On Saturday I woke before the alarm and that was early! It wasn’t because I had gone to sleep before knowing the result of the London Mayoral election and the fate of the several hundred pound bet I had on Boris (that result was never seriously in question) but because I was going out to do the first visit to one of my BBS sites.
It’s routine for me but because some in the farming community always seems so suspicious of the results of the work of myself and thousands of other volunteers giving up our time for free I thought that I’d write this blog as a record of how it works. Perhaps it might correct some of the miconceptions about the scheme from some farmers.
I’ve been surveying this 1km x 1km square for several years. I was contacted by the local BTO rep (another volunteer – like me) and asked whether I would cover a Breeding Bird Survey square locally. I was given a list of a few randomly selected 1km squares and chose the one nearest to where I lived. So that’s the first important point about this scheme – the sites surveyed are chosen at random and that means that they are representative of the country as a whole. They cover all habitats and areas. There is no reason to think that the results are biased by location in any important way.
Having agreed to survey this site I have to do it in the standardised way set out in the scheme. This means covering the site by a set route (ideally two parallel transects), in a set time of the year (April-June), at a set time of day (earlyish in the morning) and a set number of times (twice) a set distance apart (about a month). The details can be found here for anyone interested (more about the scheme; details of the methods).
The route of my survey deviates from the ideal two parallel transects because if I tried to do it like that I’d be tramping through fields of wheat and oilseed rape and that wouldn’t be much fun or very popular. Luckily, my square has two rights of way, green lanes, that cross it and make life a lot easier, but unfortunately one runs north-south and the other east-west so they are hardly parallel! So my 10 separate sections of survey are based on this cross – and that’s very sensible and wasn’t my choice – it was what the wise people in the BTO told me to do before I’d even visited the site to have a look at it. How clever of them!
So, with that modification, I do an early visit at the very beginning of May (quite often this bank holiday weekend) and my second visit about a month later (near my son’s birthday). I tend to leave the house at 0530, park the car at c0545 (you can see I was pleased this random square was close to me), walk down the footpath to the edge of the square and start recording at c0600. I then stroll along the route, stopping every now and again, and record all the birds I hear or see in the three distance categories required (I always have to check what they are as I never remember them!). I record all the birds with their own codes on a map or in a notebook . After a little more than an hour I have covered the whole route and recorded all the birds.
I don’t want to make too much of this but it is a fairly skilled task – recording these birds. Many of the sightings are actually hearings so you need to know your bird songs and calls. On Saturday I never saw the lesser whitethroats, chiffchaffs or song thrushes I recorded – but I know their songs. And there was a funny-sounding whitethroat which I spent a couple of minutes searching for just to make sure that that was what it was – I wouldn’t want to realise weeks later that I’d heard a Marmora’s warbler (some hope!).
I’m glad I can do all of this square from rights of way very easily as otherwise I would have had to contact the farmers on whose land I would have walked. I wouldn’t have minded doing that except that I would guess it would mean contacting four different farmers and I don’t know who they are or where they live so that would have been a pain (I do now know one of them, but I didn’t when I started years ago). But this does mean that the farmers whose land I survey are in blissful ignorance that their birds are being counted so carefully each year.
And you might think that is it, but when I get home, and I am very good at doing this straight away, I enter the sightings onto the BBS website. I like to get that job out of the way immediately. By 0900 the data I had collected that morning were entered and safe.
Now it remains for me to go back in June and do it all again.
And in 2010 3239 squares were covered in a similar way. These are spread all over England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and I wonder how many people were out doing what I was doing when I was doing it, and what they were seeing. That is a very large sample of bird records from randomly selected sites covered in a standardised manner. And that’s why we can be confident about the reliability of these data when they are analysed by scientists at the BTO at the end of the season.
The results are published each year – here is the latest report for 2010.
The work is funded by the BTO itself, the RSPB (through the goodness of its heart) and by the statutory nature conservation organisations across the UK. When I say ‘the work’, what I mean is the data storage, analysis, coordination and communication of the results. Most of the ‘the work’, certainly in hours, is done by people like me for nothing. I’ve done some calculations of these costs before and they still look about right – we all, Government, farmers, foresters, shopkeepers and birders, get a very good picture of breeding bird changes for a government input of about £40k pa contribution to c£1.2m worth of work. [In fact the number of squares covered has gone up so the volunteer contribution has gone up too].
Sometimes farmers, particularly NFU spokespeople who should know better, question the validity of the trends that come out of all this work. That’s a bit rich – in fact it’s a bit poor! That’s why I have written this little explanation of how the data are collected. I’m happy to try to answer any questions about this scheme and – I dare say – so would be the BTO (or RSPB or JNCC). Ask away, anyone, especially sceptical farmers.
