By Knoell8504 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsI was pleased to see that there is some evidence, from the BTO, that the decline of urban House Sparrows has stopped, paused or slowed. Let’s hope that the House Sparrow is on the up again.
Mark, I enjoyed the article and agree with the overall point. Sparrows in many of our upland villages seem to have had a good year. We’ve had c 30 at our feeders this autumn, well up on the dozen or sonof previous years.
Jim – thanks. I think they have had a better year here in lowland east Northants too.
“Let’s hope that the House Sparrow is on the up again.”
Yeah – that’s all we’ve got hope. Nothing tangible in the air given the evidence of recent ePetitions.
Mark, in your recent piece on the last Passenger Pigeon, I made reference to the Starlings that blackened the sky each evening on their way to roost in my home town.
Starlings and House Sparrows, probably the most abundant birds in my back yard when I first became hooked on nature and bird life. How sad would it be if the recent reports are a false dawn and they decline to zero in my lifetime or not long after? Not impossible given the ongoing loss of food and habitat and build up of pollutants (always assuming we’re not been told porkies)?
Now given I have determined the clever people who claim to be giving nature a home don’t appear to have the intelligence to engage with enough of the ordinary people like me who collectively could cause politicians to enable real action are not going to save them then maybe, referring back to another of your earlier themes, the “nice” people who are much too polite to shine a light on the clever people’s failures could do something?
I’m not holding my breath! Cosily chatting away day after day on blogs ain’t doing much good. I suppose they might think of a name for the last “Sparra” maybe. A nasty person’s suggestion would be Martha if its female and Artha, if it’s male.
It has been suggested by more than one naturalist/ author that sparrows started to decline in London ( and other large cities?) when motor traffic replaced horses. This reduced seed ( from the nose bag) and flies from the dung. There was also a question about the effects of petrol fumes on the sparrows well being.
It is good to see the BTO report, but it is difficult to envisage sparrows returning in numbers to inner city areas.
Trevor – excellent research done by Leicester Uni and RSPB shows that lack of insects in inner cities causes starvation in broods. The search is still on for the true cause of insect decline – lots of ideas though!
There was also the issue that soparrows were killed during the First World War because they took grain that was needed for people, however, populations seemed to recover for a while after 1919.
I too saw a report that linked the decline of sparrows to the use of unleaded petrol. Though it has to be said the House Sparrow on our housing estate has always done well and this summer seems to be a bumper year for them.
Douglas – unless something has happened in the last two years which i have missed (perfectly possible) I think the lead-free petrol idea is just that – an idea. Urban house sparrows have declined in many other cities in Europe (though they are doing great in the USA as non-natives!) and many of these declkines seem to be fairly ‘recent’. If lack of insects is the problem then what might cause a lack of insects in Paris, London and Rome? Something affecting air quality could be the type of factor – and we would have expected air quality to have risen. So is there some funny little side effect of something else that causes the decline? That’s how you get, speculatively, to lead-free petrol (I think).
Science is fun – it’s about imagination and having good ideas (and then doing a lot of hard work to test them rigorously).
Douglas – yep, the first of those is from 2000 and there hasn’t been a scientific paper that has nailed it. That’s all I mean by speculative.
There may be something in it – but at the moment it’s speculation without anything even close to proof.
MTBE is a well known carcinogenic ingredient found in unleaded petrol, there are some American (EPA) and Indian based reports linking MTBE to not only decline in insects (mostly from underground petrol tanks leaking into the water courses) that are from 2010 and one from 2012, though on the one from the EPA indicates it’s not a final report. The EPA report even links MTBE to asthma in children there’s also from India suggestions of a link between mobile phone masts to their decline in House Sparrows so it seems there could be many links to the decline of the House Sparrow and not just unleaded, I can understand some conservationist uncomfort that unleaded fuel could be just as harmful as the fuel it replaced as I’ve stated before on here and you also acknowledge some consevationist were hailing bio-fuels as the better option a few years back…. 🙁 Is this a possible reason for no further conclusive reports on unleaded fuels/mtbe as it might make uncomfortable reading? Is there a report/study in the pipeline?
