Willow ptarmigan could disappear from Finland’s forests

Peat bogs favoured by iconic bird are vanishing because of trenching

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The "go back, go back" call of the willow ptarmigan or willow grouse (Lagopus lagopus) resounds on ever fewer of Finland's peat bogs.
      The trenching of bogs combined with the warming of the climate system has caused the willow ptarmigan of the forest areas to come under the threat of disappearing altogether from the Finnish landscape.
      The willow ptarmigan has already practically vanished from Southern Finland.
      If the pace does not slow down, the bird is in real risk of also disappearing from the Northern Ostrobothnia and Kainuu regions further north in less than ten years.
     
Senior inspector Ahti Putaala of Metsähallitus, a state enterprise that administers more than 12 million hectares of state-owned land and water areas, explains that as late as in the early 1980s the forest area willow ptarmigan was still thought to have a bright future in Finland.
      Soon after that, however, the situation turned serious.
      “The southern limit is currently around the Parkano-Kitee line”, Putaala explains, drawing a line some 250km north of the capital, below which one is unlikely to come across this bird.
     
The birds living on the fells in Lapland are doing better than their forest area cousins further south, even though their population count, too, is currently very low.
      Putaala believes, however, that this is a question of normal fluctuation.
      According to British scientists, climate change will eventually confine Finland’s willow ptarmigan population to the fell areas of Lapland. Ahti Putaala points out that even this grim prediction does not take into account the worst threat of them all, namely the changing of the environment.
     
“Habitats suitable for the willow ptarmigan have been lost because of the trenching of bogs. Ditches have been dug through sixty per cent of the natural-state bogs. The willow ptarmigan and its young require the vastness of open bogs.”
     
According to preliminary studies carried out last year, willow ptarmigan in their white winter protective plumage end up increasingly often as lunch for predators, because the snow that would offer them camouflage arrives later than before in the autumn and melts away too early in the spring. For a goshawk, circling above, the snow-white plumage is a dead giveaway and an open invitation to get its talons sharpened.
     
Metsähallitus has reconditioned hundreds of hectares of protected areas in the municipality of Utajärvi in Northern Ostrobothnia and equipped willow ptarmigan there with radio transmitters.
      A study is being carried out in cooperation with the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, the aim of which is to find out - among other things - whether the correct measures have been taken to save the willow ptarmigan.
      One thing in prospect may be restrictions on hunting: hunting has gone on practically unabated and also in those areas where the bird is becoming increasingly scarce.
      There have been some calls to protect the ptarmigan from traps and guns south of Lapland, at least for some years, before it is too late and there is nothing left to hunt anyway.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.2.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Gunning for willow grouse in the fells of Finnish Lapland (7.10.2003)

Links:
  Willow Grouse (Wikipedia)
  Willow ptarmigan (Birdlife International - links to .pdf file)

Helsingin Sanomat