Tag: turtle dove

Spain’s hunters agree to temporarily stop killing endangered bird

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And the emphasis is on ‘temporarily’ – for just one year. Just one year for Turtle Doves to slightly recover enough to ensure that Europe’s notoriously ignorant and utterly selfish poachers have more Turtle Doves to kill in 2022…because you can be 100% certain that they will be back out after showing ‘restraint’ for one miserable season before they blast as many Turtle Doves out of the sky as they can. And it’s for this that conservationists are saying, “The engagement of the Spanish hunting community will make a significant contribution to help save this Globally Threatened species”? The putting down of the guns and not slaughtering a massively declining species ever again would be true engagement, but when conservation’s victories are so small I guess we have to take them where we can…

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Turtle Doves | Italy’s ‘hunters’ give ‘hunting’ an even worse name…

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Europe’s hunters constantly bleat on about how much they care about wildlife and even try to greenwash their goddammed and repulsive lobbyist groups by referencing ‘conservation” in their names (here in the UK of course we have GWCT and BASC who changed their names and added ‘conservation’ to them in response to growing public sentiment against going out and killing things for entertainment). The truth is that many of these ‘hunters’ are as dumb as bricks and little better than wildlife muggers who don’t actually have a single strand of conservation DNA in their entire bodies. Constantly ignoring the science, famously crying that their mental health will suffer if they’re not allowed to keep blowing small birds out of the sky, we are – as we’re often told on social media – supposed to have a ‘dialogue’ with these throwbacks. You can not have a dialogue with someone who is incapable of rational thought and simply is not interested in listening, though. Like the grouse shooting industry and fox hunting lawbreakers here, Europe’s gun-toting psychopaths want one thing and one thing only – to spend their days slaughtering wildlife. Even if it might mean driving a species to extinction…

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France green lights mass Turtle Dove killing

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You have to wonder just what it is that hunters have against the European Turtle Dove. At a stretch (‘different times’ and all that) it is possible to perhaps understand the hunting of a once abundant species that appeared in the spring skies and roosted in huge groups just when rural communities needed a plentiful food source, but to still be killing them now? In the 21st Century? When all the data shows that the species is in severe decline (data published in 2016 showed that the UK population of Turtle Doves had declined by 93% since 1994, a trend mirrored across Europe, where there was a decline of 78% between 1980 and 2013)? And no-one can genuinely claim ignorance of that. In 2015 the IUCN upgraded the European Turtle Dove on its Red List from Least Concern to Vulnerable where it remains after a 2019 assessment.

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Turtle Doves | Unsustainable hunting and habitat loss

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It’s not so very long ago that the European Turtle Dove was such a common fixture of the UK summer that almost everyone would have recognised the rolling, purring ‘turr-turr’ call that gave the bird its English name. But, writes Charlie Moores, it’s now the UK’s fastest declining bird species and considered vulnerable to extinction across its entire range.

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