We’ve noticed the sedentary nature over 17 years of feeding at our current semi-urban house. There used to be a colony in a climber about 100 metres away which used our feeders so our count was as much as 25 about 10 years ago. That creeper was cut down and the colony disappeared. There is a colony about 150 metres away across allotments but we rarely get more than 2 birds venturing that distance to feed. They get a lot from the allotments, although more and more people use netting and plastic to “protect” their vegetables and plants.
I’m not sure how we make sparrows more adventurous! Some obviously are, witness the Spanish sparrow that turned up a couple of years ago, but most aren’t!
The Spadger decline – potential contributing factors to chew on
Inexorable swing to winter cropping since mid-70s – many fewer fields with over-wintered stubble.
1990 Food Safety Act requires protection of grain stores from rodents, birds, domestic animals and Mrs Curry – excluded by netting at eaves and close-fitting doors etc.
Increased efficiency of combine harvesters leaves much less “tail corn” on the ground.
Increased use of fungicides and insecticides reduces amount of tail corn.
Use of cereal varieties with improved Specific Weight reduces amount of tail corn.
Increased efficacy, and prophylactic use of insecticides has massively reduced the aphid population in arable areas.
Just a purely subjective observation – but I’ve noticed that house sparrows seem to need hedges – they seem to be, as Nigel said, unadventurous, and need a hedge (big creeper etc.) to loaf around and hide in. Our garden ones sit around in some big prickly bushes before venturing to the feeders, to return as soon as poss to the bushes. A colony I used to cycle by were always just sitting around in a hedge, and whenever I see them elsewhere out and about, it is usually in a hedge/bushes/other cover – usually the scruffier the better.
With the increase in car ownership, thousands of front gardens have been given over to car parking – all those privet hedges and so on disappearing must have had some effect. Especially in a place like London where a lot of the houses are too small for on-street parking so it’s the front gardens that go. And then the back gardens go for extensions.
Just a thought.
Re Lead and petrol. Urbanites may not have noticed but sparrows have declined in the villages as well and have even gone from our our hamlet which has no though traffic. Any petrol effects must be way down the list of causes and we are next to marsh grazing and ditches with lots of insects.
They usually hung on where there were chickens which are fed mixed grains.
Now more people feed mixed grains and sunflower hearts etc as well as peanuts. The Americans don’t feed peanuts (though I saw that suggested as a feed if you wanted to discourage sparrows!)
I am not aware what seed the London trial fed as well as insects. Was it peanuts and insects or grain and insects. Any one know?
As Jane says they do like thick hedges in their territory.
Andrew – all sorts of reasons why house Sparrows have declined and they may not be the same in towns and rural areas. but in towns, it seems, it may be a lack of insects.
The house sparrow population in my garden halved from about 30 to about 15 when my neighbour removed her hawthorn hedge. As far as I can tell the group is fairly stable this year.
Diapensia – I’m glad.
I thought you were Mark?
Diapensia – I’m glad all over!
Just like the Dave Clark Five!
Think Filbert Cobb got by far the best explanation,at least for the rural populations,maybe the urban populations relied on these for topping up.
Last half of 20th century they were a big pest on farms and I believe in the first half of that century there was a period when a bounty was on them and still their numbers stayed up so obviously something as seriously gone wrong.
Dennis – your ‘topping up’ point is a very good one. I’ve often wondered that. However, it might not be right as House Sparrows are one of the most stay-at-home of British birds. Of course they will move a bit – but not much.
Mark I did not know till recently that House Sparrows do not move far.
I remember years ago hearing an old bird ringer talking the radio about the numbers of “sparrows” arriving at Hull docks in the winter ( then a big grain port with less food safety issues about spills and vermin access as Filbert says) The “sparrows” were in their millions. I assume these were tree sparrows? Do BTO records go back that far?
