A landowner, whom I know, tried to post the following comment on last Thursday's blog but failed. Because he raises some interesting points I am posting his comments here and commenting on them.
PM wrote: Mark - It sounds as if Hope Farm is going really well. Many congratulations. However you say that “winter counts aren’t the most important counts – the real measure of success is in breeding numbers” . Do you really mean this ? Surely the real measure of success is the number of chicks that are successfully fledged ?
Interesting that Trimbush comments that his lapwing have returned. With spring in the air, doubtless they have one thing on their minds. Your fellow scientists tell us that each pair of lapwing needs to fledge an average of 0.7 chicks per year in order to maintain a biologically stable population. You will know better than me that RSPB monitoring work on 25 breeding lapwing sites a few years ago, revealed that only two of these sites produced more than the 0.7 chicks per adult pair average. Which means that 23 of the 25 sites were acting as ecological traps (population sinks).
And you will remember that research work that we commissioned last season on the North Kent Marshes showed that 3 out of the 4 breeding lapwing sites monitored were likewise not producing a viable number of chicks. Which we concluded resulted from the breeding wader management prescriptions being politically correct but biologically perverse.
Isn’t this lack of chick productivity the real problem for some farmland birds ? Shouldn’t fledgling numbers be your real measure of success ?
(Believe it or not, this is the first time that I have posted a comment on any blog).
No, I meant that the real measure of success is breeding numbers. Those breeding numbers derive from an interaction between how long individuals survive and how successful they are at reproducing.
Imagine a newly created piece of perfect habitat which is colonised by some birds. The rate at which that population will grow depends on how good the breeding birds are at producing young but also how long the adult birds survive. Lots of young but low survival can be as bad as low breeding success and living for a long time. It's a bit like the RSPB membership number depends on how many new members we recruit but also on how good we are at retaining the members we already have. If you score high on both then your membership (population) is booming, low on both and you are heading for extinction. But it's difficult to say that productivity is more important than survival and that's one reason we measure breeding numbers - they integrate those two important population parameters. And it's difficult to say that membership retention is more or less important than recruitment and that's why we tell you our year end membership each year as that figure integrates those two important population parameters.
These things are clear when you compare species - albatrosses live a long time, breed at a late age and don't have many young each year even when they do breed, whereas great tits have a short life on earth and attempt to fill the woods with their young if they can. We wouldn't say that great tits have it right and albatrosses have got it wrong.
It is the quality of the habitat that ultimately determines the breeding densities of any species - better habitat leads to higher densities being achieved before the pressures of competition for food or nesting sites limit numbers. That's a great oversimplification but it captures the gist.
If your habitat is 'full' then if you produce lots of young they will have nowhere to go and they will die. That is essentially the struggle for existence which Darwin noted and which drives evolution by natural selection. And that over-production of young is what enables game shoots potentially to be sustainable without the population of their prey crashing.
So, I agree with you that productivity is important but it isn't 'the real measure of success' - unless you run a pheasant shoot and then it's pretty important.
But we are concerned about the productivity of some birds on some of our nature reserves - of course we are. With 200+ nature reserves and getting on for 200 breeding bird species on them then it would be a bit surprising if we weren't. And increasing productivity is something we are trying to do on some of our nature reserves.
And so ideally, when looking at any population to see how it's doing we would see how its density compared with what we would expect - is the site a 'good' place or a 'bad' place for that species. And then ideally we would look at the balance between production of young and adult survival. We can rarely measure survival and productivity is pretty difficult too!
Mark here in Cumbria red squirrels are becoming increasingly rare. Someone has just told me that a buzzard is taking red squirrels from a garden feeder and that a buzzard last year (possibly the same) had the remains of 17 red squirrels in it's nest. I do not know how they know this or whether it is true ,but hypothetically what if anything can be done in such a situation?
What would the RSPB do if for example a buzzard was heavily predating a colony of endangered breeding birds on an RSPB reserve?
Mark – The pheasant shooting point arose from your comment on your blog in response to me where you say that “chick productivity isn’t the real measure of success – unless you run a pheasant shoot and then it’s pretty important.”
Sorry Mark, I think productivity is just as important if you run a nature reserve or a farm. I am afraid that I still don’t agree with your thinking that breeding numbers are the real measure of success. Experience leads mean to remain convinced that fledgling numbers are the real measure of biological success.
