The Council of State reprimanded the province of Overijssel for shooting large numbers of geese in various natural areas. According to the Council, the highest administrative court in the Netherlands, the provincial government did not conduct enough research into the consequences of killing these animals on such a large scale, ANP reports.
The Council ordered the province to do this research within six months.
The number of farmland birds in the Netherlands decreased by over 2.5 million since 1960, which means about 70 percent of the total population disappeared. Some species are almost impossible to find in the Netherlands any longer, Statistics Netherlands revealed on Monday.
An estimated 750 thousand of the 1.1 million skylark breeding pairs disappeared. The partridge population dropped by 93 percent, the summer dove population by 92 percent, the tree sparrow population by 93 percent and the black tailed godwit by 68 percent.
Schiphol and Noord-Holland are still fighting for approval to gas thousands of geese in the area around the airport, despite a court ban. According to the airport and the province, gassing is the only effective way to get rid of enough birds that they no longer pose a risk to air traffic. They are heading back to court on Monday
Hunters will soon be allowed to hunt geese in a ten kilometer radius around Schiphol in an once-off event. This is necessary because the animals pose a threat to air traffic and a court banned the large-scale gassing of these birds
Road inspector Eddie had a busy morning on Tuesday. He rescued both a lost tourist and a family of geese from the A7 highway
Gelderland has decided against using the device designed to break geese's necks. Not because of the controversy that arose around this mysterious device, but because they found too few geese in the areas they were set to be killed.
The Wildlife Management Unit in Gelderland has hired a company to kill 1,600 geese in 7 Gelderland nature reserves. To do so the company will use a device designed to break the animal's neck. The Gelderland faction of the Partij voor de Dieren is distrustful of this device and has asked the provincial government for clarification.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs announced yesterday that researchers have found bird flu in wild ducks near Kamerik in Woerden. They found the very contagious H5 type in two samples of droppings.
Bird flu was discovered at a poultry farm in Zoeterwoude yesterday. The Ministry of Economic Affairs confirmed that this company has about 28 thousand animals.
Swans, geese and gulls are being caught to check if they are carriers of avian influenza. Stat Secretary Sharon Dijksma of Economic Affairs announced this precautionary measure in a letter to parliament on the progress of tackling bird flu.
Birdwatchers may do a bit of crossing out on their sightings list in the coming years, as a new technology has been developed that chases nuisance birds from airports and fields. Robot falcons and eagles - or Robobirds - which can be manually controlled, can offer new solutions to the excessive nuisance and danger that wild birds pose to the industrial landscape, De Volkskrant reports.
Police in Eindhoven are looking for two teenage boys in two cases in which birds were beaten to death. In the area of Stratum, on Tuesday the 19th of August, the owner of a meadow caught the two boys in the act of beating the birds.
Lately, half-dead geese drop from the sky in Alblasserdam. Presumably a unexperienced hunter or maybe even an unexperienced illegal hunter is the cause of this, reported RTV Rijnmond.