And here is a question for the NFU – how about making a contribution to the costs of this scheme? It’s a major way of measuring your industry’s environmental impact (there are others too, of course) and you must be interested in that.
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Indeed the NFU, being as they represent farming’s broad church, should be interested in hard data that validates their assertions that the birds and bugs are doing just fine under their stewardship. After all, many of them receive agri-environment payments (from us, the ever-so generous general public) and those payments are allegedly all about achieving environmental outcomes on farmland.
The strange thing is that the monitoring element (and indeed the payment itself) are divorced from those very outcomes; there’s no proviso in receiving the payment that Farmer X should use an element of that payment to pay for the monitoring work that would establish what effect the actions for which the payment were made are having on the immediate environment; and hence there’s no link between positive environmental outcomes and the payments themselves.
It’s a bit like a banker getting a bonus just for turning up to his desk rather than for actually making the bank some money. We all know how we feel about unwarranted bonuses for bankers – I wonder why we tolerate these blithe subsidies to farmers?
Well Jon the large part of those subsidies have kept the UK public well fed at a really reasonable cost for about three quarters of a century and a small part of that subsidy goes on agri schemes that farmers do not,stress do not get the money unless they do what the scheme says they need to do.Think therefore your interpretation is wrong.What is needed and think Mark and myself agree is that the schemes need changing to make it essential that important improvements are put into them.Mark does not probably agree about subsidies keeping food cheap but fact is minutes worked today to buy food is much less than it has ever been so it must have some impact.
Mark ——-nice of you to do all that work like a lot of others for free and to explain it all,what a pity more farmers will not see it explained in your blog.Think most farmers know that there are less birds but it is a confusing situation as well for them I guess as I see where 8 out of the 10 most declining birds were migratory birds.Notice all this yellow in fields from OSR cannot help birds and suppose we are all guilty wanting the oil.
Think the best we can hope for is to get the schemes to where they achieve better results.
Dennis – thanks for your comment but you are right that I don’t really buy your argument. First, the subsidies haven’t been there for three quarters of a century so they can’t be the only reason for cheap food (and I do agree there is cheap food). Second, you have never explained (you tend to go rather quiet each time I raise this point) how giving some of my money (a subsidy) to the Duke of Westminster keeps my food cheap. Please do try to explain that as you never have before when I have asked. And would giving him twice as much of my money work even better?
Your point about the large proportion of migrant species that have declined through the period of the breeding bird Survey is a good point. Since 1994 (when the BBS started) the biggestdeclines have been amongst migrants such as wood warblers and turtle doves. A few points on that. First, it doesn’t mean that the reasons for the declines are not to do with this country – the decline of the migrant corncrake has been turned around by domestic conservation actions and the evidence is that the same could be done for turtle dove too. Second, many of the declining species are woodland ones, such as the non-migratory willow tit, the wood warbler, pied flycatcher and spotted flycatcher and so woodland species have been a priority for research for several years now. third, the declines, as you probably know, of many of the farmland species (corn bunting, tree sparrow, skylark , grey partridge etc) took place in the 1970s and 1980s – in the time of the CBC and before the BBS came into being. And given that 70% or so of the country is farmed it would be nice to see them recovering with all that money going into farming subsidies and grants.
You and I do agree that getting the agri-environment schemes right is the key to putting the farmland bird question to bed. It wouldn’t take much to do it – no blood , sweat or tears – just a few tweaks to the existing schemes to deliver value for the existing money.
OSR isn’t that bad actually. As part of the mixture it is OK. I notice, and this is merely an anecdote, that on my BBS surveys there are more flights from the hedgerow into fields of OSR than wheat. Obviously with the crop rotationI have seen OSR grow in every field several years and what grow in them the other years during my time surveying this area. It seems to me that it’s the dunnocks, whitethroats, linnet and blackbirds that feed in the OSR. And the one or two reed buntings I see on my survey square will always be in OSR field – they follow the OSR around, always nesting in it and never in the wheat (in my anecdotal experience of my single plot out of 3000 or so that make up the total picture).
Thank you, as always, for your comment. Keep going – you’ll have made 250 comments here by the end on May or mid-June – you are the most numerous commenter and you are very welcome here!
Daft laddie question. If you chose your square (for whatever reason – and convenience is as good as any) does that introduce bias to the randomness and if so, how is that accounted for? I’m no statistician so please be gentle with me!
Bimbling – it’s a good question. And the answer is ‘ maybe a very little, but a very very little – and then only perhaps’. Pinning the sites down to 1km grid squares is a good start – you can’t fiddle about with the sites to make them a bit better than otherwise by including ‘that lake just over there’ or even by going to your favourite birdwatching site. And as I remember it, the 3 or 4 options I was offered several years ago were all within about 10 km of where I live so they represented about 3 or 4 out of about 300 or 400 squares in that radius (if I have done my pi-r-squareds right). It’s the fact that they are a random selection in the first place that is important. And then if the ones I didn’t choose are still offered to other surveyors the whole thing works very nicely. And of course I might not have chosen the closest one (I think I did though), I might have chosen the one that was easiest to do on the way to work, or the one near a cafe that does great breakfasts for a treat afterwards.
