Great question. Much of my work involves quantifying natural and anthropogenic sources of mortality in marine mammals. That doesn't necessarily translate well to birds, but one recommendation I'd make is to try to ensure that you're accounting for the probability of recovering carcasses. That can differ among species by orders of magnitude; similarly, some human-caused sources of mortality raise the probability of detecting a carcass, whereas others are inherently cryptic. Please share your findings. I look forward to seeing it. http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/WilliamsR_2011_ConservLetters.pdf

Thanks Rob. Of course, we'll share it, that's sure. We are very conscious of the different detectability depending not just on the group but also on the environment and the cause of death. It's not the same finding birds collided against windows that the much more scattered casualties at windfarms or poisoned in the field.

I work in a Fauna Recovery Center in Vila Real, Portugal. we assign a cause of injury to every animal that comes into the Centre but appart from gunshots and road traffic accidents, it's difficult to be sure about the cause of injury/death . All the animals records from Fauna Recovery Centers in Portugal are sent to the Instituto Conservação da Natureza e Florestas, a governamental institution. You can ask them for the data.

Muito obrigado, Roberto

Do you know who exactly could be the right person to ask? Is it possible that they already produce annual or periodic reports?

The ICNF is responsible for producing anual reports for the EU. You can try to contact their office by email [email protected].

Hi Jorge,

maybe someone already talk to you about the EURING recovery program in Europe (http://www.euring.org/). Nased on this data (available for some range of bird species), you could receive the database and for each recovery (live or dead), you have some information about the condition of the individual as well as the circumstance (found, shot, trapped, visual recapture, found due to wires, air craft collision, etc.)

Some studies were just focused on a single species as Schaub and Pradel (2004 Ecology 85:930–938). I am not sure some people try to do a meta-analysis of all data among all species. However, these data can give you some informations with number of recoveries for each casualty and if you try simple modellingm you could have relative importance of each sources.

Hope this could help a little.

Cheers,

Guillaume

Salut Guillaume

Merci beaucoup.

Yes, of course we are aware of EURING and it's a good idea to ask them.

By now, we have gathered the recovery data for species ringed in Spain. We have also most of the data from the fauna recovery centers in Spain (it's not centralised as in Portugal as Roberto explained, thus it's more difficult to deal with 17 administrations!!). We are going to get conclusions soon.

The mentioned national surveys ( http://goo.gl/E8mxVM) have considered different sources for each mortality cause. Thus, we can just have general a general idea, but probably the order of magnitude will be correct, as well as the ranking.

The paper you mentioned is great because it offers a model to avoid those bias, even if, as you said, its scope is very restricted to one species (white stork) and one cause (power lines).

Thank you, again, for your contribution

Hi Jorge

Glad it can help. If you have some questions about the paper I mentioned, do not hesitate to ask. I am quite used to CR models (I made my PhD in the Biostatistical group in Montpellier) and I am currently running analyses on source of mortality in lapwings with M. Schaub, so, using the same kind of model as in Schaub & Pradel 2004 but with more mortality sources, but I am trying to refine it a little.

So, in case, I would be glad to help.

Cheers,

Guillaume