The results of the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch were released last week. They show considerable stability in identities and rankings of the UK’s top 10 winter garden birds. That’s what usually happens with small changes in rankings from year to year and larger changes becoming apparent over longer periods.
It’s worth looking at the actual results (they are quite well summarised – click here) and the results from the previous three years are available, as are county-level detailed results.
The headline result from the RSPB is that the poor old Starling has fallen from third to fourth and looking at the data there is a decline in numbers (though one would have to correct for effort (eg numbers of gardens participating) to be sure of this). But a fall in numbers is only one way to change your position in the rankings – you can be overtaken by another species getting commoner, and there is some of that going on as Woodpigeon (when did we cease calling it Wood Pigeon?) has increased in each of the last couple of years. If Starlings had declined to their current level (uncorrected for effort) and Woodpigeons had remained at their 2022 level (uncorrected for effort) then Starling would still be #3.
The increase in Woodpigeon numbers is real, I think. The BBS says they are increasing (and Starling decreasing) and my memory (a less reliable measurement) tells me that Woodpigeons were less common garden visitors in the days of my youth but also over the 25+ years I have lived in this house and looked out over this garden. It used to be that Collared Doves lived in towns and Woodpigeons lived in the country but now both live in towns, and in my small rural town in Northants, Woodpigeons are much more in evidence now than in the past.
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I like to collate our county results to share locally, so am disappointed to find that everything detailed is now in pdf format. It makes copying into my own spreadsheets much more time-consuming.
Using Nitro Pro I just extracted a page for Wiltshire and converted to Excel. Worked up to a point and would need cleaning up using Find/Replace etc
Birds of the Western Palearctic (1985) uses ‘woodpigeon’ but ‘wood pigeon’ is found in at least some other more recent books. On-line it is possible to find ‘woodpigeon’, ‘wood pigeon’ and ‘wood-pigeon’ though the first seems to be the most popular. I have a book from 1885 called ‘Provincial Names and Folklore of British Birds’ by the Rev. Charles Swainson which gives ‘Ringdove’ as the standard name and ‘woodpigeon’ as a variant. By whatever name, I would agree that it is a bird that seems much more commonplace in gardens now than it was in my youth.
The standout statistic for me is the absence of dunnock from the top five,never mind the top ten, maybe unnoticed by many. The importance of insects cannot be overstated. In the 60s,70s and to a slightly lesser extent the 80s ,our Birmingham inner city garden was teeming with insects and consequently many birds,song thrush and cuckoo regular visitors as well as the all the common species. A 95% drop in the tiger moth ‘woolly bear’ caterpillar, seen everywhere in the decades mentioned and the favourite food of the cuckoo has been a major factor in the birds decline. I have not heard a cuckoo in Lichfield, in my semi-rural location in over thirty years. We have not had a song thrush in our garden in all that time. With reference to the starling,the ‘ murmuration’ now a wildlife spectacle , would be remembered by most Brummies over forty as thousands of starlings roosted in the city centre every night,sadly no longer. Many thanks to the RSPB for your sterling efforts.
Stephen – that’s a very interesting comment thank you.
Starlings…in Bradford city centre, the evening murmurations were a delight to me as a child…alas no more. I haven’t seen starling in the city for many years ( a bit vague I know) but we do see them on the moors in small groups.