Very interesting Mark, you mention some of the species you saw.
Could we see a comprehensive list?
Hi Mark,sometimes I think I perhaps take up to much of your comments space but feel this was a really good blog and explained lots of things in your reply some of which like the OSR I was obviously surprisingly wrong.
Think we will always disagree that subsidies keep food cheap but thought they came in about 1947 as a way of keeping food cheap,well if that is right it is at least getting towards my figure and feel sure the part about keeping food at affordable level in 1947 is probably right.There is no doubt although I guess you will not agree that if no form of subsidy food would have to increase in price because roughly the same small profit and income on capital would have to be maintained.I have said before that I understand your gripe about Duke OW and of course in proportion my contribution is the same and I am not happy about it either and for sure you know me well enough to know that I am bound to be really annoyed but just taking the example of a large land owner rather confuses the issue unless you and I can do something about it.We both know I think that these sort of anomalies always occur and when farming always thought it wrong that lots of people earnt twice as much as me for working half the hours.
That is about as good as explanation as I can do but do think those points are reasonable.One really good agreeable point is that we agree food is cheap and the proportion of persons income spent on food could well be less than almost anywhere in the world I would guess but with your knowledge even that may be contested.
Thought your blog and reply to me were especially informative and always like your thoughts even if in some instances the same disagreement surfaces,at least over a period of time we have come much closer.
Dennis,
Thanks for taking the time to reply. In my defence, I don’t think I’m wrong, just somewhat misunderstood! I have been at the sharp end of agri-environment schemes, representing for some years farmers lobbying for a bigger and juicier slice of the subsidy cake; as a commited conservation worker contributing data (and drawing my own, albeit less scientific conclusions) to national monitoring schemes; and as a farmer (albeit on a very modest scale) myself.
My point, which I think you missed, is not that agri-environment schemes are inherently wrong – merely that their effects are not closely enough monitored, nor their design adapted accordingly, hence they remain at best crude instruments for change. For example – Farmer X is asked to do Action Y; if there is any independent monitoring (and it’s a big if as in these days of self-empowerment aka trusting Farmer X to tell the truth about Action Y) it will be to check that Action Y is visible on the ground. What it won’t do is measure quantifiable biodiversity data that would show whether Action Y has actually achieved net environmental benefits, and hence whether Farmer X really deserves his subsidy, and whether Action Y’s overarching scheme or pillar (or whatever jargon we choose to use these days) is really working.
J
Hi Mark
Just to clarify from a fellower BBSer, did you do your habitat survey ahead of your bird survey or did you do it at the same time? For the wider readership, the survey line is divided into 10 transects for each of which the habitat is recorded, which includes the nature of the crop. Thus it is fairly straightforward for scientists at the BTO to determine the broad association (negative or positive) between particular crops/habitats across the country and any changing pattern through the years as bird adapt to new crops.
On a BBS square I have done for the first time this year the transect line crosses private farmland on a square that has been covered for over 20 years. The telephone number of the farmer is provided so he can be called the day before the survey as he likes to know who is about on his land, and who can blame him. I ran into him at 7 am last Monday morning and he told me a couple of years ago he had seen someone with binoculars looking in his garden just after dawn. His house is at least 400 yards from the nearest right of way so he went out to see what was going on taking with him his shotgun and mastiff. A nasty shock indeed which resulted in the square not getting done last year! Still he was ok with me and the mastiff was too. The simple courtesy of a call makes a big difference and I guess a bit more mutual respect would help the dialogue between NFU and conservation considerably. When I say mutual what I guess I mean is that the conservation organisations have bent over backwards to be nice to NFU and farmers and the NFU have p***ed all over them. So a financial contribution would be a gesture of goodwill.
An even better one would be for NFU to give a 1% membership discount for each farmland BAP species breeding on the members farm. Verified independently by birders. Perhaps this would help provide better access to farmland too as farmers rush to get birders on their land 🙂
Phil – thank you. As a fellow BBSer – in the first year, I did the habitat survey separately (and that’s what I’ve done for the new (for me) 2nd BBS I have started this year) but since the only thing that changes each year (so far) is the crop in the fields, and there are only five fields (!), and the only change is whether there is wheat, OSR or sometimes spring beans in the fields, I do the habitat survey as I do the bird surveys.
I have rarely met anyone on my visits to ‘my’ BBS square – but those I have have usually had dogs with them.
Thanks for your comment – and I agree totally that seeking access permission and keeping in touch with the owners of the land is a good thing to do.