An annual census of wintering birds in Spain’s beleaguered Doñana National Park has returned the bottom numbers in 40 years.
Some 70,000 people of 31 waterbird species have been tallied throughout December 2023. In Doñana’s heyday, half 1,000,000 or extra birds could be recorded.
The meagre totals included solely round 4,000 Greylag Geese – a tiny fraction of the 70,000 that could be counted in a typical 12 months.
Climate change and unlawful water abstraction are drying out the world-famous Doñana National Park (search engine marketing / BirdLife).
Doñana, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, is home to an nice vary of plant and animal species, a lot of that are prone to extinction. However, the park itself is severely threatened by a spread of threats together with unlawful water irrigation practices and local weather change-induced drought. Just final 12 months, BirdLife International described the positioning as being getting ready to extinction.
Although it was introduced final autumn that the Andalucian authorities plans to develop Doñana as a way to reserve it, conservationists concern that it’s now too late to revive the park to its former glory.
Although he welcomed the plans, vice director of the Doñana Biological Station, Javier Bustamente, stated: “We are actually seeing the results of the irrational extraction of water from the aquifer for years and years, and even when it have been fully suspended, it could take a long time for the ecosystem to get better.
“Doñana won’t ever once more be what it was, it would turn into one other sort of ecosystem, much less wealthy and various.”
Rainfall has as soon as once more been low within the area this winter, which means that the already-parched land will stay dry all through 2024 no less than. It is the dearth of appropriate wetland habitat which has led to such low waterbird counts throughout the realm.
