Strasbourg, 28 February 2023                                                                      T-PVS/Files(2023)25

CONVENTION ON THE CONSERVATION OF EUROPEAN WILDLIFE

AND NATURAL HABITATS

Standing Committee

43^rd meeting

Strasbourg, 28 November - 1 December 2023

New complaint (pending): 2021/6

Conservation de la Gélinotte des bois (Tetrastes bonasia rhenana) (France)

‑ complainant report ‑

Document prepared by

 POLICHIA, GNOR, natur&ëmwelt a.s.b.l.,

Joint complaint 2016/6

by POLLICHIA -Verein für Naturforschung, Naturschutz und Umweltbildung e.V. and natur & ëmwelt a.s.b.l. Luxembourg

Update report by both co-complainants of spring 2023

Bern Convention Secretariat

Directorate of Democratic Participation

Council of Europe

F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex, France

Neustadt and Luxembourg, 16^th February 2023

Dear Sir or Madam,

In your spring meeting 2022 you deferred a decision concerning our Complaint n° 2021/6 and requested an update report from us for the meeting in April 2023, which we deliver herewith.

We complained that the French authorities enforce the final global extinction of the Western hazel grouse (T. bonasa rhenana) by passive avoidance of rescue activities for the last few scattered survivors. Furthermore, the regional authorities of the Grand-Est even refused the permission for a last-ditch rescue project by ex situ-management, which had been requested by the relevant German state authority (Vogelschutzwarte Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland) and before also by the Luxemburgian Environmental Ministry. Both requests had been prepared by a specially created international (Germany, France, Luxembourg) task force of hazel grouse scientists (see source 1[1]). This team of roughly three dozen members includes basically all hazel grouse scientist from the range countries of the subspecies, as far as these can be recognized from their scientific publication record. The international consortium also includes almost all known hazel grouse experts from France with experience and a proven track record of scientific work on the species. As such, this team, which forms the bulk of the complainants’ informants, is considered by us to have the best worldwide expertise on this bird. The rescue concept by the consortium is also supported by the tetraonid specialists of the Species Survival Commisssion in the IUCN, and by the Galliformes Taxon Advisory Group of the EAZA (Europ. Assoc. of Zoos and Aquaria). The more intriguing is that the French authorities oppose expert advice and rather follow opinions of local bird groups without specialized expertise. An official rescue proposal brought forward by the Staatliche Vogelschutzwarte für Hessen, Rheinland-Pfalz und Saarland was declined by the French authorities after quarrels concerning internal French responsibilities and competences had arisen among various birding groups in the Vosges, the only place in the world where the subspecies is surviving precariously. A previous similar request from the Environmental Ministry of Luxembourg has not even been replied to by the French authorities. A local activist group of largely self-declared experts, for not logically explicable reasons which we feel are entirely to be sought in the realm of politics and fears of losing a monopoly for responsibility in regional conservation, have brought the international approach to a standstill by their voting power in the regional advisory council of the region’s conservation administration.

Much valuable time was lost, and by now it is no longer certain that the subspecies can be rescued at all. This is a very rare case that a vertebrate taxon is becoming extinct because state conservation authorities decline a rescue mission based on the combined expertise of virtually all experts for this species.

This letter summarizes the most recent developments.

1 Current status of hazel grouse in the Vosges

Independently of the subspecies rhenana, hazel grouse as a species is protected by the Bern Convention and by the European birds directive (annex I), and SPAs have been designated for the species in the Vosges. However, hazel grouse has already gone extinct in many areas and most SPA territories, and is on the very edge of total extinction in the entire Vosges, within and outside SPAs.

