Relationship between hunting management and bird diversity in small game estates in Central Spain

Abstract

In Europe, hunting and its associated management has been performed for centuries and has potentially had profound effects on our landscapes and on the biodiversity they hold, although the latter aspect has not received much attention outside the UK. We investigated the relationship between hunting management, raptor and steppe-bird diversity in Central Spain. We surveyed 54 red-legged partridge hunting estates with varying game management intensity in spring and/or summer between 2006 and 2009. Birds were counted from fixed points (58 ± 57 points per estate, range 4-425). Information about game management was gathered through interviews with game managers. We modelled the abundance and number of species of each bird group in each estate according to habitat variables and game management variables (mainly artificial feeding, releases of farm-reared birds, predator control) with forward-backward stepwise GLMMs. Our results show that steppe-bird and raptor abundance and diversity are mainly associated to habitat, not management, variables. Partridge abundance showed a positive relationship with the number of raptor species observed but not with their abundance. We conclude that management implemented for red-legged partridges in Central Spain does not seem to have neither positive nor negative effects on co-existing species (steppe-birds) or their predators (raptors), but having good densities of partridges, and maintaining the habitat that allows those high densities, has a positive effect on biodiversity.