What's the purpose, Mr. Juncker?

Just like many across the EU I've been waiting impatiently for a while for Jean-Claude Juncker, President-elect of the European Commission, to come up with the proposal for his team of commissioners. Just like many across the EU I was taken by surprise when he did...

Choosing Mr. Karmenu Vella from Malta, a country notorious for breaching the EU laws for nature conservation, to be in charge of environment is either very farsighted or exactly the opposite. However, we shouldn't judge Mr. Vella just by the country he comes from, and it's not so much the person Mr. Juncker chose that surprised me than the tasks that were given to him.

The first one on the list goes like this:

"Continuing to overhaul the existing environmental legislative framework to make it fit for purpose.
In the first part of the mandate, I would ask you to carry out an in-depth evaluation of the Birds
and Habitats directives and assess the potential for merging them into a more modern piece of
legislation."

I may be not so familiar with the entire "environmental legislative framework" but I do know the Birds and Habitats directives, mentioned specifically, rather well, and that is why the task left me wondering... Of course, formally it just says that "you might look into it", but at the same time it includes the presumption that something is wrong with the directives and needs to be changed. And what is wrong is obviously that they are not 'fit for purpose' and 'modern'.

Well, allowing shooting Indians if you see more than five of them on your property might illustrate an outdated law, but the Birds and Habitats directives are not about shooting Native Americans. What makes the directives not modern enough? Is it just the fact that there are two of them, not one? We have come a long way since we had only ten laws, and I don't think anyone would suggest that the mere number of laws indicates how modern we are.

The important thing is that the directives do deliver as they are and they would deliver even more if we would implement them fully. I'm from Latvia, I know. Since our joining the EU in 2004 little would have been achieved in nature conservation if it were not for the Birds and Habitats directives. But now we have a good network of protected areas for nature - Natura 2000, we have European Rollers we would probably not have without this network, and our government has evaluated the status of all wild bird populations of Latvia for the first time since... No, it's the first time ever!

It's not just Latvia. There is lots of evidence from all over the EU that the Birds and Habitats directives deliver what they were supposed to. White Stork, White-tailed Eagle, Eurasian Beaver - these are just some examples of populations recovering due to the legal protection by the directives. There is, of course, a lot still to be done, but the directives set us clear goals and give us the tools for reaching them.

With the directives obviously working for biodiversity and with the majority of the citizens of the EU finding the conservation of biodiversity important (see here), I just can't stop wondering what the purpose that the directives are unfit for is.

The secret network: Natura 2000

I wonder how many people would know what freemasonry is. I would suspect that most of the people when asked would at least have heard of such an organisation. But there is a network much more secret than the one of freemasons. It's called Natura 2000 and though it operates exclusively in European Union 73% of Europeans have never heard of it. Natura 2000 network is present in every country of EU, it consists of SACs and SPAs, and about 20% of EU, in many ways the areas most important for survival and well-being of people, is under its control.

The good news is that this is by no means a hostile network, and I'm pretty sure most of the Europeans will know at least one of its 'members': national parks, nature reserves... Natura 2000 is a EU-wide network of nature protection areas, established under Habitats Directive and Birds Directive. Obviously, nature conservationists are not very good at marketing: while almost everyone knows, for example, a certain junk food 'restaurant' and is supposedly loving it, the brand of the most precious nature sites in Europe is unknown and many of those who do know it don't really like it as the name has a certain aura of legal restrictions. But the feeling I get, when I hear 'Natura 2000' is that of natural uniqueness: though they go under the same name, each of the sites is unique, and each of them is a gem of nature.

My attitude towards the Natura 2000 sites stems from some personal experiences with several of such sites throughout my life.

Kemeri National Park had just been established (and, as Latvia had not yet joined EU, it was not yet given the name Natura 2000) and I was just becoming an ornithologist: Kemeri National Park was two years old and I was 15, when between my primary school graduation exams me and my younger brother were doing fieldwork for the breeding bird atlas of the territory. The national park contains spectacular diversity of habitats: from floodplain black alder forests to dry coastal pine forests, from sea coast to raised bogs and marshes, lakes, rivers and urban parks... All this made a lasting impression on me and Kemeri National Park is still one of my favourite Natura 2000 sites in Latvia.

What started as a voluntary fieldwork in Kemeri made me into a 'bird atlas specialist', secured me my first job in Latvian Ornithological Society and eventually lead me to being the CEO of the organisation. Along the way were jobs in Gauja National Park and Slitere National Park, so similar in their names, so different in their history and appearance.