And given all the uncertainty Mark refers to about the potential drivers of the decline of the house sparrow in both urban and rural habitats, let’s not forget Dr Chris Bell’s research on the issue here http://tinyurl.com/nfa92bz , Charlie Moore’s interview with him here http://tinyurl.com/nuwchx6 and Bell’s latest You Tube video posting on the subject here http://tinyurl.com/ntax7lu (NB the podcasts are not short, but are worth listening to).
Oops, that should read …..Charlie Moores’ interview…… Don’t want to upset the grammar police
While you all speculate about this scientific theory and that scientific theory the view from the stratosphere is screaming out the name of the common denominator – mankind! (another example of the “obvious sometimes being the hardest thing to see and talk about”).
Previously on this entry I talked about “nice” people. Mark had tried this tack before, so maybe it is time to try another experiment. If the 1200 or so “nice” people that read this blog turn nasty (like me) for a year and withhold their subscriptions to the various NGOs who make a nice living out of these catastrophes without actually fixing them, then maybe something positive can come out of something negative? That is to get us all 60 odd million of us in thhis country thinking and talking about what we’re doing to our one and only Home!
Turning the thing on its head is after all a valid scientific problem solving technique.
Unfortunately, identifying the problem as being ‘mankind’ doesn’t really help solve the problem does it? I don’t think you are going to persuade the entire human race to eliminate itself so we need to try and identify the specific things we are doing to cause the problems that concern us. Of course you can – rightly – argue that we should seriously reduce our resource gobbling ways but we have to accept that any progress in that direction is going to be far too slow for many of our fellow species if it happens at all. It is surely essential, therefore, that we seek to identify specific causes to individual problems – the use of this chemical, the practice of that farming method, the application of this game-keeping practice etc – and try to correct them. There will be failures of course but also successes.
With respect to some of your other points, if commenting on blogs was all anyone did then it would be fair to make allegations of fiddling while the Titanic burns or Rome sinks or whatever but I suspect that many (most?) of the people commenting on this and other blogs are also engaged in a variety of ways in trying to make the world a better place for nature. You have also made it clear that you feel the NGOs are dong nothing to improve the state of nature but is this really fair? I am not employed by an NGO but it seems to me that the State of Nature would be a whole lot worse by now if it weren’t for the efforts of the RSPB, the Wildlife trusts et al. The fact that RSPB did not officially promote the vicarious liability ePetition is something that was obviously disappointing to many people but is hardly tantamount to them giving up on fighting wildlife persecution as some people seem to think. Of course, whilst wildlife continues to decline the RSPB and their fellow NGOs are, by definition, not doing enough but I really don’t see how withdrawing our support from them will help them to do more.
I was of the impression that like my beloved swifts, one of the main reasons for urban aass sparra decline was a loss of nesting sites or so I thought… like holes in eaves, gaps under tiles, loose fascias & soffits, crumbling mortar exposing wee gaps to exploit etc.
Many of our aaases are a lot more energy efficient, solid, tidy and air tight (more so since the 70s it seems anyway) and the beautiful, wonderful, fantastic, awe-inspiring and unique swifts …. ( oh and those dull cheepy sparras) run out of nesting sites.
Like Dennis I think Filbert is spot on re rural sparrows.
I’m waiting for someone…. to come on here and say:
“See. We told you. It’s those blessed hawks you all love”.
Do not think there is any simple solution and there is in this instance genuine effort being put in to find a remedy.
As Mark says it is the tip of all the problem as so many are in decline,what I do not understand is why farming is targeted with being the cause so often,surely if the land is not farmed it would soon turn to scru and then forest so many species would more or less disappear.
What we really need is to make it worthwhile for farmers to provide habitat and food for these species in trouble,it really should not be difficult if the powers that be want to do it as 75% of farmers already are in environment schemes.Problem is getting the schemes set up sensibly.
Surely that is something for rspb to get their teeth into as they have a million members.
Now if they talked to the NT and got co-operation together they would have a bit of clout.
One thing I’ve wondered about is oilseed rape – not whether its a good crop or not, but rather when farmers started combining they found an unacceptable loss of the tiny seeds from conventional combines – I just wonder how much lost grain was captured when combines were made ‘watertight’ for oilseed rape which must be grown on most arable farms now at one time or another ?
