A couple of weeks ago I was srolling around Berlin on a sunny day, looking at the sights. Last week I spent a similar amount of time walking through similar parts of central London on another sunny day.
In Berlin I strolled through parks and squares near museums and churches and in London I walked through St James’s Park and Russell Square, near the National Gallery and British Museum, and entered Westminster Abbey.
My ‘phone tells me I made 18,000 steps in Berlin and 17,000 in London.
In Berlin I kept an eBird list which included 100+ House Sparrows, and several Swifts, Swallow and House Martins. In London I didn’t keep a list but I kept my eyes and ears open and recorded not a single individual of any of those four species.
Hmmm!
I’m not really sure why there is this big difference. London is a much bigger city – central London is further away from the countryside (a source of aerial insect plankton?) than central Berlin is. But why aren’t London’s parks full of their own insect life?
Paris, Madrid and Warsaw all have Swifts (Madrid has two species of them to make it more fun) and visible House Sparrows. I’ve easily come across House Sparrows in Washington DC whereas I have struggled to see them in the normal course of events in central London.
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I used to say that I was going to read on long train journeys but I rarely do. I look out of the window and I let my brain go wherever it will – which is often puzzling over what is top of my mind in nature conservation at the time.
So it should come as no surprise that I was more than usually attentive to how many, or how few, corvids I saw between Berlin and Warsaw, and back again, on a recent trip. I didn’t make a proper count over the 18 hours on the train mostly passing through German and Polish countryside (there was a 4-hour delay in one direction!) but there were very few corvids to be seen. In fact I’m sure I saw more Common Cranes than Magpies!
I definitely saw more Magpies, Rooks, Carrion Crows and Jackdaws on the 50-minute journey from St Pancras to Wellingborough on Friday than I did in all those 18 hours in eastern Europe.
Of course, releasing over 50 million non-native gamebirds (Pheasants and Red-legged Partridges) into the countryside for recreational shooting is the equivalent of feeding generalist predators and scavengers such as Red Foxes and Carrion Crows. Carrion Crows – I wonder why they aren’t called Bird-killing Crows? Might it be because they eat an awful lot of carrion, by any chance? And what is a major source of carrion in the UK but the 30+ million gamebirds that aren’t shot by recreational shooters but are gone by the time the next 50 million are released the next year?
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A very thought provoking blog Mark and yet another very poor reflection on this country and it’s Government with all its vested interests in shooting. I have always thought that the demise of our butterflies though the caterpillars being eaten and the demise of our reptiles especially adders and lizards, through the predation of the young by pheasants is largely due to gross distortion of our balance of wildlife by the release of enormous numbers of pheasants etc.
It is just shame on this Government that this is allowed to take place. Release of game birds for shooting is prohibited in Holland and may well be in other European countries.
So it is shame on the shooters in the U.K. and shame on this Government for encouraging this enormous damage and distortion to our native wildlife.
Comparisons between the fauna of different countries are not straightforward as there are clearly various factors involved. The impacts of game bird rearing and release may be a factor in corvid abundance but it would be incorrect to think that this practice is restricted to the UK. I don’t have any information on numbers involved but I know that various game species are reared and released in France and Germany (i have no idea about Poland) including pheasant, quail, partridge spp, mallard and hare.
Jonathan – the UK is way out ahead in terms of numbers, compared with other European countries.
Hi Mark. As I say, I have no information on numbers of birds released in other countries so I am happy to bow to your greater knowledge on the topic. Irrespective of comparisons with other countries I am certainly of the view that the release of large numbers of pheasants every year into the countryside is ecologically distorting and likely to have serious negative consequences for a variety of other species.
I do feel, though, that there is a tendency sometimes for people to think that other than a few weird islands in the Mediterranean, the UK is the only place in Europe in which legal and illegal practices associated with shooting have harmful effects on wildlife. This is emphatically not the case. Persecution of raptors , for example, occurs in various European countries including Germany (see CABS reports). The sentences recently handed down in Spain to the perpetrators of a raptor poisoning incident were widely (and rightly) admired but the fact remains that they were issued in response to an astonishingly large poisoning incident so the problem certainly exists in Spain.
None of this exculpates the UK in any way but it is important to recognise that all is not perfect elsewhere – we need to support efforts to put an end to persecution wherever it occurs.
Finally, I visit family in Germany quite often and have not noticed that crows and magpies are conspicuously less abundant than in the UK but I will pay more attention on future visits to see how it compares!
Jonathan Are there many free rang pigs in Germany. I guess the winters can be much colder than here so possibly not.
Corvids and seagulls used to be very common on free-range pig farms around here. Recently farmers have introduced bird proof feeders so it will be interesting to see what happens to their populations. They used to feed there year round. This must have influenced their population. Free range pigs have spread across the country.
Looking on the internet Pig world has an review article
Straw-based/outdoor systems
UK – 40% of sows are outdoors, ……………. 2-3% of finishers are free range and 0.6% of production is organic.
…………..
Rest of EU, US, Canada, Brazil – very few, if any, pigs are kept outdoors or on straw indoors. Most are kept on slatted floors. Very few organic pigs.
http://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/highlighting-the-differences-how-uk-welfare-standards-compare-with-our-competitors.html 10 June 2019
Buzzards have moved in here and surely benefit from winter pheasant roadkill. I see half a dozen red kites a year, if I’m lucky. it will be interesting to see when they arrived in earnest how the Buzzards fare.
Spring summer road kill is mainly baby rabbit not many pheasants.
I have not seen any large scale free-range pig farming in the part of Germany I visit (Hessen) but Germany is a large country so it may well be practiced in other parts.
Corvids provide a major part of Goshawk diet. Goshawks are undoubtedly commoner in Germany and Poland than they are here. Then again they do release far fewer bloody pheasants and one German state that allows release says they cannot be shot in the year of release, which seems odd. Personally I would do what the Dutch have done and ban the release of non-native game birds, not the shooting of them just the release. I’d also of course ban all lead ammunition.
I believe they have about 40 pairs of goshawk in Berlin! There’s a (non sporting) estate near me which is absolutely heaving with various corvids species as well as plenty of songbirds too. In addition quite a few wood pigeon and grey squirrels. I’ve always thought with its extensive mixed woodland it was as ‘goshawky’ a place as you can get, but FC staff tell me there have been very occasional sightings, but never a breeding pair. Like hen harriers our goshawks are missing. Mark Conor Jameson in his splendid ‘Looking for the Goshawk’ surmised that we don’t get the phenomenon of goshawks living close to people in this country because such birds are more easily bumped off, so there is a form of unnatural selection at work.
Kites hadn’t nested in Derbyshire since the mid 19th century – until last year when the first pair for over 150 years nested in the south of the county. This year there are at least four active kite nests so we can expect an exponential increase over the next decade….except in the Peak Park moorlands – for obvious reasons.
Swift numbers are reported to be down and this spell of awfully wet and cold weather won’t be helping them either.
Let’s hope for sunshine during the week 22-30 June which is Swift Awareness Week. There are over 75 events arranged by some 70 local swift conservation groups, details of which are on the Action for Swifts blog. Events are spread from the south coast to the N of Scotland and there’s even one in Eire!