s common agricultural policy apparently driving the bird declines, conservationists are warning that many European countries are facing a second “silent spring” – a term coined by the ecologist Rachel Carson to describe the slump in bird populations in the 1960s caused by pesticides.

“We’ve lost a quarter of skylarks in 15 years. It’s huge, it’s really, really huge. If this was the human population, it would be a major thing,” said Dr Benoit Fontaine of France’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the new studies, a national survey of France’s common birds. “We are turning our farmland into a desert. We are losing everything and we need that nature, that biodiversity – the agriculture needs pollinators and the soil fauna. Without that, ultimately, we will die.”

Farmland makes up 45% of the EU’s land area, but farmland bird populations in France have fallen by an average of a third over the past 15 years. In some cases, the declines are worse: seven out of 10 meadow pipits have disappeared from French fields over that period, while eight in 10 partridges have vanished over 23 years, according to a second French study which examined 160 areas of typical arable plains in central France.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/21/europe-faces-biodive...

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What is less well-known is that some species of birds have already disappeared (possibly extinct though not recognised as such in the 1950/60s). My friend Jules Letambour, an expert on Jacques Perret's satirical ramblings mentioned to me the other day about Perret's writing that included the loss of bird life in France, in the 1950s, due to the mechanisation and pesticidisation of bigger industrial farms back then... Much of the wren species have gone.

The cascade of events was fairly swift from the introduction of insecticide (which in those days— 1950s — were mostly arsenic and soon organochlorines such as DDT. They were replaced in the U.S. by organophosphates and carbamates by 1975 — then nerve agents). No insects, no birds.

And the birds which ate grains were also destroyed by the DDT. See Silent Spring.