>Bird decline 'smoking gun' for pesticide's effects

Peter, although I am concerned about the adverse effects of imidacloprid on
nontarget species, some of the same criticisms that I had of the van Dijk
study apply to this study.

In the first place, the authors also ignored all other pesticides in the
Netherlands database, and simply used van Dijk's limited dataset on
imidacloprid residues alone (see the supplemental material (open access)
for details of what they excluded).  So this study was another case of not
really wanting to find out what is hurting birds, but rather to see if
there is a correlation with one specific pesticide, ignoring all other
measured residues.

Furthermore, the authors make it sound as though birds are disappearing.
But if you read the list of the 15 bird species that they chose to study at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7509/fig_tab/nature13531_ST1.html
you will immediately notice that only 7 (less than half) of the species are
in decline--all other populations were either stable or increasing.
Somehow the press seemed to miss this little detail.

I would have liked to see much more information and more graphs in their
supplementary material, such as the actual trends of bird numbers prior to,
and during the introduction of imidacloprid.

Again, I'm not saying that imidacloprid is not responsible for the decline
of some insectivorous bird species, as insectivorous species would be
expected to decline with more efficient killing of insects.  But I would
also like to see some investigation as to whether the decline of the seven
species was associated with things such as the adoption of no-till or
increased herbicide use.

Far from being a smoking gun, this study suggests that we should
objectively investigate the overall impact of our agricultural practices
upon ecosystems.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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