OSR had problems with seed shedding even before the combine got there. If the seed made it past the cutter bar another problem was it being blasted out of the back with the straw and trash. Gaps between board on trailers boosted the sales of gaffer tape and wood filler – but not before it had been spread along every verge in the land …
Roderick,doubt that made any difference,my guess is that as combines were used for clover which is also really small seed they have just like the motor car become more efficient.
It is remarkable just how much more efficient modern combines are in reducing the amount of spilt grain. During the last month I must have walked over at least 50-60 cereal stubble fields and the lack of spilt grain in some stubbles is really noticeable, in some fields there appeared to be almost none. A couple of years ago, I looked at a stubble (barley I think) where part of the field had been combined by a modern all-singing-all-dancing combine up until the point it had broken down, as the weather was closing in, the rest of the field had to be combined by the neighbouring farmer who took great delight in coming to the rescue in his very old combine. The difference in spilt grain was staggering, however given that few stubbles are now overwintered, I doubt that it actually makes much difference. These days given suitable soil conditions most stubbles will be ploughed and drilled with another crop by the middle of October.. Last year being the exception, I don’t ever recall seeing as many overwintered stubbles (and in some cases unharvested crops) as I did last winter.
I wonder how accurate are the bird numbers given? I now have wood pigeons in my garden, I live in the centre of a large village. Population is about 17,000. Only a couple of years ago pigeons would not be seen anywhere near the garden. It could be interpreted that there are more wood pigeons because they are seen in my garden, or is it because the woods have been cleared and there is nowhere else for the pigeons to nest? They have had to alter their lifestyle to survive? Similarly, magpies were not seen in the area until a motorway was constructed nearby. I think the magpies followed the roadkills into the district. Just casual observations from a non-birder.
Diapensia – I’m no “birder” either and used to wonder the same thing (how accurate are these figures).
I used to wonder as wherever I lived there seemed to be a veritable plethora of house sparrows knocking about and for that matter, nesting swifts.
But for me, that said more about the decrepit pre-war houses I was living in rather than any view into the population trends of the two species I mentioned – to think otherwise would be quite unscientific and logically inconsistent.
I think these days (more and more in fact with online recording now etc…) the BTO figures are pretty darned accurate (within a window of accuracy of course) at least in England (perhaps less so in Scotland).
The thing with birds is in the main they’re VERY visible (and failing that, audible) and have a vast army of “birders” out recording them every day (and sending results to the BTO).
This would make the BTO figures a pretty good estimate I’d say (again…. in England mainly).
The same couldn’t be said for population estimates of… oh I don’t know…. maybe…. scottish wildcats, moles or twenty-two spot ladybirds.
Diapensia they are getting tamer so you notice them more.
When I went to London 50 years ago I was amazed by the lumbering wood pigeons on Clapham Common. You had to watch where you walked or you might trip over one. Back home in the dales they flew miles high (Well out of shotgun range.) and left when you were a couple of fields away. Now they nest in a big shrub by the garage door which gets bashed every time the doors are opened. They get used to it and quit flying off the nest.
At the moment the Magpies leave when I am a filed away but a mile away, on Minsmere reserve, one landed a couple of meters in front of me and I had to wait for it to finish feeding, while I was looking down on it, before I could pass.
In the meantime, in the UK, House Sparrow will be reported as 66% down long term, Starling down by 78%. (Gloucestershire Bird Atlas (“The Birds of Gloucestershire” about to be published – official launch 15th November 2013).
In Gloucestershire, in a study conducted between 2007 and 2011, the percentage of Tetrads in which HS was recorded was 69.9% Starling 57.1%.
Between 1988 and 1991 the stats read 76.5% (HS) and 85.2% (Starling).
These are our modern day Canaries in the coal mine, will you be voting for the “Greenest Government Ever” or the other mainstream party at the next election?
Can,t see any difference in any of the “main party” leaders. So I will probably not bother.
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![By Knoell8504 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://markavery.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Chocolate-chip-cookie-crumbs-on-plate.png)
Mark, I enjoyed the article and agree with the overall point. Sparrows in many of our upland villages seem to have had a good year. We’ve had c 30 at our feeders this autumn, well up on the dozen or sonof previous years.
