Songbirds

When I were a lad, I lived on the outskirts of a small town outside Cardiff. Our little home backed onto a country lane which in turn led to what I think will have been the green belt. One of my favourite childhood memories (aside from that time me and 3 friends went along the tracks to find that dead body - or was that the film Stand by Me, I digress) was when my dad used to take me for walks. We had an old, coverless bird-spotting book and a scruffy pair of binoculars. I was captivated by the way my dad could identify any bird by silhouette and song. In hindsight, he was probably lying, but I've had a bit of a interest in ornithology since my childhood.

I don't tell this story often, partly out of embarrassment, and partly because nobody cares about my childhood. But this story leads me nicely onto the real subject of this article - the decline of our once thriving and diverse songbird population.

One if my first thoughts was that they are being outcompeted by magpies, crows and other birds of this ilk, coupled with the fact that these birds also raid nests and take hatchlings in a particularly evil double-whammy. This was in fact going to be the crux of this article until I did a bit of research and found out one thing: it's bollocks.

It turns out that the RSPB, in conjunction with the Britsh Trust for Ornithology has just (10th March 2011) published the results of a staggering 35 year study on the causes of the songbird decline in the UK. It looked at a number of factors, such as the predator-prey relationship, and found that there is NO evidence for believing this hypothesis (that magpies/crows et al are to blame), and perversely found a number of instances of a positive relationship between the predators and the prey (where the presence of the predator encourages population growth in the prey species). The study included a number of different predators, including "nest invaders" such as: Great Spotted Woodpecker, Magpie, Jay, Carrion Crow and Grey Squirrel. Link to the executive summmary of the article here.

So, that idea throughly debunked, I'll put forth my hypothesis: We are to blame. Humanity the Virus (see: The Matrix) has systematically destroyed the habitat, limited the food source and introduced some competing species into the eco-system. I am no Ecologist, but if we restrict a species' food supply, habitat and introduce new competitors for the same resources, then the songbirds are basically fucked. (profanity used for effect, rather than poor vocabulary)

It may have come to a point where songbirds are starting to circle the drain, and the longer I live, the more that I see the circles get a little bit faster and a little bit tighter. There may be no recovery unless sucessive governments decide to do something about this and either legislate against these restrictions (which they won't do), or curb the introduction of new species (which they can't do). One day, not far from now, I predict that these some of these songbirds will become one of the 16 species to become extinct that day. It will be all our fault, and we can't blame magpies.