Nature conservation from a bird's-eye view

You notice it close to home. On a summer evening, sitting out on the terrace or the balcony. There was a time when you could listen to the birds coming back from their last evening flights, searching for a roosting spot in a tree or a bush. Or the hungry chirping of freshly hatched tits up in the roof timbers, or the drumming of a woodpecker. That was then. The birds seem to have vanished, and the garden has grown quieter. Sometimes that silence is almost unsettling.

The feeling that something is wrong with our birds can also be expressed in plain numbers. According to a study byBirdLife, Austria's only bird conservation organisation, our feathered friends are running out of time: "More than half of the 66 native species show an predominantly negative trend. A quarter have stable population trends, and only one sixth have actually increased in numbers. Farmland birds give particular cause for concern: 15 of the 22 most important representatives are declining at an especially alarming rate."

We want the birds back

That's a call directed at us. When ornithologists speak of "farmland birds", they mean species that breed in fields and meadows — birds that live on or in the immediate vicinity of agricultural land. Hardly any other group of species is as threatened by modern farming as field and meadow birds. As far back as 1997, we established anature conservation projecton our land in the lower Mühlviertel, together with WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature).

This patch of land is an eldorado and refuge for many endangered species — not just birds. Rare animals and plants of all kinds have made themselves at home here. Among the birds, it is above all the slender corncrake, but also the small and voracious red-backed shrike and the melodious whinchat. The whinchat is especially close to our hearts. Populations of this species have declined dramatically in Upper Austria and Niederösterreich in recent years. Here, the birds can settle and recover undisturbed. Because Bio is about more than pleasure.organicis about more than pleasure.