Jim – thanks. I think they have had a better year here in lowland east Northants too.
“Let’s hope that the House Sparrow is on the up again.”
Yeah – that’s all we’ve got hope. Nothing tangible in the air given the evidence of recent ePetitions.
Mark, in your recent piece on the last Passenger Pigeon, I made reference to the Starlings that blackened the sky each evening on their way to roost in my home town.
Starlings and House Sparrows, probably the most abundant birds in my back yard when I first became hooked on nature and bird life. How sad would it be if the recent reports are a false dawn and they decline to zero in my lifetime or not long after? Not impossible given the ongoing loss of food and habitat and build up of pollutants (always assuming we’re not been told porkies)?
Now given I have determined the clever people who claim to be giving nature a home don’t appear to have the intelligence to engage with enough of the ordinary people like me who collectively could cause politicians to enable real action are not going to save them then maybe, referring back to another of your earlier themes, the “nice” people who are much too polite to shine a light on the clever people’s failures could do something?
I’m not holding my breath! Cosily chatting away day after day on blogs ain’t doing much good. I suppose they might think of a name for the last “Sparra” maybe. A nasty person’s suggestion would be Martha if its female and Artha, if it’s male.
It has been suggested by more than one naturalist/ author that sparrows started to decline in London ( and other large cities?) when motor traffic replaced horses. This reduced seed ( from the nose bag) and flies from the dung. There was also a question about the effects of petrol fumes on the sparrows well being.
It is good to see the BTO report, but it is difficult to envisage sparrows returning in numbers to inner city areas.
Trevor – excellent research done by Leicester Uni and RSPB shows that lack of insects in inner cities causes starvation in broods. The search is still on for the true cause of insect decline – lots of ideas though!
There was also the issue that soparrows were killed during the First World War because they took grain that was needed for people, however, populations seemed to recover for a while after 1919.
I too saw a report that linked the decline of sparrows to the use of unleaded petrol. Though it has to be said the House Sparrow on our housing estate has always done well and this summer seems to be a bumper year for them.
Douglas – unless something has happened in the last two years which i have missed (perfectly possible) I think the lead-free petrol idea is just that – an idea. Urban house sparrows have declined in many other cities in Europe (though they are doing great in the USA as non-natives!) and many of these declkines seem to be fairly ‘recent’. If lack of insects is the problem then what might cause a lack of insects in Paris, London and Rome? Something affecting air quality could be the type of factor – and we would have expected air quality to have risen. So is there some funny little side effect of something else that causes the decline? That’s how you get, speculatively, to lead-free petrol (I think).
Science is fun – it’s about imagination and having good ideas (and then doing a lot of hard work to test them rigorously).
Mark here’s what I was reading http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/leadfree-petrol-may-be-villain-in-mystery-of-demise-of-the-worlds-most-familiar-bird-698469.html
also from here briefly at http://www.bto.org/sites/default/files/u23/images/about_gbw/house-sparrow-survey/bird_table_63_housp_survey.pdf
Not speculative there’s plenty more links out there citing unleaded/lead free petrol as a possible cause.
Douglas – yep, the first of those is from 2000 and there hasn’t been a scientific paper that has nailed it. That’s all I mean by speculative.
There may be something in it – but at the moment it’s speculation without anything even close to proof.
MTBE is a well known carcinogenic ingredient found in unleaded petrol, there are some American (EPA) and Indian based reports linking MTBE to not only decline in insects (mostly from underground petrol tanks leaking into the water courses) that are from 2010 and one from 2012, though on the one from the EPA indicates it’s not a final report. The EPA report even links MTBE to asthma in children there’s also from India suggestions of a link between mobile phone masts to their decline in House Sparrows so it seems there could be many links to the decline of the House Sparrow and not just unleaded, I can understand some conservationist uncomfort that unleaded fuel could be just as harmful as the fuel it replaced as I’ve stated before on here and you also acknowledge some consevationist were hailing bio-fuels as the better option a few years back…. 🙁 Is this a possible reason for no further conclusive reports on unleaded fuels/mtbe as it might make uncomfortable reading? Is there a report/study in the pipeline?
