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Are farm-reared red-legged partridge releases increasing hunting pressure on wild breeding partridges in central Spain?

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Abstract

Wild red-legged partridge populations have experienced important declines in recent decades. With an aim to increase or maintain hunting quotas, releases of farm-reared red-legged partridges have concomitantly increased. However, the sustainability of this management practice is increasingly questioned. Farm-reared partridges suffer a high mortality rate immediately after release, and many released birds may already be dead before hunting takes place. Therefore, it is possible that if hunters adjust harvest to the number of farm-reared released birds, this may lead to an overhunting of the wild breeding stocks. We investigated here whether autumn mortality by hunting of radio-tracked birds that bred in the previous summer differed between hunting estates that use or do not use releases as part of their management practices. Although our sample size was limited (32 radio-tagged birds monitored throughout the hunting season in four estates, with only one conducting releases), our results report novel data that support this cause for concern. We found that hunting was the main cause of mortality and that the proportion of hunted partridges was much higher in the estate with releases of farm-reared birds than in the three estates that did not use releases. Therefore, the release of farm-reared partridges, instead of reducing hunting pressure on the breeding stock through a potential dilution effect, may have an opposite effect. This should be confirmed with more spatial replicates, but raises serious concerns regarding the long term sustainability of wild partridge populations and their exploitation for hunting purposes in estates that overhunt partridge populations due to releases.

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Acknowledgments

We thank all game managers and hunting societies’ presidents for allowing us to study partridges on their hunting estates. Particular thanks are due to all people who have helped with the data collection and genetic analyses.

Funding

This study was supported by the Comunidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Bases científicas preliminares para un plan de conservación de la perdiz roja en Castilla-La Mancha) and Spanish Ministry of Science (MCYT-REN200307851/GLO and CGL2004-02568/BOS). FC was supported by the Andalucía Talent Hub Program launched by the Andalusian Knowledge Agency, cofounded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (COFUND–Grant Agreement n° 291780) and the Ministry of Economy, Innovation, Science and Employment of the Junta de Andalucía.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas (EEZA-CSIC), Carretera de Sacramento s/n, La Cañada de San Urbano, 04120, Almeria, Spain

    F. Casas

  2. Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

    F. Casas

  3. Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos (IREC, CSIC-UCLM-JCCM), Ronda de Toledo 12, 13005, Ciudad Real, Spain

    F. Casas, B. Arroyo, J. Viñuela, J. L. Guzmán & F. Mougeot

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  1. F. Casas
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  2. B. Arroyo
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  3. J. Viñuela
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  4. J. L. Guzmán
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  5. F. Mougeot
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Correspondence to F. Casas.

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Casas, F., Arroyo, B., Viñuela, J. et al. Are farm-reared red-legged partridge releases increasing hunting pressure on wild breeding partridges in central Spain?. Eur J Wildl Res 62, 79–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-015-0975-8

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