When the proposal to start a European Endangered Species Breeding Programme for rhenana-hazel grouse was first formulated in 2018, reproduction of at least one wild pair could still be confirmed by camera trapping in the Vosges. By this point the experts had already concluded that the Vosges contained the only surviving Western hazel grouses worldwide, after their extinction in Luxembourg and Germany (where our project had elicited three professional status surveys which could only confirm their extinction). However, even in 2018 the last few survivors were an unviable population, certain to disappear soon if there was no intervention. Since the ecological reasons for this final collapse are not entirely understood, and since biotope measures to support hazel grouse by suitable sylviculture needs years to decades to improve in situ living conditions, last-ditch ex situ-management was the only feasible rescue option for stabilizing a captive stock for the time being, managed by EAZA’s professional galliform keepers genetically and demographically, until the habitat situation in the wild could be understood by research and be gradually stabilized, e. g. in suitable protected areas. The plan was and would still be to develop a long-term captive flock of sufficient size to yield birds for research and reintroduction over at least a few decades. Birds would be delivered for reintroduction in all range countries without cost (present interest for this in Luxembourg and Germany), the actual husbandry funded by EAZA as is usual for such long-term ex situ management. Ideally, the captive flock should be managed as an EEP (official European Endangered Species Programme) by the Galliform Taxon Advisory Group of the EAZA. No doubt, ex situ is seen only as an emergency solution, the real aim is the subsequent reintroduction as soon as this is feasible after appropriate biotope improvement for which however many details need to be understood and planned (which costs more time than is available now before the final extinction in the wild).

Until now the already critical situation has further deteriorated. The latest and most informative results are from a rigorously planned survey in the southern Vosges by four experienced ecologists from our international rhenana-task force in 2020 and 2021. The study involved the most detailed and comprehensive hazel grouse survey ever in the Vosges and was carried by some of the best hazel grouse ecologists of western Europe. The results have appeared in December 2022 in the French scientific journal “Alauda” (Footnote 2[2]). 69 sites were visited on 108 occasions for indications of presence from November to April. Proof of presence were only obtained in six out of these 69 sites, and perhaps up to 14 or 16 territories remain, of which a very small proportion is perhaps still occupied by a pair. Extinction in the short term was concluded. The French conservation authorities interfered with this study: The French surveyors received a letter from the authorities that such a study was undesirable and should be terminated at once to avoid negative legal consequences from the authorities. The reasons stated were that the surveyors would disturb sensitive wildlife and would violate the rights of forest owners when entering private forest. After seeking legal advice and response by the surveyors that French legislation guarantees scientists the freedom to enter forests, the authorities withdrew their position and made, albeit merely orally by telephone, an excuse for what they now thought to have been an inappropriate overreaction. This incident shows, however, how profoundly the French state officers decline serious actions for Western hazel grouse, and what little regard they show for serious scientists rather than loud activists.

The situation of rhenana-hazel grouse in the wild is hopeless, because their precarious status is only a terminal phase in an ongoing population collapse lasting over two decades or longer. There is no chance that the population can recover without intensive management and ex situ support. Measures to stabilize biotopes, e. g. by creating dense coppice stands required by these grouse or by finding out which competitors and predators are too abundant, and regulating these, take far too long to expect that the single survivors could hold on until they could flourish again. Ex situ is the only hope for the moment, which of course does not oppose or hinder in situ habitat action. In fact, we explicitly state that in situ measure need to be started without delay, to enable reintroduction as soon as possible.

All status data of this survey were given to the French authorities before publication. However, the survey was ignored, and also the symposium volume of the hazel grouse conference in Bad Dürkheim (see footnote 1), which had been printed bilingually French-German to support and promote international cooperation. During a video-conference organized by DREAL Strasbourg on 6th November 2020 on the future of Vosgian hazel grouse the task force experts, who are the only people with hard data, were not allowed to present their survey results (e-mails proving efforts to get heard at the meeting can be provided), while lay activists were given wide opportunity to lament about an alleged lack of status knowledge, which precluded positive decisions.