Anyway Mark it doesn’t matter whether you and I agree or not. The RSPB can run its reserves as it wants as can we (with Natural England’s blessing). What really matters is that the issue is given a real airing (many thanks to you and your blog) and that others including Defra with their HLS agri-environment breeding wader schemes can, after 20+ years of Environment Stewardship, think a bit more deeply about how to improve their agri-environment prescriptions in order to reverse the tragic and continuing fall in numbers of some farmland bird species.
Lazywell and Sooty - you seem to misunderstand our policy on predator control. We aren't against it. We do, as has been said on this blog before, control (and that means killl in this case) foxes , for example, on about 20 of our nature reserves - and that's usually in cases where we think that they are reducing breeding wader nesting success. So to that extent we are in total agreement. You could characterise the RSPB as reluctant controllers of predators who do it when we are fairly sure it is necessary rather than inveterate predator controllers who do it everywhere and anywhere. That is a perfectly rational position to be in, I would say.
And Lazywell, in that context we do carry out research into non-lethal alternatives to killing things - that is a sensible place for a reluctant-to-kill, science-based organisation to be in. And more than that - my blog of 24 November last year shows that it also delivers results which are quite impressive and worth taking further. It's good to keep an open mind and where you have a problem, and on some of our nature reserves we want to increase productivity of species so that their population numbers increase, and we are looking at the full range of options not just one. There can't be much wrong with looking at the whole picture - particularly when that open mind has already led to some practical success on the ground.
PM - I didn't ask anything about whether you shoot pheasants, did I? And we don't disagree that chick fledging success is important - and there is nothing in what I have written here that could lead you to think that we do, is there? Your initial point was that I was incorrect to say that the breeding population is the real measure of success - I would hope that this discussion has shown you that that is right.
Timely perhaps to refer to a project I hadn't been aware of before, "Reducing the impact of predation on ground nesting waders", namely lapwing and redshank:
www.rspb.org.uk/.../204704-reducing-the-impact-of-predation-on-ground-nesting-waders-
I'm trying to find out more details from the scientist involved, but the summary on the webpage is gloomy: habitat manipulation was successful, but the waders didn't respond as desired and the level of predation, particularly mammalian, remained high.
In turn I was startled by the proposal for work in the future - essentially further habitat manipulation, but this time for other prey species in order to encourage a kind of diversionary predation.
This, I suggest Mark, is a case of your policy of predator control being a policy of last resort being taken to ridiculous extremes.
Many thanks, Mark for focussing your latest blog on the issues raised in my email. That’s very good of you. Likewise I also believe that a debate such as this is crucial for the future of farmland birds such as the lapwing – a species which is suffering one of the steepest declines in the UK.
I agree with you when you write that “Those breeding numbers derive from an interaction between how long individuals survive and how successful they are at reproducing”. But what about immigration? Breeding numbers on a specific site are also derived from immigration of breeding birds to that site. Which results from how successful the manager of the site is in creating attractive breeding (but not necessarily fledging) conditions for prospecting adults.
Gert Corfield mentioned my article in British Wildlife published in October. I guess it is relevant to quote a couple of points from it:
The wider picture is set out by the doyen of ornithological science, the recently retired RSPB Chairman, Prof Ian Newton who wrote to me recently “The finding that makes me think that the British population as a whole has suffered a net reduction in breeding success is that an analysis of BTO ringing data in the 1990s showed no change in adult mortality over several decades, so declining numbers could only have been due to reduced reproduction. From this, it follows that much of the present habitat in lowland Britain must be acting as a 'sink' in which reproduction is insufficient to offset the normal adult mortality”.
I believe that herein lies one answer and something that so far has been overlooked by policy makers and by far too many conservationists, both in theory and in practice. How many times has one visited a flagship reserve to find good numbers of breeding lapwing attracted to the site but negligible numbers of chicks fledged.
Another clue to the lapwing population crash lies in a paper published by Kleijn and others in Nature in 2001 which focussed on the rather more determined and committed Dutch approach to breeding wader management “management agreements for breeding waders …. might have led to an ecological trap; that is, it might have decoupled the cues that individuals use to select their nesting habitat from the main factors that determine their reproductive success”. Such ecological traps are created by breeding birds being strongly attracted, both through philopatry and artificial flooding, to traditional breeding sites where unsuitable management after the egg laying period, results in too few chicks being fledged.
To answer another question of yours, Mark – No I don’t run a pheasant shoot, but yes I am a landowner with responsibility for managing two National Nature Reserves who thinks that the crucial issue of chick fledging success (breeding productivity) of some species of farmland birds has been ignored for too long.