The ban has officially entered into law: three and a half months after the Council of State’s decision to ban capercaillie hunting for five years, a decree was published on Saturday 17 September in Official newspaper to set the terms.
In 2019, seven associations had seized the Council of State, after the refusal of the Ministry of Ecological Transition to ban the hunting of this bird, the largest wild land bird in Europe. In its decision rendered a year later, the highest administrative court considered that “capercaillie hunting is not compatible with the maintenance of the species and that it is necessary to suspend it throughout the metropolitan territory of France for a sufficient period of time to allow the recovery of the species in the different sites of its distribution area”.
According to the text published on Saturday, dated 1is September, the five-year period may be shortened “if new data show a sufficiently favorable evolution of the conservation status of the capercaillie”. The Tetrao urogallusof its scientific name, present in particular in the Pyrenees, the Cévennes and the Jura, is considered “vulnerable” on the French red list of threatened species.