From EDP News, by Tara Greaves
First it was the decline of farmland birds, but now woodland birds are also in trouble - and more of a worry is that no one knows how to stop it.
Human activity and Mother Nature seem to be conspiring to make it increasingly difficult for woodland birds to survive - and with two such great powers combining, the future does not bode well.
Such is the concern about what is going on in our woodland habitats that two other great forces - the RSPB and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) - have got together to conduct research.
But with no definite answers as to why numbers have dropped in a variety of species - by as much as 90pc in some cases - it might be too late for those already on the borderline.
Yesterday, the two organisations put out an appeal for sightings of the secretive lesser spotted woodpecker, which has fallen by 77pc in the last three decades and in some areas is now only rarely seen.
Chris Hewson, a research ecologist at the BTO based in Thetford, said: "We need the public to help by logging sightings on the Birdtrack facility, which can be accessed by the BTO website. This will help us form a picture of what is going on.
"We are involved in a number of projects, one is updating a survey of 350 woods from 20 or 30 years ago to find out what has changed.
"The results show that several varieties of woodland species, including the nightingale, spotted fly catcher, willow tit and hawfinch, are in heavy decline. The trouble is they occupy different habitats and eat different things so there must be a number of reasons for the fall."
Among those suggested are the rise in the number of deer and grey squirrels - introduced by man - the change in use of woodland areas and, once again, climate change rears its ugly head.
"In the past, people made their living from the woods which doesn't happen as much now. There is not such a call for fire wood or wood products so woodland owners perhaps pay less attention to them," said Mr Hewson.
"Also there is a lot of human impact on the environment going on in the world and some birds have complex life cycles.
"At the BTO we are more concerned with identifying the causes and then perhaps looking at ways in which woodlands and habitats can be managed best to reverse the decline."
The survey shows that the willow tit has fallen by 80pc in the last 30 years together with the tree pipit and spotted fly catcher.
It is even worse for the lesser redpoll, which has dropped by 90pc in three decades.
"That means that for every five that were in the woods 30 years ago there is now only one," added Mr Hewson.
But, while there is still hope for those birds, the red-backed shrike and a species of woodpecker, which were common even 50 years ago, have been wiped out.
Dr Paul Dolman, an ecology lecturer at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, said: "We have known for some time that farmland birds are in trouble because a lot of the land has become an industrial/biological desert. "Intensive agriculture and loss of hedgerows are among the reasons for problems and they are fairly well understood but what is more worrying is the decline in woodland birds because there has been no obvious change.
"More species have gone up from the UK Amber List, which is birds that we keep an eye on to the Red List, that is the birds we are most concerned about. For example the song thrush has seen a national decline of 50pc in the last three decades while the willow tit is more than 70pc but it is unlikely that there is a single explanation.
"The East of England is one of the regions that is most effected by deer numbers. Some species did not exist in this country 100 years ago but they were introduced and now their numbers have considerably increased," he added.
"Some of the work I've done is in Norfolk where I found that in Thetford Forrest there are 60 Montjac per 60 sq km, which is twice the number of native species.
"They eat the young shoots off the branches they can reach and basically if there are a lot of deer in the wood they remove the shrubby understory. The nightingale likes to forage under shade so if that disappears they have trouble feeding.
"One solution might be to control deer and grey squirrels but before you can suggest anything like that more research needs to be done."
It seems that with the help of the public it might be easier to understand the problem but finding a solution could take time that some birds simply do not have.
