His office is the great outdoors, the forest and the roadsides. Equipped with a pair of binoculars, Antoine Rougeron scans the horizon. An ornithologist for two decades, the forty-year-old devotes his spring mornings to counting birds and, above all, the northern harrier, for which he developed a passion during his dissertation on nature management and protection. “Twenty years ago, I had listed twenty-four couples alone. This year, with a colleague, we counted only five. »
It must be said that the specimen has the habit of nesting on the ground in agricultural plains. The little ones don’t have time to learn to fly when they are snatched up by the harvesters. “As for those who survive, they will have to face a series of adventures: migrations, wind turbines, the end of the pantry because of insecticides… I inevitably think of all this when I grab my binoculars. On my small scale, I realize that everything is slipping through my fingers,” confides the employee of the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO).
Suddenly, a sprayer enters the field by unfolding its mechanical arms. “If there are any, the larks will take their little shower of phytos”, says Antoine Rougeron. Another species which nests on the ground, among large crops, and whose numbers are inexorably decreasing by 1% to 2% per year. “Twenty years ago, while looking for harriers, we could hear two or three corn quails responding to each other, recognizable by their funny singing: “Pouiiit, poit, poit!” It’s been years since I heard them. » With their broods hidden in the middle of fields of barley or rapeseed, the gray harrier, the skylark or the corn quail are textbook cases of a phenomenon that goes beyond them.
Redistributed biodiversity
In less than thirty years, four hundred and twenty-one million birds have disappeared from European skies. This seems small compared to the fifty billion birds populating the planet, but it is a significant decline, and a very rapid one. Around twenty million of these beaked and feathered jewels escape our sight every year in Europe. Due to global warming, some are moving, many are dying and the distribution maps of biodiversity are being redistributed. The white elk or the European bee-eater are now present throughout France; the crow, the blackbird and the wood pigeon are doing very well; on the other hand, the tree sparrow or the wild pipit are close to extinction.
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