When you try to protect one species and then you find that you protect also other species!

When you try to protect one species and then you find that you protect also other species!

10 February 2022

Here are some pale swift chicks (Apus pallidus) inside the nest, a beachfront loft that the parents stuff with seagull feathers that they "catch" in flight, just as they would with the insects they eat. In fact, the pale swift, as well as the more familiar common swift (Apus apus), is an exceptional flyer. You can really say that in flight it is able to do everything, from sleeping to mating.
But why do we talk about white swifts? Life PonDerat work for the conservation of seabirds. Because the results of a study just published are very interesting and broad the perspective of interventions like ours.
Twenty years ago, in the Lavezzi Islands, an archipelago in the sea in front of Bonifacio (Corsica), eradication of rats has been carried out to protect the last pairs of Scopoli’s shearwaters and Yelkouan shearwaters that still nested among other things with reproductive success practically zero since almost all the chickss were predated to the rats in the first two weeks of life.
The eradication of rats from some of these islands has led to a greater survival of the chicks of shearwaters but also of those of pale swifts, also victims of these predators brought on the islands by man.
In the presence of rats only a few pairs of pale swifts nested in the most inaccessible places. Now the species has colonized other sites and, therefore, the number of nesting pairs and also the number of chicks that survive has incresed.
Further evidence that eradication of rats from islands not only benefits seabirds but also other elements of biodiversity, as we also found in the Pontian Islands. We’ll talk about it.