Bird species plummeting in India, says new report: What are the major threats to them?
- August 28, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Bird species plummeting in India, says new report: What are the major threats to them?
Subject : Environment
Section: species in news
Context:
- A large number of bird species in India are either currently declining or projected to decline in the long term, according to a report based on data from about 30,000 birdwatchers.
- Report title: The State of Birds in India 2023
Details:
- Out of the 942 bird species that were assessed, 142 are diminishing and only 28 are increasing.
- While raptors, migratory shorebirds, and ducks have declined the most, birds living in habitats like open ecosystems, rivers, and coasts are among the worst affected.
- The key factors responsible for the decline are urbanisation, infrastructural development, environmental pollutants, and climate change.
What are the major threats to birds in India?
- Climate change:
- Climate change affects bird reproduction and survival through the disruption of species interactions by phenological mismatches — it occurs when the timing of annual events like breeding, nesting and migration become out of sync.
- Mismatches in seasonal timing (of migration, breeding, emergence) between birds and their prey can reduce survival and reproduction and also lead to fatal competition with other species.
- Soaring temperatures force sedentary birds to go through rapid adaptive changes.
- For instance, Amazonian birds over 50 years lost body weight to lose heat more efficiently.
- Sapping heat compels birds to change their behavior.
- They tend to spend more time looking for shade instead of searching for food.
- This can have an adverse effect on their survival and reproduction.
- Climate change leads to new and dangerous interactions between different species.
- In Hawaii, due to rising temperature, mosquitoes have colonized higher altitudes.
- This has given rise to malaria among mountain birds.
- Urbanization
- The most urbanized regions in India have:
- the least number of bird species,
- the least number of rare species, and
- the fewest insectivorous species.
- Consequences of unplanned rapid urbanization:
- Loss of natural habitat for birds exposes them to more air pollution and high temperatures.
- Noise pollution forces birds to sing louder, or at different frequencies, or, in the worst case, to abandon otherwise suitable habitat.
- Light pollution may confuse and disorient them, causing them to collide with buildings.
- Lack of food supplies in urban areas leads to the homogenisation of bird communities as only behaviourally dominant species such as House Crows and feral Rock Pigeons are able to survive.
- Monocultures:
- Monoculture is the practice of growing one type of seed in a field at a time.
- In India, commercial monoculture plantations of rubber, coffee, and tea have been rapidly expanding in recent years.
- Tea plantations have grown from 5,214 sq km to 6,366 sq km from 2003 to 2020.
- Oil palm plantations have also increased across the country with expanding hotspots located in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the northeastern Himalaya.
- Commercial monocultures are known to harbor fewer bird species than natural forests within the same biome.
- Oil palm plantations in Mizoram support only 14% of the bird species found in comparable rainforests.
- In Uttarakhand, teak plantations can shelter just 50% of the total woodpecker species seen in the state’s sal forests.
- Energy infrastructure
- A wide range of species are known to have been killed due to collisions with wind turbines.
- Several of them have migrated to regions where there aren’t such giant devices.
- The transmission lines have also led to the death of many large-bodies species because of collision and numerous small-bodies species have been electrocuted.
- Over 60 species from 33 families of birds are affected by collisions and electrocution at power lines in India.
For details of the state of birds in India 2023 report: https://optimizeias.com/state-of-birds-most-species-dip-india-peafowl-among-those-flourishing/