We have seen in our reports on this website that the exact causes of declines in turtle doves in our part of the world are not fully established. While changes in farming practices that have reduced traditional feeding opportunities and the risk of novel diseases from related species like the collared dove are undoubtedly implicated, continuing pressure from ‘sport’ hunters on the doves’ migration routes are a major factor, if not in the decline, certainly in preventing the population from recovering.

European turtle dove distribution map from Plant of Birds http://www.planetofbirds.com/columbiformes-columbidae-turtle-dove-streptopelia-turtur

The European turtle dove is not yet considered globally threatened and has a very large range but in Europe it is considered to have an unfavourable conservation status, a status that may be confused by those, probably uncertain, numbers outside of the region (species account here). In the UK, where the turtle dove population has seen a 95% decrease it is given the RED status of a species whose population or range has declined rapidly in recent years, or that has declined historically and not shown a substantial recent recovery. In Jersey is too has RED status.

Our turtle doves are migratory, visiting us for just the spring and early summer. While the exact routes that our turtle doves take are unknown, in order for them to get to and from their wintering areas south of the Sahara, most European birds must pass through narrow sea crossings, safe areas, to avoid lengths of open water. These ‘safe’ areas are anything but safe.

Jersey’s birds would most likely have gone south through France and Spain before flying across Morocco. Birds from further east in Europe go through the islands of the Mediterranean including Malta and Cyprus. These islands lie on one of the main flyways of wild bird migration (over 384 bird species have been recorded in Malta). The importance of these islands to European bird populations like that of the turtle dove mean that they should be treasured.

However, the large scale shooting and trapping of birds during migration through Malta and parts of Cyprus are well known to conservationists right across Europe, and to anyone who has visited. During the spring and autumn, thousands of migrating and resident birds are shot indiscriminately. Further, thousands of small songbirds are trapped to be caged or for the table. An analysis of international ringing recoveries of 75 species, from 35 countries, showed individuals that had been killed in Malta (report here). Many of these birds, like turtle doves, were rare or declining species, species that only have small numbers of young and take several years to reach sexual maturity. Birds that we and millions like us had cared for and protected during the breeding season!

The impact of hunting pressures on European bird populations can have serious repercussions on their conservation status. This hunting, much of it Illegal, is therefore an international issue that affects the breeding birds of almost all countries in Europe. Malta is an EU country and spring hunting and trapping is expressly forbidden by the Birds Directive. However, exceptions can be made and despite widescale disapproval elsewhere in Europe (see e.g. Chris Packham’s blog with videos here) it goes on.

Cyprus Base (Akrotiri and Dhekelia) is a British Overseas Territory which makes it very disappointing then that the numbers of trapped songbirds illegally killed there reached an estimated 900,000 birds in 2014 (report here) – the highest level recorded in 12 years.

Comparative figures reported for the Republic of Cyprus reveal that illegal bird trapping elsewhere on the island is still an issue (reports here), but the figures have reduced since 2002. The light of bad publicity is rightly being shone on Malta and Cyprus. Encouragingly, the Base Area authorities have recently signed up to a Cyprus Strategic Action Plan on illegal bird trapping.

Photo of legal turtle dove hunting from International Safari Corporation website http://www.safariinternational.com/en/small-game/passege-game/335-morocco-turtle-doves

Law enforcement throughout the islands is a key problem as authorities are under-resourced and under-staffed. What can we do? Please support the efforts of the local bird conservationists who often work under pressures that we couldn’t start to imagine here. BirdLife Malta and BirdLife Cyprus need support from all of us so check their websites and sign up to their newsletters. Keep up to date too through Mark Avery’s blog and Birders Against Wildlife Crime.

While the Eastern Mediterranean receives much publicity for its bird hunting, it does go on in the west where turtle doves can, in places, be hunted legally under strict conditions. Hunting trips to shoot (our?) turtle doves in Spain and Morocco (here and here) are freely advertised – that’s some holiday!

From New York City Audobon

New York City in the USA has long been a favourite site for foreign visitors – including millions of birds. But here, as in other North American urban areas, birds face a significant danger: colliding with a building or structure. “It is estimated that some 90,000 birds die annually in New York City because of collisions with buildings,” says Susan Elbin, NYC Audubon’s director of conservation and science.

In the dark, and especially in foggy or rainy weather when birds fly at lower altitudes, the combination of glass and light becomes deadly. Confused by artificial lights, blinded by weather, unable to see glass, or simply exhausted by flying around the lights like moths near a flame, birds can be injured or killed. Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP), the Toronto-based conservation society that spearheaded the lights-out movement in 1993, is succinct about the threat: “Across North America, more birds die from collisions each year than succumbed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill.” A landmark study conducted by the Field Museum in Chicago showed that by turning the lights off in one building, the number of bird kills dropped by an average of 83 percent.