There is one action group in Vosges, the Groupe Tétras Vosges, consisting originally of local stakeholders for capercaillie conservation in the Vosges, which now also claims responsibility for hazel grouse. However, we could not find out what expert background they might have on the latter species or what they ever did to protect or support the species in the wild, as this group denies communication and international exchange, and we are unaware of any technical scientific publications by this group. We had invited this group to report at the Western hazel grouse conference in Bad Dürkheim and initially they announced a presentation on the status of hazel grouse in the Vosges. However, this group finally cancelled its attendance a few days before the date, and did not take pare even as observers, declaring that they had no information on hazel grouse in the Vosges and no interest to discuss this matter, because they had never heard of subspecies in hazel grouse. This confession of a serious lack of knowledge has not hindered them from actively combatting everything brought forward ever since by the international expert team and by the German authorities. We are helpless before the strong political pressure of these politically influential activists who seem to be immune to any scientific argument, but who are represented in the local advisory council of the regional conservation authorities which has a decisive vote to grant or to refuse any conservation project proposed to the regional authorities. The then head of the Hessian Vogelschutzwarte, Mrs. Stiefel, had offered to the chairman of Groupe Tétras Vosges to visit him in an official mission, in order to find out why they opposed hazel grouse conservation and why they denied the rhenana subspecies – she only had to learn that the extinction of “only” a subspecies would not merit such an effort. No communication was ever possible with these local pressure groups, well-networked with the local rather than national administrative level which in France seems to be entitled to decide on the extinction of a subspecies. Worst of all, they were the ones to write an action plan for the French authorities on this matter.

2. Action plan

The French administration decided to ignore the international task force of hazel grouse scientists and the bird protection authorities of Germany and Luxemburg. Instead, two local bird groups without objectively demonstrable expertise on this species, Groupe Tétras Vosges and Lorraine Association Nature, were to write a "Plan de conservation en faveur de la gélinotte 2022-2031”.

Not unexpectedly, this action plan is problematic:

-          The plan has been written by authors who have never studied hazel grouse nor published on the subject to our knowledge.

-          It denies the subspecies rhenana. This important point is treated below in detail.

-          It pretends to have status information on the bird population in Vosges which is largely based not on data but on unproven hypotheses and assumptions, and these are even outdated. Ignoring the recent detailed survey (see footnote 2) the information sources considered by the compilers of the action plan are aggregated data from 2010-2020 which are not reliable any more for a short-lived bird like hazel grouse.

-          The action plan does not at all discuss the ex situ rescue identified by the combined expertise of the scientific experts during the Bad Dürkheim conference and by the state authorities of Germany and Luxembourg as the only approach preventing extinction in the short term. Instead, funding for vaguely alluded long-term measures in the forest is requested without clear proposal on how the money will be spent. In fact, this “action plan” does not identify concrete actions, but rather general scenarios which do not seem practical at the short term. It is therefore not an action plan.

3. Hazel grouse taxonomy

Hazel grouse taxonomy in general has cropped up in this debate unnecessarily, although it is not controversial at all in an extensive scientific literature on the subject, but was only said to be so to combat external influences from hazel grouse professionals into a seemingly politically closed community of local bird conservationist in the Vosges.

Neither the local opponents nor the quoted action plan considered the predominantly German-language literature on the taxonomy of T. b. rhenana, consisting of half a dozen taxonomic revisions since almost 100 years which unanimously supported the subspecies. The taxonomy has recently been revised and many new data added (Nowak et al 2012, Schreiber 2018, Schreiber and Montadert 2019, Schreiber 2021), with the two latter reviews printed in French language. The only scientific book ever written on hazel grouse in France, appeared in 2021 (Mathieu et al. 2021) [3], also provides a decent summary of taxonomy with good photos of the subspecies, but seems not to have been received by the local activists. Rather, they claimed that all taxonomic literature would be too old (which is simply wrong given the recent progress reports in 2012, 2018, 2019, and 2021), and many amateur activists request that subspecies must be shown to differ by mtDNA if to be accepted by them, having no idea what is implied by this request to examine this question further. Intriguingly, the action plan included the already available mtDNA study of rhenana-hazel grouse by Nowak et al. (2012) in its reference list, but did not cite or discuss it in the text, but instead stated in the relevant text chapter that no such study would be available. Indeed, Nowak et al. (2012) from the respected Senckenberg Research Institute had been asked by the German state authorities to find out if rhenana-hazel grouse differed in DNA markers; in this analysis mtDNA has been found to be diagnostic characteristic for the subspecies[4].

