University of Exeter, the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (
PECBMS), and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (
RSPB) are reporting
steep declines in European bird populations over the last 30 years:
The study, published today [Nov. 2] in the journal Ecology Letters, reveals a decrease of 421 million individual birds over 30 years. Around 90 percent of these losses were from the 36 most common and widespread species, including house sparrows, skylarks, grey partridges (pictured above) and starlings, highlighting the need for greater efforts to halt the continent-wide declines of our most familiar countryside birds.
While this news is very distressing there are also positives:
The majority of the declines can be attributed to considerable losses from relatively few common birds, but not all common species are declining. Numbers of great tits, robins, blue tits and blackbirds were all shown to be increasing. Populations of rarer species, including marsh harriers, ravens, buzzards and stone curlews have also shown increases in recent years: this is likely to be the result of direct conservation action and legal protection in Europe.
Conservationists are usually fighting for rarer species. In doing so, the legal protections are, more often than not, only helping the less common bird. This study shows that there is a clear need to figure out ways to extend environmental protections.
The road ahead will be tougher because "common" birds tend to live in farm areas and well-populated areas–places that have immediate financial stakes in fighting against environmental protections. However, these are exactly the places that both animals and humans must fix if we are going to continue to inhabit a healthy planet.