In a statement sent today to the Lusa agency, Quercus explains that in December it asked the government and the authorities to provide it with information on the current situation and, above all, to carry out inspections.

"Data that Quercus now has access to, resulting from two inspections during December 2018 and January of this year, carried out by the Nature and Environmental Protection Service (SEPNA/GNR), show the magnitude of the problem: between 70,000 and 100,000 birds dead.

"The SEPNA/GNR informed that it had given notice to the competent administrative authority, the Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas (ICNF), proposing the preparation of possible legal amendments to prevent the harvesting of olives at night, guaranteeing the protection of the species that sleep in the olive trees.

"Quercus demands that the new government, through the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture, take urgent measures to suspend the practice of harvesting olives at night, carried out by mechanical means in superintensive olive groves," reads the statement.

The environmental association also calls on olive oil companies to reject the olives from the night harvest, and like "at least one large company that has already done so", to voluntarily opt for the suspension of this practice in their olive groves.

Environmentalists also explain that this concern follows a warning issued in late 2018 by the Junta de Andalucía in Spain regarding the impact of mechanical harvesting of olives in superintensive olive groves in the region.

This report, according to Quercus, describes the "major impacts" that this process has on local birds, concluding that, even from a conservative perspective, "more than two and a half million birds died" in 2017/18 during the olive harvest.