Gauja National Park has always been about giving people the opportunity to enjoy nature and conservation of not only natural but also cultural heritage. The national park is full of tourist attractions (both, sites and events), perhaps the most notable of them being 'The Golden Autumn in Sigulda', when the small town of Sigulda is flooded by tourists wishing to see, well... lots and lots of trees with yellow leaves.

On the other hand Slitere National Park was originally a strict nature reserve: a site of near-natural forests and mires and home for many rare and protected plant and animal species, some of which are found almost nowhere else. Since times immemorial (i.e., I don't remember since when) Slitere National Park is also the place where first year biology students take their field course to get to know and learn to study the plant and animal communities in the various habitats found in the area.

But if your image of Natura 2000 sites is one of restrictions and untouched nature you should think about the Natura 2000 site I do the main part of my Hoopoe studies: protected landscape area 'Adazi'. Adazi is not only a Natura 2000 site but also the largest military training area in the Baltic States. Here the military activities not only co-exist but have actually formed many of the natural values for protection of which the Natura 2000 site was designated: large areas of heath and dune habitats.

Kristine, an environmental officer working in the Adazi military base, once told me: "If any of my colleagues object nature conservation here, I explain them that without this being an area for nature protection we would probably not have it as a military training area either." She might be right: this large 'free' territory so close to Riga might be a delicious bite for real estate developers, and indeed part of the former military training area has been claimed by private land owners. But now the territory is double-protected being not only an internationally important military training area but also a nature protection area of EU importance.

By the way, the forests on the periphery of the military training area are used not only for tactical military training but also as excellent sites for berry and mushroom picking. Not only locals but also people from afar visit the area during the summer and autumn to supplement their menus and sometimes their household economies with the treats of the forest.

I cannot claim having much and in-depth knowledge of Natura 2000 sites (at least compering to some of my colleagues), but, as you can see, I do have a first-hand experience of Natura 2000 network not only being important for conservation of species and habitats but also giving people jobs (it gave me mine), positive emotions to tourists and profit to local businesses (think autumns in Sigluda), being a tool and a classroom for informal and formal education (biology students in Slitere National Park) a source of healthy food and household income (berry-pickers in Adazi) and even serving the needs of military defence. And the full spectrum of the benefits provided by Natura 2000 sites is much more than that. Even if we are ignorant of the name we all benefit one way or another from this 'secret' network.

One might ask: If people know the sites and the values they provide, is it really a problem that so many don't know the 'brand' Natura 2000 and the fact that the network is based on two laws of EU (the Birds and Habitats directives)? I think it is very similar to knowing that milk comes from cows not from cartons in shops. As long as everything is OK with cows, we drink milk, it benefits our health and knowledge of cows is just what makes us slightly smarter than the ones who have never bothered thinking about where the milk comes from. But if government (a hypothetical one) decides to ban dairy farming, this knowledge might be valuable to realise how this decision will affect our habits of drinking milk and maybe try to fight the decision of the hypothetical government. Therefore, yes, it is worth knowing where Natura 2000 comes from and what it really means, and I can say that from my personal experience: I must admit that in 2003 I was one of the 32% voting against Latvia joining EU, something I wouldn't have done had I realised the connection between the milk and the cows.

The ugly side of killing

 

Great Egret. Photo by Māris Strazds

 

It's easy to oppose killing: everyone knows killing is bad. For an ornithologist it should be equally easy to oppose killing of birds. One could poke hunters with a half-eaten chicken leg and cry: "You evil bird-killing bastards!" But when you're an ornithologist you know how much in nature is actually based on killing. Was it Elton John or someone else who said: "Eat or be eaten."? Balance is the key: don't eat so much there will be nothing to eat in the end.

Modern day hunting is not only (but also) about eating. And you know us modern day eaters: we don't feel the balance. To help us out (at least when it comes to birds) there are laws (in EU it's the Birds Directive) that tell us when, how and which birds we are allowed to kill not to disrupt the balance, i.e., not to threaten the populations of birds. But then there is the case of illegal killing...

When talking to my colleagues in BirdLife International, I usually say that illegal killing is a marginal issue in Latvia. Yes, there are cases when birds are killed illegally, sometimes out of ignorance ("Well, it looked like a duck..."), sometimes out of inter-specific competition ("I couldn't let the cormorant eat my fish") and sometimes out of sheer stupidity and feeling of impunity. Although I still couldn't claim that illegal killing of birds in Latvia poses serious threats to bird populations (but there are cases when it does), each of the cases is still frustrating and an indicator of people's attitude towards nature and laws of nature conservation.

