The spring of 250000 deaths

The long awaited spring has come. Migratory birds rush to their breeding grounds: the best territories have to be occupied, nests have to be built and eggs have to be laid. In only a couple of months the most important task in a bird's life has to be carried out: reproduction. By autumn the young birds have to fledge and be ready for their first migration. Therefore the rush.

Latvia is a land of forests: about half of the territory of the country is covered in them. Not surprisingly forests are the most important habitat for the birds breeding in Latvia. Globally important populations of Lesser Spotted Eagle and Black Stork breed here and altogether about half of the bird species breeding in Latvia are at least partially dependent on forests.

In spring the forests are full of birds' songs. Great Tits start singing already in sunny winter days, but with spring setting in they are joined by more and more species: Treecreeper, Nuthatch, Blackbird, Chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Wood Pigeon, Song Thrush, Tree Pipit, Pied Flycatcher, Wood Warbler, Cuckoo...

But birds' songs are not the only sounds in the spring forest. "Husqvarna singing," my colleague Maris Strazds once said. Today it’s more often John Deere that is singing: harvesters have replaced men with chainsaws. But to be profitable logging with the forestry machinery has to be carried out all year round almost 24 hours a day. Only during the wettest times and in the wettest places it not possible but technologies to deal with this problem are being developed.

So the birds that have arrived and started looking for mates or even started laying their eggs or raising their young may have to face a scene pretty close to what Herbert George Wells described in his "The War of the Worlds": their world destroyed by alien machines, not only their houses and their young - everything. The sight of a clearcut hurts people, who know that it will take at least a generation for the forest to grow back to how it used to be. But for birds it is tens of generations, which means for them it is almost irreversible.

Very cautious estimates show that in state forests only (almost half of the total area of forests in Latvia) at least 50.6 thousand nests are destroyed by logging during April-June. Assuming there are five eggs in each nest, this means approximately 250,000 eggs or nestlings destroyed every spring. Emotions aside, this is an obvious breach of Birds Directive as well as the national law of Latvia. So what? Nothing. Discussions between LOB and the forestry sector about this issue have been dragging on for at least five years. Meanwhile forests are logged in spring and birds' nests are destroyed. Just a few weeks ago there was another fresh clearcut in state forest in a Natura 2000 site. Spring is here.