Yellow-breasted bunting population declines rapidly: study

Live Mint , Thursday, June 11, 2015
Correspondent : Mayank Aggarwal
New Delhi: Indiscriminate hunting, especially in China, has led to the rapid decline of the population of bird yellow-breasted bunting, a migratory bird that visits India during the winter months, a research paper said.

Despite a hunting ban in place in China since 1997, millions of these birds are still being killed there every year for food and were sold on the black market as late as 2013, said a statement from Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) India, which conducted the study along with UK-based Birdlife International.

The results of the study were published in a recent edition of Conservation Biology.

Once among the most abundant bird species in Eurasia from Finland to Japan, the population of the yellow-breasted bunting has declined by 90% and its distribution range has shrunk by 5,000 sq. km since 1980, the study said.

The bunting visits Sikkim, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Manipur, West Bengal, the Terai region of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from early October till April, in flocks of up to 200 birds. As per the study, the rate of trapping and consumption is less in India, where its meat is called Bageri. The bird is also reported from Nepal and Bangladesh.

With its population rapidly declining mainly due to trapping in its non-breeding range, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has placed the bird in the category of endangered species.

“During migration and in its wintering grounds, these birds gather in huge flocks at night-time roosts, making it easy to trap them in large numbers. They have been traditionally trapped for food using nets. But in recent times, hunting has reached unsustainable proportions,” BNHS said.

“Consumption of these birds has increased in East Asia and the once prevalent subsistence hunting has been replaced by large-scale commercial hunting to meet this demand. One estimate from 2001 suggests that 10 lakh buntings were consumed in China’s Guangdong province alone,” BNHS added.

“The magnitude and speed of the decline is unprecedented among birds distributed over such a large area,” said Dr. Johannes Kamp of University of Münster (Germany), the lead author of the paper.

Authors of the study suggested urgent implementation of law and large scale nature education to save the bird.

“The decline proves that illegal hunting could be the reason for the disappearance of many once common Indian bird species. Only poaching of large mammals is reported in the media and sometimes action is taken. But what about the insidious and clandestine trapping of large numbers of birds that still goes on in some parts of our country? The authorities should bring a halt to all types of poaching and trapping,” said BNHS director AsadRahmani.

To arrest the rapid decline of the population of the bird, the Convention on Migratory Species, an environmental treaty under the aegis of the United Nations Environment Programme, has agreed to develop an international action plan for the recovery of the yellow-breasted bunting throughout its range by 2017.

 
SOURCE : http://www.livemint.com/Politics/xljWtWAIwr6MhDb2MwgY5H/Yellowbreasted-bunting-population-declines-rapidly-study.html
 


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