Activists collected a few faecal droppings in the Vosges for genetic analysis in the laboratory of Dr. G. Jacob, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, although this laboratory lacks a publication record in phylogenetic or taxonomic research. Dr. Jacob gave an oral presentation on his results during a video-conference of DREAL on 6th November 2020, from which the officer of DREAL concluded the subspecies would not exist at all. The results of this study individualized four birds (a pair and their two siblings) by fingerprinting DNA from faeces with hypervariable markers which are able to show individuality of birds. Following discussions amongst peer geneticists, Dr. Jacob confirmed the very limited database to be insufficient for meaningful taxonomic application. We had communicated this event in detail in our letter to the COE dated 28^th March 2021, and refer to this letter. Due to the limitations of this analysis and lack of further samples, Dr. Jacob has never published the preliminary results originally presented to DREAL. Therefore, these first insights that were subsequently withdrawn by their creator, cannot be used in the debate – they are scientifically meaningless and they are irrelevant in the light of the above-mentioned large body of literature by various experienced and renowned taxonomists, spanning a period of 100 years, and including DNA genetics.

Nevertheless, the local birders continued to claim (and even do so in the action plan) that genetics would invalidate the rhenana subspecies, so that Dr. Jacob issued an e-mail already on 12th November 2020, in which he wrote: “Nous ne disposons pas d’outils génétiques fiables permettant d’assigner un individu à une sous espèce et seule l’étude des caractéristiques phénotypiques permet de déterminer l’origine des individus vosgiens » (the e-mail can be provided if necessary).

For those referees of the Council of Europe with expertise in phylogenetics, we feel obliged to add a few technical details why the now withdrawn data, claimed to be valid by local bird activists and the DREAL, cannot be interpreted in terms of subspecies taxonomy:

-  Hazel grouse are a species with unstable populations, local ups and downs in the course of decades, which makes them not only prone to local extinction during bottle-neck phases of population size, but also renders their genetic study most challenging on account of randomly shifted profiles of variable genetic markers during demographic change. Many individual birds (dozens to hundreds) and broader selection of gene markers than one single or only few genes must be analyzed to balance this haphazard fluctuation of genetic profiles that falsify the phylogenetic information contents of the data. Moreover, for subspecies taxonomy of dynamically fluctuating populations, which are split into many genetically slightly divergent local demes, at least several geographical sites need genotypification in order to care for the microspatial genetic drift.

- The initial Vosgian study relies on one mtDNA marker instead of nuclear genes, although mtDNA is known from the literature to be a hypervariable DNA sequence in hazel grouse, with some 62 variants encountered in the 174 birds studied so far (footnote [5]). Such hypervariable systems are specific for few specimens only rather than for broader population units or subspecies, and therefore they are principally unsuitable for taxonomy in specie with such elevated marker variability. Much longer sequences from genes with greater phylogenetic stability would be required to identify entire subspecies populations.

- In addition, some DNA-microsatellites were studied, which are even more hypervariable at the individual level. All experience with comparable genetic species systems with unstable demography propose that microsatellite profiles change during very few years in populations such as in the French mountains, at most during decades, rather than over the millennia needed for subspecies evolution, and therefore they evolve too rapidly for taxonomic studies as long as the demographic influence on the markers is not evaluated and can be recognized in data interpretation.

It is not at all our purpose to criticize Dr. Jacob, who did probably his best to help clarify a conservation problem. However, given the fact that an experienced phylogenetic laboratory, i. e. at the Senckenberg museum in Germany, had just issued a study recently before, stating that the rhenana-subspecies is well differentiated in DNA systems (Nowak et al. 2012), the French authorities allegedly eager to bring clarity in what only they believed would be an open scientific question should have asked a scientist experienced in phylogenetics. It is not to blame Dr. Jacob that he had to withdraw his first interpretation, but it was in our eyes the undesirable consequence of not asking for analysis an experienced lab.