We’ve noticed the sedentary nature over 17 years of feeding at our current semi-urban house. There used to be a colony in a climber about 100 metres away which used our feeders so our count was as much as 25 about 10 years ago. That creeper was cut down and the colony disappeared. There is a colony about 150 metres away across allotments but we rarely get more than 2 birds venturing that distance to feed. They get a lot from the allotments, although more and more people use netting and plastic to “protect” their vegetables and plants.
I’m not sure how we make sparrows more adventurous! Some obviously are, witness the Spanish sparrow that turned up a couple of years ago, but most aren’t!
The Spadger decline – potential contributing factors to chew on
Inexorable swing to winter cropping since mid-70s – many fewer fields with over-wintered stubble.
1990 Food Safety Act requires protection of grain stores from rodents, birds, domestic animals and Mrs Curry – excluded by netting at eaves and close-fitting doors etc.
Increased efficiency of combine harvesters leaves much less “tail corn” on the ground.
Increased use of fungicides and insecticides reduces amount of tail corn.
Use of cereal varieties with improved Specific Weight reduces amount of tail corn.
Increased efficacy, and prophylactic use of insecticides has massively reduced the aphid population in arable areas.
Just a purely subjective observation – but I’ve noticed that house sparrows seem to need hedges – they seem to be, as Nigel said, unadventurous, and need a hedge (big creeper etc.) to loaf around and hide in. Our garden ones sit around in some big prickly bushes before venturing to the feeders, to return as soon as poss to the bushes. A colony I used to cycle by were always just sitting around in a hedge, and whenever I see them elsewhere out and about, it is usually in a hedge/bushes/other cover – usually the scruffier the better.
With the increase in car ownership, thousands of front gardens have been given over to car parking – all those privet hedges and so on disappearing must have had some effect. Especially in a place like London where a lot of the houses are too small for on-street parking so it’s the front gardens that go. And then the back gardens go for extensions.
Just a thought.
Re Lead and petrol. Urbanites may not have noticed but sparrows have declined in the villages as well and have even gone from our our hamlet which has no though traffic. Any petrol effects must be way down the list of causes and we are next to marsh grazing and ditches with lots of insects.
They usually hung on where there were chickens which are fed mixed grains.
Now more people feed mixed grains and sunflower hearts etc as well as peanuts. The Americans don’t feed peanuts (though I saw that suggested as a feed if you wanted to discourage sparrows!)
I am not aware what seed the London trial fed as well as insects. Was it peanuts and insects or grain and insects. Any one know?
As Jane says they do like thick hedges in their territory.
Andrew – all sorts of reasons why house Sparrows have declined and they may not be the same in towns and rural areas. but in towns, it seems, it may be a lack of insects.
The house sparrow population in my garden halved from about 30 to about 15 when my neighbour removed her hawthorn hedge. As far as I can tell the group is fairly stable this year.
Diapensia – I’m glad.
I thought you were Mark?
Diapensia – I’m glad all over!
Just like the Dave Clark Five!
Think Filbert Cobb got by far the best explanation,at least for the rural populations,maybe the urban populations relied on these for topping up.
Last half of 20th century they were a big pest on farms and I believe in the first half of that century there was a period when a bounty was on them and still their numbers stayed up so obviously something as seriously gone wrong.
Dennis – your ‘topping up’ point is a very good one. I’ve often wondered that. However, it might not be right as House Sparrows are one of the most stay-at-home of British birds. Of course they will move a bit – but not much.
Mark I did not know till recently that House Sparrows do not move far.
I remember years ago hearing an old bird ringer talking the radio about the numbers of “sparrows” arriving at Hull docks in the winter ( then a big grain port with less food safety issues about spills and vermin access as Filbert says) The “sparrows” were in their millions. I assume these were tree sparrows? Do BTO records go back that far?
