Two new international agreements will help to save migratory birds from hunting, trapping and poisoning, and to protect their long-distance flyways. A key objective is to phase out lead shot within three years, and eliminate the toxic drug diclofenac.
Two new international agreements will help to save migratory birds from hunting, trapping and poisoning, and to protect their long-distance flyways. A key objective is to phase out lead shot within three years, and eliminate the toxic drug diclofenac.
Two historic global agreements that will help save migratory bird species across the world were reached last weekend.
The Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) agreed a set of guidelines to tackle causes of poisoning and ratified a groundbreaking Action Plan to save more than 400 bird species.
The Resolution Preventing Poisoning of Migratory Birds supports the guidelines to prevent the risk of poisoning, encourages parties to reduce and minimise poisoning of migratory birds, including recommending a ban on veterinary diclofenac, the phasing out of all lead ammunition, and action on rodenticides, insecticides and poison baits.
These five groups of poisons were identified as the most significant poisoning risks to migratory birds and the agreement marks a key milestone in ending this threat.
"The adoption, by CMS Parties, of the global Guidelines to Prevent the Risk of Poisoning of Migratory Birds is a significant step forward. A key element enshrined in the Guidelines is to phase out the use of lead gunshot in all environments over the next three years", says the CMS secretariat.
Protecting the 'African-Eurasian flyway'
The Landbird Action Plan, also agreed at the meeting, sets out ways to improve the conservation status of more than 400 different species of bird that use the 'African-Eurasian flyway' (AEF).
In fact the AEF is is made up of three different sub-flyways:
- the East Atlantic Flyway, used by about 90 million birds annually, passing from their breeding areas in the United States, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia and northern Europe to wintering areas in western Europe and on to southern Africa;
- the Black Sea-Mediterranean Flyway;
- and the West Asian-East African Flyway, a group of well-established routes by which many species of birds migrate annually between mid-Palearctic breeding grounds in Asia and non-breeding sites in eastern and southern Africa.
The Plan also identifies the need for landscape-scale protection and recognises how everybody doing their bit can make a real difference.
More than a quarter of the 52 red-listed species of Birds of Conservation Concern are ones which nest in Europe and spend the winter in sub-Saharan Africa, and depend on the AEF for their annual migrations.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate, The Ecologist.
Flying birds image via Shutterstock.
