Large herbivorous birds and crop damage - how to mitigate the conflict?

The population of large herbivorous birds (LHB; cranes, swans and geese) has increased in Sweden the last 30 years as a response to successful conservation and intensified agriculture providing high quality food for the birds.... [ view full abstract ]

The population of large herbivorous birds (LHB; cranes, swans and geese) has increased in Sweden the last 30 years as a response to successful conservation and intensified agriculture providing high quality food for the birds. As a consequence, the damage to agricultural crops caused by the birds has also increased. Some of the species are still protected from hunting and therefore compensation is paid to affected farmers. In 2015 about 451000€ was paid by the government to compensate for crop damage caused by LHBs and about 337000€ was used for subsidies to cover preventive actions. Crop damage is to a large extent concentrated to the surrounding of important wetlands and a conflict between conservation issues and farming therefore often arises. Farmers get reluctant to both the reserves and the LHBs since the birds are attracted to the reserves for roosting and then cause damage when foraging outside the reserve boarders. In Sweden, such conflicts are mitigated by facilitating communication between different stakeholders and by implementing measures to prevent damage. Communication is improved and maintained by establishing groups of people, representing different interests, that meet on a regularly basis to discuss and apply possible measures to reduce damage. Preventive measures commonly used in Sweden are scaring, diversionary fields and occasionally lethal scaring if no other means work. However, to be able to improve the mitigation of conflicts, and to learn about the processes involved, the measures also need to be evaluated. This has been done for some of the management measures that is directly linked to bird numbers and damage levels and has shown that birds to some extent can be scared from growing crops and attracted to diversionary fields. However, more evaluation is needed to understand patterns and processes, especially in the socio-ecological part of the management system. Such evaluations also need to bring in the aspect whether it is a long-term solution to only use the strategy of “push” and “pull” when the bird populations continue to increase, since more and more resources will be needed when we have succeeded to turn threatened populations to conservation success stories.