Not Just Bees: Controversial Pesticides Linked to Bird Declines

[IDemo]

Evidence continues to mount that a highly controversial class of pesticides blamed for widespread bee declines is also harming other creatures, perhaps catastrophically.

In a study of neonicotinoid pesticides and bird populations in the Netherlands, biologists found a close and troubling link. As neonicotinoid levels rose in streams, lakes and wetlands, populations of insect-eating birds declined. The pesticides appear to have eliminated the insects on which they rely.

“These insecticides appear to be having more profound effects than just killing our pollinating insects,” said ecologist Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University in the Netherlands, an author on the new study, published today in Nature.

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The focus on bees “has missed the bigger picture,” wrote Dave Goulson, a biologist at the University of Sussex, in a commentary accompanying the study. And what’s been missing from the science of that bigger picture, he wrote, is the next logical piece of evidence: that unintended effects on invertebrates can ripple up the food chain.

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/neonicotinoid-bird-declines/

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. There are certain brands of birdfood my family avoids for that reason.

Manufactured by the same overarching corporation that does herbicides and pesticides, and there have been quiet recalls in the past of their birdseed for being contaminated with their other products.