Pesticide Acute Toxicity Is a Better Correlate of U.S. Grassland Bird Declines than Agricultural Intensification

Abstract

Common agricultural birds are in decline, both in Europe and in North America. Evidence from Europe suggests that agricultural intensification and, for some species, the indirect effects of pesticides mediated through a loss of insect food resource is in part responsible. On a state-by-state basis for the conterminous Unites States (U.S.), we looked at several agronomic variables to predict the number of grassland species increasing or declining according to breeding bird surveys conducted between 1980 and 2003. Best predictors of species declines were the lethal risk from insecticide use modeled from pesticide impact studies, followed by the loss of cropped pasture. Loss of permanent pasture or simple measures of agricultural intensification such as the proportion of land under crop or the proportion of farmland treated with herbicides did not explain bird declines as well. Because the proportion of farmland treated with insecticides, and more particularly the lethal risk to birds from the use of current insecticides feature so prominently in the best models, this suggests that, in the U.S. at least, pesticide toxicity to birds should be considered as an important factor in grassland bird declines.

Severe recent decrease of adult body mass in a declining insectivorous bird population

“…In the early stages of laying and nesting, there is virtually no negative impact of AI on Diptera abundance [24], thus providing a possible explanation for the lack of relationship between AI and body mass revealed here. Yet, extending findings from [23], we did detect a negative effect of AI on the number of chicks fledged (electronic supplementary material, table S5), suggesting that, if food abundance is not involved, other factors such as food quality and availability [37] or pesticide use [38] may affect the quality of breeding habitats in agricultural landscapes and explain variation in breeding success. Similarly, it is possible that the same variables (e.g.…”

Assessment of Pesticide Residues in Edible and Unhatched Chicken Eggs in Sharkia Province, Egypt

“…Up to date, several studies have attempted to determine the cause of hatching failure in domestic birds (Bakst et al, 1998;Christensen, 2001;Sellier et al, 2005). Indeed, some recent studies (Geiger et al, 2010;Mineau and Whiteside, 2013;Hallmann et al, 2014;Gibbons et al, 2015) signifying that pesticide use is increasingly recognized as a key factor for explaining population declines of farmland animals, besides it would be more implicated in this ongoing reduction than formerly reported (European Common Bird Monitoring Schemes, 2014). Pesticide exposure of females during egg formation, especially yolk formation, may result in the contamination of eggs, as a maternal effect (Sauveur and de Reviers, 1988).…”

Environmental Risk Assessment of Agrochemicals — A Critical Appraisal of Current Approaches

“…Also, given the high toxicity of most insecticides, herbicides and fungicides to their target and nontarget organisms, their negative impacts on the environment cannot and must not be ignored. Indeed, pesticides constitute one of the main drivers of population decline in some wildlife species [4]. Therefore, proper evaluations of the risk that pesticides and other agrochemicals pose to organisms and ecosystems should be conducted in a scientific manner.…”