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After decades of stability, the white stork population in Hungary has decreased by almost a quarter in the past five years, according to a survey by the Hungarian Association for Ornithology and Nature Conservation, MME, for short.
A summary of data was prepared from the national white stork nesting survey, which was launched in 1941 and repeated every five years, most recently in 2019. Based on this, only 4,000 pairs could be expected in Hungary this spring, indicating a 22% decrease compared to the stock which has stabilized at around 4,800-5500 pairs in recent decades. The decline is primarily characteristic of Transdanubia, where the number of couples has halved in many places in the past twenty years.
This is how the survey was conducted
Under the coordination of the MME Monitoring Center, the association’s staff and volunteers, in cooperation with the guards of the national park directorates, inspected 7,376 nesting sites, during which 2,952 pairs of storks were raised in Hungary and 588 were not they could reproduce for some reason.
In addition to the 82 missing birds and 1,396 uninhabited nests, experts also counted 2,358 nest holders that were once placed on lamp posts for white storks, but that no longer had nest material in them.
In the 1940s, 15-16 thousand pairs of white storks passed in present-day Hungary. After World War II, it halved, and after a decline that continued until the late 1960s, the number of pairs stabilized at around 5,000 pairs over several decades. Due to the annual effects of the weather, the number fluctuating between 4,800 and 5,500 pairs decreased to 4,000 pairs in 2019.
As the communication notes, the decline in stocks has become widespread across the range of the white stork, which mainly nests in Europe. Reasons for this include habitat and chemical conversion in large-scale agriculture, significant deaths from electric shocks, mass shootings in the Mediterranean and the drought caused by climate change, and a reduction in the size and quality of feeding places.
The decline of anthropogenic and adaptive white storks can be halted by preserving fresh and wet grasslands and nature-friendly management and grazing, as well as further reducing deaths from electric shock and destruction of birds in the Mediterranean today, according to Hungarian Ornithology and Nature Conservation.
Photos: Getty Images
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