And given all the uncertainty Mark refers to about the potential drivers of the decline of the house sparrow in both urban and rural habitats, let’s not forget Dr Chris Bell’s research on the issue here http://tinyurl.com/nfa92bz , Charlie Moore’s interview with him here http://tinyurl.com/nuwchx6 and Bell’s latest You Tube video posting on the subject here http://tinyurl.com/ntax7lu (NB the podcasts are not short, but are worth listening to).
Oops, that should read …..Charlie Moores’ interview…… Don’t want to upset the grammar police
While you all speculate about this scientific theory and that scientific theory the view from the stratosphere is screaming out the name of the common denominator – mankind! (another example of the “obvious sometimes being the hardest thing to see and talk about”).
Previously on this entry I talked about “nice” people. Mark had tried this tack before, so maybe it is time to try another experiment. If the 1200 or so “nice” people that read this blog turn nasty (like me) for a year and withhold their subscriptions to the various NGOs who make a nice living out of these catastrophes without actually fixing them, then maybe something positive can come out of something negative? That is to get us all 60 odd million of us in thhis country thinking and talking about what we’re doing to our one and only Home!
Turning the thing on its head is after all a valid scientific problem solving technique.
Unfortunately, identifying the problem as being ‘mankind’ doesn’t really help solve the problem does it? I don’t think you are going to persuade the entire human race to eliminate itself so we need to try and identify the specific things we are doing to cause the problems that concern us. Of course you can – rightly – argue that we should seriously reduce our resource gobbling ways but we have to accept that any progress in that direction is going to be far too slow for many of our fellow species if it happens at all. It is surely essential, therefore, that we seek to identify specific causes to individual problems – the use of this chemical, the practice of that farming method, the application of this game-keeping practice etc – and try to correct them. There will be failures of course but also successes.
With respect to some of your other points, if commenting on blogs was all anyone did then it would be fair to make allegations of fiddling while the Titanic burns or Rome sinks or whatever but I suspect that many (most?) of the people commenting on this and other blogs are also engaged in a variety of ways in trying to make the world a better place for nature. You have also made it clear that you feel the NGOs are dong nothing to improve the state of nature but is this really fair? I am not employed by an NGO but it seems to me that the State of Nature would be a whole lot worse by now if it weren’t for the efforts of the RSPB, the Wildlife trusts et al. The fact that RSPB did not officially promote the vicarious liability ePetition is something that was obviously disappointing to many people but is hardly tantamount to them giving up on fighting wildlife persecution as some people seem to think. Of course, whilst wildlife continues to decline the RSPB and their fellow NGOs are, by definition, not doing enough but I really don’t see how withdrawing our support from them will help them to do more.
I was of the impression that like my beloved swifts, one of the main reasons for urban aass sparra decline was a loss of nesting sites or so I thought… like holes in eaves, gaps under tiles, loose fascias & soffits, crumbling mortar exposing wee gaps to exploit etc.
Many of our aaases are a lot more energy efficient, solid, tidy and air tight (more so since the 70s it seems anyway) and the beautiful, wonderful, fantastic, awe-inspiring and unique swifts …. ( oh and those dull cheepy sparras) run out of nesting sites.
Like Dennis I think Filbert is spot on re rural sparrows.
I’m waiting for someone…. to come on here and say:
“See. We told you. It’s those blessed hawks you all love”.
Do not think there is any simple solution and there is in this instance genuine effort being put in to find a remedy.
As Mark says it is the tip of all the problem as so many are in decline,what I do not understand is why farming is targeted with being the cause so often,surely if the land is not farmed it would soon turn to scru and then forest so many species would more or less disappear.
What we really need is to make it worthwhile for farmers to provide habitat and food for these species in trouble,it really should not be difficult if the powers that be want to do it as 75% of farmers already are in environment schemes.Problem is getting the schemes set up sensibly.
Surely that is something for rspb to get their teeth into as they have a million members.
Now if they talked to the NT and got co-operation together they would have a bit of clout.