Last week I got a call saying that a Great Egret was shot near the town of Cēsis. A local had seen the bird some days before but now the bird was lying dead in the pond after waterfowl hunters had been around. There is no huntable species in Latvia even remotely similar to Great Egret. But when you have a shotgun in your hands and see a big white bird you simply must shoot it. Maybe it is because of the fear of being caught, maybe it's because the interest in bird has been lost after the urge of killing has been satisfied, the dead bird is left where it has fallen. However, in this case thanks to the rapid action of the locals and State Forest Service the poacher is caught and will be punished.



Black Stork female Guste shot in Ukraine. Photo by Maris Strazds

But when thinking about the conservation of the breeding birds of Latvia, you cannot think only about what is going on in this country, as another ugly example clearly shows. Black Stork female Guste was one of the eight young Black Storks that had hatched in Latvia and were to be followed to their wintering areas by satellite transmitters. Guste chose a strange route: in Ukraine she took the long way around the Black Sea. It was a very wrong decision. The signal from the transmitter stopped and days later the bird was found in a situation very similar to the aforementioned Great Egret: the bird was shot and left in reed. I am afraid, however, in this case the guilty will not be caught.

Illegal killing doesn't affect only the black or the white. It doesn't even matter if the bird is big and beautiful, as the ones mentioned before, or small and ugly. I any case it is hard not to get emotional about such cases. Ornithologists and hunters live in an uneasy balance in Europe (there are places, like Malta, where it's downright war). When it is obviously a hunter that has committed the crime, it is hard not resort to the generalisation of "you evil bird-killing bastards". I still trust that the "average hunter" at least in Latvia is a law-abiding citizen, but for the sake of the balance it would greatly help if not only the ornithologists were raging about the cases of illegal killing of birds.

The Flight of Life

For earth- and country-bound creatures like us a trip from Eastern Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa relying on our strength alone might seem one of unimaginable difficulties. For a bird that has been taking this trip for generations it is not necessarily so. Or at least it shouldn't be. Probably more out ignorance than of jealousy we have managed to make the trip for migratory birds harder. A new study by LOB funded by Latvian Environmental Protection Fund and Max Plank Institute for Ornithology will follow eight Black Stork females from the nests where they hatched to the wintering areas and, hopefully, back.

It is estimated that since early 1990s the breeding population of Black Storks in Latvia has declined by half. One of the obvious and for now the only scientifically proven reason for this is the intensification of forestry (degradation of habitat, disturbance etc.). However, there are other potential dangers for the species, and not all of them are here in Latvia. The mission of these eight Black Storks will be to shed more light on the threats the species has to face.

The TV channel LNT that supports this project has called it "The Flight of Life". Though less hopeful and probably less appealing to public but much more appropriate name would be "The Flight of Death". It is no accident that female Black Storks have been chosen for the study. Our current data show that at the age of more than 100 days the proportion of females in the population is 20% instead of 50% it should be. If this is true, it is alarming news for the Black Stork population and even more so for the eight storks that are followed on their way to Africa. Chances of their safe arrival home are actually rather slim.

One of the potential dangers that lurks somewhere in Africa (but probably not only there) we do know but haven't proven the impact on the population yet is DDT. This notorious insecticide has been banned in Europe for several decades, and when you mention it to someone in Latvia now the response you usually get is: "What is DDT?" But it is still being used in Africa. We don't know where they get it, we have pretty good notion on how, but anyway Black Storks contract DDT poisoning. All of the unhatched eggs tested for DDT and the products of its decomposition in recent years have been positive.

We hope that Guste, Dace, Dora, Mellene, Agnese, Tince, Santa and Oga will return to Latvia safely and with some answers. Their journey has just begun. Let's allow ourselves a moment of optimism and naiveté and hope it will be a flight of life after all. Those wishing to follow their trip can look them up in Movebank.

The lovable killer

Starting a blog and then falling silent for three months is probably not the best way of attracting readers. I will try to be more productive in the future, but I guess the readers of this blog will understand that spring and the beginning of summer is a hectic time for an ornithologist and, I'm afraid, writing a blog in English is far from priority.

The peak of the breeding season has passed, reports for various counts and studies (almost) completed, so why not return to my blog. And this time, though to some extent I continue the topic of death, I decided to write something optimistic and focus on my pet project: research of Hoopoes.

