Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Conservation Director of the RSPB Dr Mark Avery, described the troubling plight of the House Sparrow Passer domesticus.

According to a recent study in the journal Animal Conservation by scientists from the RSPB, Natural England and De Montford University, house sparrows have declined by up to 68% of their 1970 population.

Commenting on the BBC website, Dr Peach of the RSPB, said:

“The trend towards paving of front gardens and laying decking in the back, and the popularity of ornamental plants from other parts of the world, has made many gardens no-go areas for once common British birds.”

It has been proposed that an absence of aphids and other insects during summer – crucial for feeding chicks – may have a strong role to play.

Moreover, these insects inhabit vegetation frequently associated with a healthy front garden; honeysuckle wild roses and hawthorn. The current fashion of paving over front gardens in cities, particularly in large cities like London, is no doubt linked to their demise and should be cause for a serious re-think amongst policy-makers.

When questioned, Leader of North Herts District Council, Councillor John Smith, was reluctant to concede that the loss of brownfield sites could be a potential contributory factor, believing it to be a local phenomenon.

Environment Minister Micheal Meacher was “very worried, [given that] we may have lost nearly 15 million birds in the last thirty years.” In the case of starlings, the Rt. Hon Meacher cited, that the loss of first year juveniles was known to be a contributory factor to their decline, possibly linked to diminishing autumn food supplies because of heavy pesticide use in intensive agriculture. A body of research highlights intensive agriculture as the cause of declines in farmland birds, and perhaps the combination of uber-urbanisation of town gardens is creating a ‘double whammy’ for the house sparrows.

Dr Avery and colleagues hopes to follow-up this report up with more detailed research in the near future, pending sufficient funding.

Hear the report on Radio4 here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/science_nature/sparrows.shtml

New research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology suggests the impact of wind farms on farmland birds is less serious than previously thought.

Dr Mark Whittingham and co-authors focused their study on farmland birds overwintering in East Anglia, in early 2007. The birds were allocated to functional groups (that is, grouped alongside birds with similar ecological requirements and taxonomic characteristics).

The researchers found no effect of proximity to wind turbines on grain-eating birds, corvids (crows), gamebirds and the skylark. However, the researchers found pheasants, which are widespread across Britain, to be more abundant further away from the wind turbines. Importantly, among the 33 bird species recorded (of which five are red-listed), wind farms were not found to be a threat.

In order to meet growing energy demands and combat climate change, wind farms are one of a suite of potential alternative energy options that could contribute to a shift from our present fossil-fuel dependency. The European Commission has set a target of creating 20% of EU Energy from renewable sources by 2020, and farmland, as the most abundant land cover in Europe is the most likely place to put them. Future EU policy calling for more wind farms on farmland should not be incompatible with existing EU policy (Agri-Environment Schemes) to increase biodiversity on farmland.

Dr. Whittingham said: “This is the first evidence suggesting that the present and future location of large numbers of wind turbines on European farmland is unlikely to have detrimental effects on farmland birds. This should be welcome news for nature conservationists, wind energy companies and policy makers.”

This article received extensive coverage in the media including:

The Today Show, Radio 4
and
The Telegraph

Reference: Claire L Devereux, Matthew J H Denny and Mark J Whittingham. Minimal effects of wind turbines on the distribution of wintering farmland birds. Journal of Applied Ecology, 2008; DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2008.01560.x

The annual ‘State of the UK’s Birds’ report, produced by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the RSPB, and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, along with the statutory conservation agencies for the four UK countries (Countryside Council for Wales, Natural England, Northern Ireland Environment Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage) reveals that climate change is having major impacts on the breeding success and timing of breeding of many well-known species of bird.

A paper published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, has shown how local impacts of climate change affect seabird populations of the common guillemot Uria aalge and the thick-billed guillemot Uria lomvia around the Northern Hemisphere.

Climate change may alter the frequency, intensity and distribution of the climatic indices; the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation. These climatic oscillations are linked to sea surface temperature (SST), which in turn affects the prey abundance for seabirds.

In this study, data were collected and analysed from 43 different colonies across the whole circumpolar region. Colonies where factors other than climate were known to have a great impact on guillemot populations, (such as excessive hunting and oil spills) were excluded from the study so as not to confound the results. Whereas previous studies had focused on effects of climate change on seabird populations at single locations, the strength of this study lies in the extent of area covered; most of the Northern Hemisphere. Looking at such a large geographic area greatly minimises the possibility that observed changes could have been caused by anything other than climate change. SST datasets were taken from three time-series, 1965-76, 1977-88 and 1989-97. SST was described as the temperature deviation (positive or negative) from a 50-year average around guillemot colonies.

The researchers discovered that both species responded negatively to rapid changes in the environment, regardless of how the temperature changed. However, common guillemots responded favourably to colder phases (that is, an increase in colder, energy-rich waters) and thick-billed guillemots favoured warmer phases (since they are found further north and warmth allows ice melt and greater feeding opportunities). The response to rapid change reinforces the idea that broadly, even within an ecological time frame, species with a slow life-history strategy particularly cannot adapt fast enough to rapid environmental change.

The wider implications for biodiversity, and thus for conservation managers and policy-makers, is once again a strengthening of measures to tackle climate change. Although conservation measures can be implemented for biodiversity at mid-latitudes to help local adaptation, species already at northern latitudes cannot readily shift their climatic envelopes. Hence globally, we must increase efforts to reduce the rate at which we are changing our climate.

Reference:

Irons, D., Tycho, A-N., Gaston, A.J. et al. (2008). Fluctuations in circumpolar seabird populations linked to climate oscillations. Global Change Biology. 14(7):1455-1463.

Read the full paper online here (subscription required).

An unique and insightful piece of research on British birds has recently been published by Dr Gavin Thomas in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. For the first time a phylogeny (taxonomic family tree) of British birds has been published, showing that closely related species tend to decline in sync.

Dr Gavin Thomas found that birds experiencing population declines tended to be clustered on the phylogenetic tree. The implication of his research is that birds in taxonomic groups with species that have already undergone declines, may be at risk from decline in the future. For example, the greenfinch is closely related to the linnet and bullfinch, which have undergone declines, but the greenfinch is not currently listed as endangered. It is proposed that this could be due to shared traits that predispose certain species to decline, such as requiring specialist habitats or having a slow life history, (for example small clutch size and low reproductive rate).

However it is likely that there are other key traits that enable some species to survive better than others such as broad diet and habitat requirements, which could be why the blackbird is not declining but other family members such as the mistle thrush and starling are in decline.

Where resources are limited or practicalities prohibit conservationists to undertake baseline surveys of birds, the use of genetic information to identify birds potentially under threat in the future will be incredibly useful.

BES members and blog readers are invited to comment on this article.