Emma Thackery wrote:
>
> And you're a delusory, equivocating moron who will not waste my time
> again. The title of this recent *April, 2005* article published by the
> Finnish Zoological and Botanical Publishing Board, which you so
> expediently omitted, is "Population Crash of the Ortolan Bunting..."
> Whatever the nomenclature--- endangered, vulnerable, in decline or
> otherwise--- hunting the creature (emberiza hortulana) is banned in some
> regions, because of population decline. This is a fact well documented
> throughout the relevant professional literature. You insist otherwise
> because the article does not contain the word "endangered".

You said it was "endangered". That word has a
specific meaning, and it does not apply to the
ortolan. The article you referenced said that
BirdLife International called it "vulnerable"
(which is a subcategory of "threatened") in 2000,
but as I showed by linking to the current BirdLife
International web page on the ortolan, that is
not true today. BirdLife International currently
classifies the ortolan as "Least Concern" which
is their lowest category -- the exact opposite of
"endangered".

The title of the article uses the words "Population
Crash", desribing events occurring between the
late 1980s and mid-1990s. But this "crash" merely
restored the population to about what it had been
fifty years earlier. As the article says on
page 10, "Within our study area in particular,
the ortolan bunting densities in the period
1936-1939 (Soveri 1940) were only about 35%
of the densities observed during the early
1980s (Tiainen & Pakkala 2001)." It would be
just as accurate to describe the period of the
early 1990s as the end of a surge in population
rather than a "crash".

Also, this article only concerns a small area in
southern Finland. As the article itself notes,
"The main distributional area of the ortolan bunting
is in the east and south of Europe, mainly in dry
and open landscapes (Cramp & Perrins 1994)."
The relevance of a population decline on the
remote fringe of its range hardly seems relevant
to whether the species itself is endangered or
threatened. These are migratory birds not
confined to any particular region. As the
articles notes (on page 13), the ortolan bunting
winters in sub-Saharan Africa.

No, you have completely failed to back up
your wrong assertions with facts. When presented
with the actual facts, you stubbornly refuse to
acknowledge them. That qualifies you as a fool,
worse yet, an arrogant fool.