The action plan further claimed that a widely-read book monograph by Prof. H. H. Bergmann and Dr. S. Klaus would invalidate the rhenana subspecies. However, this statement contradicts what is said in the quoted book (which is not a taxonomic work anyway), indeed it is a falsification of its relevant chapter in which hazel grouse taxonomy is summarized. We informed the authors of the monograph about the misquotation, and they reacted by writing to the French conservation authorities, asking that the action plan should no longer misuse their book by way of a false citation. Bergmann and Klaus, alleged principal witnesses against the rhenana-subspecies, declared to the authorities in their letter that they have never questioned the validity of this subspecies.

As such, the alleged controversy about the subspecies rhenana boils down to a fake debate by local activists without any background in genetics. It is unacceptable that the French authorities follow this fake debate against the scientific literature and the unanimous opinion of specialists.

To emphasize what is lost if T. b. rhenana goes extinct, we take from the uncontroversial scientific literature that T. b. rhenana differs from the still common subspecies T. b.styriaca in the Alps in the following characters (the population in the Jura Mountains are a bit transitory, but principally like in the Alps); the information was condensed in the most recent taxonomic revision (Schreiber 2021) in French language, which also reviews most relevant previous sources (footnote [6]):

- shorter wings.

- a much greater sexual dimorphism (differences between males and females) in plumage colours which suggests that both subspecies might also have different social behaviour: perhaps T. b. rhenana is more polygamous or has a distinct mate recognition.

- a dorsal plumage more reddishly tinged in rhenana, whereas in the Alps the hazel grouse are uniformly dark brown only. In colours, rhenana is not uniform, however, while the Alpine stock is.

- T. b. rhenana has fewer but larger and irregular dark blotches on breast and belly, in little contrast to the surrounding background (which is tinged in warmer colours), while in the Alps hazel grouse have more, smaller, regular dark brown spots on breasts and bellies, and their spots stand in great contrast to the only uniformly white background feathers.

- rhenana is individually more variable in external appearance (chiefly colours) and in biometry, the Alpine subspecies is by contrast among the most uniform hazel grouse populations worldwide (little individuality in patterns). They might differ in the amount of genetic variation.

- strong ecological differences in habitats.

-  according to Nowak et al. (2012) the rhenana-subspecies differs in mtDNA characters from adjacent populations (footnote 4).

4. Conclusions

Western hazel grouse is one of the most critically threatened bird taxa of Europe and stands on the very verge of global extinction. Many experts have invested considerable effort in trying to promote the rescue of this subspecies and all preparations had been made for ex situ rescue by numerous species experts in France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium, with support by IUCN and EAZA.

In this most critical situation, the French authorities prevent the best available experts to do what is perhaps still possible, by refusing the collection of eggs from the few and doomed wild clutches which perhaps still are produced for a captive founder stock, thereby ignoring scientific facts and ranking science below the opinions of local bird activists without the necessary expertise. We are unaware of any scientific counter-argument to try a last-ditch rescue of this subspecies, and to prefer its global extinction by passivity instead. Furthermore, to stimulate a fake debate about taxonomy which is not shared by any specialist seems irresponsible.

Moreover, there is no sign that serious habitat projects are even in the planning stage, let alone being implemented on the ground. The action plan published by local activists is a symbolic document to avoid further critique that nothing is being done and to prevent intervention from the COE. However, the action plan has zero chance of succeeding to rescue the subspecies without coinciding immediate ex situ rescue.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Michael Ochse, President,

on behalf of POLLICHA - Verein für Naturforschung, Naturschutz und Umweltbildung e.V.

Roby Biwer, President,

on behalf of natur&ëmwelt a.s.b.l. Luxemburg