One thing I’ve wondered about is oilseed rape – not whether its a good crop or not, but rather when farmers started combining they found an unacceptable loss of the tiny seeds from conventional combines – I just wonder how much lost grain was captured when combines were made ‘watertight’ for oilseed rape which must be grown on most arable farms now at one time or another ?
OSR had problems with seed shedding even before the combine got there. If the seed made it past the cutter bar another problem was it being blasted out of the back with the straw and trash. Gaps between board on trailers boosted the sales of gaffer tape and wood filler – but not before it had been spread along every verge in the land …
Roderick,doubt that made any difference,my guess is that as combines were used for clover which is also really small seed they have just like the motor car become more efficient.
It is remarkable just how much more efficient modern combines are in reducing the amount of spilt grain. During the last month I must have walked over at least 50-60 cereal stubble fields and the lack of spilt grain in some stubbles is really noticeable, in some fields there appeared to be almost none. A couple of years ago, I looked at a stubble (barley I think) where part of the field had been combined by a modern all-singing-all-dancing combine up until the point it had broken down, as the weather was closing in, the rest of the field had to be combined by the neighbouring farmer who took great delight in coming to the rescue in his very old combine. The difference in spilt grain was staggering, however given that few stubbles are now overwintered, I doubt that it actually makes much difference. These days given suitable soil conditions most stubbles will be ploughed and drilled with another crop by the middle of October.. Last year being the exception, I don’t ever recall seeing as many overwintered stubbles (and in some cases unharvested crops) as I did last winter.
I wonder how accurate are the bird numbers given? I now have wood pigeons in my garden, I live in the centre of a large village. Population is about 17,000. Only a couple of years ago pigeons would not be seen anywhere near the garden. It could be interpreted that there are more wood pigeons because they are seen in my garden, or is it because the woods have been cleared and there is nowhere else for the pigeons to nest? They have had to alter their lifestyle to survive? Similarly, magpies were not seen in the area until a motorway was constructed nearby. I think the magpies followed the roadkills into the district. Just casual observations from a non-birder.
Diapensia – I’m no “birder” either and used to wonder the same thing (how accurate are these figures).
I used to wonder as wherever I lived there seemed to be a veritable plethora of house sparrows knocking about and for that matter, nesting swifts.
But for me, that said more about the decrepit pre-war houses I was living in rather than any view into the population trends of the two species I mentioned – to think otherwise would be quite unscientific and logically inconsistent.
I think these days (more and more in fact with online recording now etc…) the BTO figures are pretty darned accurate (within a window of accuracy of course) at least in England (perhaps less so in Scotland).
The thing with birds is in the main they’re VERY visible (and failing that, audible) and have a vast army of “birders” out recording them every day (and sending results to the BTO).
This would make the BTO figures a pretty good estimate I’d say (again…. in England mainly).
The same couldn’t be said for population estimates of… oh I don’t know…. maybe…. scottish wildcats, moles or twenty-two spot ladybirds.
Diapensia they are getting tamer so you notice them more.
When I went to London 50 years ago I was amazed by the lumbering wood pigeons on Clapham Common. You had to watch where you walked or you might trip over one. Back home in the dales they flew miles high (Well out of shotgun range.) and left when you were a couple of fields away. Now they nest in a big shrub by the garage door which gets bashed every time the doors are opened. They get used to it and quit flying off the nest.
At the moment the Magpies leave when I am a filed away but a mile away, on Minsmere reserve, one landed a couple of meters in front of me and I had to wait for it to finish feeding, while I was looking down on it, before I could pass.
In the meantime, in the UK, House Sparrow will be reported as 66% down long term, Starling down by 78%. (Gloucestershire Bird Atlas (“The Birds of Gloucestershire” about to be published – official launch 15th November 2013).
In Gloucestershire, in a study conducted between 2007 and 2011, the percentage of Tetrads in which HS was recorded was 69.9% Starling 57.1%.
Between 1988 and 1991 the stats read 76.5% (HS) and 85.2% (Starling).
These are our modern day Canaries in the coal mine, will you be voting for the “Greenest Government Ever” or the other mainstream party at the next election?
Can,t see any difference in any of the “main party” leaders. So I will probably not bother.