From the strategic point of view Hoopoe is downright unimportant species for bird conservation in Latvia. Though the bird is rare (160-250 breeding pairs) and therefore it is included in the national list of specially protected species, the breeding population is doing fine. The rarity of the species is simply due to the fact that Latvia lies almost on the northern border of the range of Hoopoe (north from us they breed only in Estonia). Being common elsewhere Hoopoe is also not listed in the Annex I of Birds Directive (i.e., it is not a specially protected species in European Union). So, yes, my research of this species is just following birder's heart rather than conservationist's mind. This is also the reason why I dedicate my spare time rather than working hours to this activity.

Hoopoe is a nasty bird. Its habit of killing and eating other small animals (mainly insects but also frogs, lizards etc.) alone might make it 'bad' for some people (though probably not gardeners who might value Hoopoe's taste for mole crickets). Hoopoes, unlike many other animals, also tend to fight savagely amongst themselves. This year, when I was catching Hoopoes using a polystyrene decoy (to equip the birds with geolocators), my decoy bird was mutilated and raped by the Hoopoes I was trying to attract. Family planning is also not the nicest feature of this bird: Hoopoes lay a lot of eggs, but as the young hatch asynchronously, if the season is bad, the younger nestlings die. For some reason Latvians have also called Hoopoe 'Hunger Cuckoo' and regarded the bird a bad omen.

But the beauty of the bird makes up for it all. With its striking black-white-and-buff plumage, long beak and erectable crest Hoopoe stands out in the northern community of 'small grey birds'. In Latvia the fact that the species is rather rare also helps it ensure people's affections. No wonder I have never had a problem of finding someone to help me ring Hoopoe nestlings and my inbox is full of messages from people overjoyed to have seen Hoopoe.

I first met Hoopoe when I was a child and saw the bird several times in the vicinity of my home on the outskirts of Riga, but the relationship grew serious during my final years in school when, while doing my research for school (back then students had an option to do it, now they have to), I learned that the vicinity of Balozi, a small town just next to Riga, is one of the best breeding areas for Hoopoe in Latvia. The small gardens established on abandoned peat extraction sites offer Hoopoe excellent opportunities for foraging and breeding (the gardens are full of nestboxes for Starlings).

Hoopoes don't like company and I must admit I don't enjoy it too much either, that is one of the reasons why since 2006 my main study area is a 'quieter' place: military training area Adazi. The place is quieter in the sense that there are less people there, but, as it is still an active military area there is, of course, much noise. However, it doesn't seem to bother birds very much. The original cover of pine forests is stripped to bare sand but what might seem as a devastation has in the long (more than 80) years of military activity become a special place of nature (the military area is also Natura 2000 site), and also Hoopoe. The sandy plains are suitable foraging grounds but the concrete buildings and ruins scattered in the area are excellent nest sites.

Since 2006 thanks to the idea and work of the late Arnis Berzins additional nest sites - nestboxes - have been supplied for Hoopoes breeding in Adazi. Now when the original nest sites (buildings and ruins) are planned for removal, providing Hoopoes with nestboxes has proven to be a good idea. The nestboxes have also been a good way of getting more insight into the little known breeding biology of the Hoopoes of Latvia. For one thing the breeding season turned out to be much longer that thought before: the first eggs can be laid in the end of April but the last nestlings fledge in the beginning of August. This year my colleague Ieva Mardega, analysing the records of ringed Hoopoes in the nestboxes for European Rollers, confirmed what I had long suspected: Hoopoes can have two broods per season also as far north as Latvia.

This year my little pet project gained some international importance thanks to Rien van Wijk, a Dutch colleague working on Hoopoes in Switzerland. He contacted me asking if I would be willing to cooperate to study migration patterns of Hoopoes by equipping the birds with geolocators. A geolocator is not a transmitter. It is a small device recording the time of day and the intensity of light, and using these data an approximate location of the bird can be calculated. However, to get the data the bird has to be caught again and the geolocator has to be taken off. So this year we catch the birds the first time and hope for luck next year. Then we will find if the Hoopoes from Latvia use the same migration routes and wintering areas as the birds from Switzerland.

Hoopoes will still be in Latvia for a couple of months (and I still have some birds to catch to get to 25 as I have promised Rien), but I guess winter is the time when I really feel that Hoopoe is more than just a study object for me. Every winter for several years now there comes a moment when I realize that I really miss these nasty but lovable birds.

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.