The capercaillie fuels passions in the Pyrenees.

Drawing.

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Henri Ausloos / Sipa

It is recognizable by its black plumage, its long tail erect in a fan and its eyes circled in red.

The capercaillie, the largest wild land bird in Europe, finds itself at the heart of a heated legal battle in the Pyrenees between hunters and associations for the protection of nature.

Last acts on October 5 and 6 of this showdown that has lasted for ten years: the France Nature Environment (FNE) association filed two summary proceedings before the administrative courts of Pau and Foix.

Objective: request the suspension of capercaillie hunting in the Hautes-Pyrénées and Ariège, by contesting the prefectural decrees fixing the number of individuals that can be taken in these departments.

⚖️The administrative court of Toulouse suspends the hunting of Capercaillie and Ptarmigan in Ariège (09) 🙂🙃


⏩ Bravo to the # ComitéEcologiqueAriégeois for this great


victory💪 💪Rdv Friday before the court of Pau for hunting in the Hautes-Pyrénées ( 65) ... pic.twitter.com/5nOH78jQ1n

- FNE MidiPyrenees (@FNEmidipyrenees) October 14, 2020

Because the hunting of this bird, also called heather cock, provokes the anger of environmental associations, which now systematically attack these orders in the Pyrenees.

This year, the prefectures authorized four samples in the Hautes-Pyrénées, eight in Ariège and one in Haute-Garonne.

But hunters will have to put away their rifles if the administrative judges decide to suspend hunting, as was the case last year in Ariège.

"Associations do this by ideology"

“This little game is stupid,” says Jean Guichou, the director of the Ariège hunting federation.

Every year, it's the same story.

The judge of the administrative tribunal, he is told that the species is in danger, he takes no risk, he closes the hunt.

The associations do this out of ideology, not for the capercaillie, but because they want to ban the practice of hunting.

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“We are attacking prefectural decrees, we are not attacking hunters, who defend their leisure, responds Thierry de Noblens, president of FNE.

It's not the same thing.

Since 2011, we have won 46 procedures which prove the nature protection associations right.

But the administration is under the orders of the hunting federations and sits on dozens of court decisions, while the capercaillie population is constantly eroding.

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Not a protected species

Unlike its cousins ​​from the Jura and the Vosges, where only a few hundred individuals remain, or from the Cévennes, where it was reintroduced between 1978 and 2004, the Pyrenean capercaillie is not classified as a protected species.

"But we do not want to be the gravediggers of the species," says Jean-Marc Delcasso, president of the Hautes-Pyrénées hunting federation, for whom the capercaillie represents the Grail for a Pyrenean hunter.

“When the reproduction index is not good, less than one, that is to say less than one chick per hen, it is not hunted,” he adds.

We did not wait for the ecologists to tell us.

We have no interest in the Pyrenees to see the capercaillie disappear!

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The animal, which numbered 9,000 individuals in the Pyrenees after the Second World War, saw its population decline massively until the 1990s. With an estimate of around 4,000 adults on the French side of the chain, “the trend is today at a rather regressive stability, without however the population being in danger in the short or medium term ”, assures Emmanuel Menoni, wildlife biologist at the French Biodiversity Office (OFB) and specialist in large grouse.

Enemies more formidable than hunters

According to him, “Hunting has been a problem, but it's not anymore.

With such low harvest levels, it's a bad judgment against hunters.

The quantities withdrawn are today insignificant and no longer play a demographic role.

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However, it is an observation shared by all: the capercaillie has more formidable enemies than hunters.

Electric cables or ski lifts in the mountains, or even pastoral fences, cause dozens of fatal collisions every year.

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