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Pesticides Leading Cause of Grassland Birds

6K views 52 replies 14 participants last post by  OldDublin 
It looks like they picked out five potential causes of decline. Didn't see predation from hawks and owls that have increased in numbers, in the five potential causes. Different to see habitat not being blamed. At the same time hawk and owl numbers increased prey numbers have dropped. You would think the pesticides would be lowerering hawk and owl numbers too, as they said DDT did in the past. Maybe the decline is from the increase in the hawk and owl numbers.
 
What people need to realize is that the habitat that held healthy numbers of smallgame in the past, is now not good enough with the high avain predator numbers. The solution of planting switchgrass may work good in your small settings,but maybe we should look at what can be done to allow the smallgame to be able to reproduce and survive in our modern day habitat. Even in the habitat like we had fourty years ago our pheasants can not make it today.
 
Lynn, I believe you are sincere about your wanting to bring back the pheasants. But in reality you need birds that can survive in todays conditions. Some of these are the same conditions that pheasants did well in, before the avain increases. You are concentrating on the pheasants, but all the smallgame species I have hunted are down from the days when hawks were less numerous. I always bring up the muskrat because their habitat as in water quality has greatly improved but their numbers are really low compared to the days when their water was really bad. Talked to a fellow yesterday, who is really into feeding and seeing birds in his backyard in town. He complained about less birds at his feeder, from his sightings, the the bird visits at his feeder are down 90% except for the hawks which he sees often. You are correct about not sitting back and not doing anything because you can't do any thing about avain predation. And if you want I can show you many areas in my area that have habitat that will support a pheasant population if they are not killed by poachers or avain predators. If you would be interested in trying to get some birds started in these areas, I could show you these places.
 
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