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Dr Manish Chandi, a social ecologist, says the project will also affect saltwater crocodiles and the island’s water monitors, fish and avifauna.

"Decline of the North American avifauna," a study released on Thursday in the journal Science, found that the continent has seen a net loss of 2.9 billion birds since 1970.

Aeronautics, dinosaur locomotion and migration have all drawn hugely from the study of avifauna, and human culture has embraced the winged beasts as a potent metaphor for transformation.

That group is effectively a death squad for songbirds, killing an estimated 4 billion US avifauna a year; globally, island cats drive 14% of vertebrate extinctions.

The high number of species and the ecological diversity observed in the Messel avifauna resembles that of a modern tropical forest.