View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDS GONE?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDS GONE?

Recently I’ve been pondering over some of the frequently asked and strange questions that are posed to us at the Old Moor Welcome Desk. I looked at some of them in last week’s blog but there was a particular one that I left over as it deserves an entire article on its own.

The question is - ‘Where have all the birds gone’? Whether it’s in their garden, on nature reserves like ours, in the UK as a whole or even globally, more and more people are noticing that there are fewer and fewer birds in the skies than in previous decades and are, quite rightly, wondering what has happened to them.

This is an issue that the RSPB battles with every day. Where have they gone? Why have they disappeared? How come there are now over 20% fewer birds in the skies worldwide than 50 years ago? In Britain specifically the figures are even more startling. Surveys show that we’ve lost 73 million birds over that same time period - that’s almost a third of our total bird numbers.

According to data collected by the British Trust for Ornithology, “almost 30 million House Sparrows, 20 million Starlings, 4 million Skylarks, 2 million Blackbirds and 1 million Chaffinches have vanished from the UK since 1970”. Almost half of all our bird species are in decline with farmland and woodland birds being particularly hard hit.

So what’s the cause of this dramatic decline?

Global warming is playing its part, definitely. As the planet heats up certain kinds of birds find it more difficult to find somewhere safe and comfortable to live that has a readily available and reliable food source. They either adapt or die and sadly, some species seem to be unable to evolve quickly enough. 

But an indication of the biggest single reason for falling bird populations may be on your windscreen. If you’ve been around longer than the aforementioned fifty years, cast your mind back to your youth. If you aren’t that old you’ll just have to trust me and indulge us oldies for a while. It is relevant, I promise.

Imagine it’s the long hot summer of 1976, the season of melting pavements and the burgeoning Punk music scene. You’re on a road trip, perhaps (like me) heading to Scarborough in the back of your Dad’s Austin Maxi. The skin peels from your legs as it sticks to the attractive mustard-coloured vinyl of the hot back bench seat and your Mum is listening to Perry Como on the car cassette player. You try to look out of the front windscreen but find it difficult. 

“Dad, put the wipers on!”

Dad does as you ask and the screen smears with black streaks, the squished bodies of a hundred bugs and small flies. It’s difficult to imagine if you weren’t there but sometimes the window would be black with the remains of these little creatures as they hit the speeding car. On really bad days you might have to pull over to the side of the road and clear the view. But if these bugs were a mild summer irritant to us back then, they were a godsend to the birds in breeding season.

Mammalian mothers feed milk to their babies. It’s full of fats, proteins and calcium to help the little ones grow strong muscles and healthy bones.

Bird mothers feed insects to their babies. They’re full of fats, proteins and body casings to help the little ones grow strong muscles and healthy bones.

In a perfect world, a single adult bird might eat around 100 times its own body weight in insects each year. That would be the equivalent of me chomping through around 10 tonnes of pizza annually. Even I would find that daunting. But the birds need this vital food source and a lack of bugs means that fewer birds will be able to feed their young.

Since research began in 2004 bug numbers have fallen an incredible 60% nationally. In some species that have been particularly badly hit, that figure increases to as much as 78%. Looking at that as a generalisation, up to three quarters of flying tiny creatures that birds might eat and feed to their young have disappeared. But why? How?

Consider that over 70% of the UK is used for farming in some way. Intensive human farming practices are a large contributor to this decline. We’ve destroyed hedgerows and meadows to provide huge single-crop fields which are easier to work with machinery than a lot of small ones. This has obvious financial benefits for the farmers but this changing land usage has resulted in the removal of many bug’s foodstuff and habitat, just as it has for several of our bird species. Routine use of pesticides has also made a huge contribution to plummeting insect numbers. 

So what to do? We can’t simply demonise and castigate the farmers. They’re doing a great job in keeping us fed while struggling to make their own living. But we can ask them to slightly change the ways in which they do it. 

We can support farmers and land managers who grow their crops in as nature-friendly a way as possible. We can ask uncomfortable questions when we shop and put our consumer pounds behind our conscience. There’s no better way to effect change than via a purse or wallet.

And you could of course join the RSPB and other conservation charities. By adding your voice to the one and a quarter-million strong RSPB membership, we can put increased pressure on Governments and big businesses to put nature at the forefront of their planning and developments. 

As an individual we can keep habitat loss in the public eye by campaigning and making sure that our elected officials are constantly aware of the issues involved. The RSPB has an excellent web page on this subject at this link. Look especially at the “More action you can take'' section.

We can all do our bit, however small, to make sure that there is still a natural world for future generations to enjoy. And those individual little bits add up. Just ask a hungry Blue Tit.