Growing awareness of light’s fatal attraction to birds has led to action: NYC Audubon inaugurated Lights Out New York in 2005. This year, a number of the city’s iconic buildings such as the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, 501 Lexington Avenue (formerly known as Citigroup Center), Silverstein Properties, The Time Warner Center and the Worldwide Plaza will turn off their lights from midnight to dawn during peak migration season from 1^st September to 1^st November.

In downtown Chicago, about 100 buildings go dark after 11pm for six months during spring and autum migrations. That is “virtually all of the buildings downtown over 40 stories,” according to Annette Prince, director of Chicago Audubon Society’s Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. And in May, Minnesota’s governor signed a bill that requires structures owned or leased by the state to turn out the lights after midnight during spring and autumn migrations. Other bills supporting Audubon lights-out efforts have been passed or sponsored in Michigan, Massachusetts, and San Francisco.

Not only birds are saved. By following Toronto’s bird-friendly rating system, Metro Hall posted annual savings of $200,000 in energy costs.

Savings in terms of birds’ lives are not as easily measured. In New York City, about thirty volunteers patrol a handful of buildings in the city during migration as part of Project Safe Flight. “The monitoring and research improves our understanding of the causes behind urban bird collisions and suggests ways to prevent bird collisions from occurring,” says Elbin, adding: “The number of birds migrating in autum and spring seemed light this year since few birds were found at the 13 buildings monitored.” (One hundred and fifty eight and 65 bird kills were found, respectively.) White-throated sparrows, common yellowthroats, and ovenbirds were the most numerous species found.

Glenn Phillips, NYC Audubon’s executive director, explains that such low numbers can be misleading and are due in part to New York City’s unique architecture: “We don’t know the true scope of the problem in part because of the set backs of the buildings. With set backs, the birds may fall onto high floors, their bodies never reaching the ground. Other considerations are: predators, wind currents, and traffic. All these factors make it hard for us to collect data and monitor deaths.”

Publications on bird-window collisions can be found here

Keeping birds safe around windows – tips here

From Phys.org

Is it worth having birds in the city? If you live in Seattle or Berlin, the answer is yes, to the tune of £80 million and £47 million a year for each city, respectively.

A new study published in the journal Urban Ecosystems looks at what economic value residents in two comparable cities place on having birds in their gardens and parks. Researchers at the University of Washington and Humboldt State University compared two types of common birds – finches and corvids – in both cities, asking residents how much they would pay to conserve the species and what they spend, if anything, on bird food.

They found that both cities place a “sizeable” value on bird enjoyment, somewhat more so in Seattle. Residents in both cities spend more than the average U.S. adult on bird-supporting activities, suggesting that people from Seattle and Berlin value having birds around their homes and neighbourhoods.

These activities, in turn, also show that birds benefit the local economies as residents invest in food and nesting structures.

“This paper shows that our interactions with birds actually have a pretty high economic return to the community where you live,” said John Marzluff, one of the paper’s co-authors. “We know that having a liveable, green community that attracts birds also increases the value of homes in that area. This paper shows there’s an economic service birds are providing.”

Researchers say this is the first look at estimating the economic value of enjoying common birds in an urban setting. Previous studies have assessed people’s willingness to pay to see rare or charismatic birds and to pay for conservation of endangered species, but these instances don’t affect most people.

“No one has really looked at what people will be willing to pay for these more common species, ones that aren’t necessarily endangered or threatened. We wanted to address that because people living in urban areas don’t encounter endangered species on a daily basis,” said co-author Barbara Clucas.

Clucas in the Seattle area and collaborators in Berlin went door-to-door and surveyed dozens of households in different types of neighbourhoods – urban with apartments, dense suburban, light suburban and rural. The researchers asked specific questions about how residents viewed corvid and songbird species, whether they would pay for conservation of these species and what they spent annually on bird food.

In both Seattle and Berlin, residents’ willingness to pay for bird conservation was higher for finch species than for corvids. Interestingly, some Seattleites said they would pay to actually reduce the crow population in the city, though many also appeared indifferent about crows.

In contrast, Berliners were willing to pay a small amount to increase the city’s crow population, but they had an overall negative reaction to conserving magpies, another corvid species associated by legend with stealing and mischief.

“There’s a lot of culture that goes along with these birds, and that influences how we view them,” Marzluff said.

The researchers also noted that residents living in the urban core in both cities interacted the least with birds. The more that we as humans feed and house birds, the more variety and density appear around our homes. If that interaction isn’t happening in urban cores, “there’s a greater disconnect between nature and humans in those areas, and that’s where most of the population lives,” Marzluff said.

That interaction is important for human-nature connections that can lead to greater appreciation for the natural world, he added.

Download the full paper How much is that birdie in my backyard? A cross-continental economic valuation of native urban songbirds here

As part of the programme to support our threatened population of swifts in the Channel Islands Vic Froome has produced a wonderful booklet on the incredible swift, its life and how we can help it. See how to get a copy at the bottom of this page.

Vic was given permission to make changes to a booklet published originally by Action for Swifts (read the UK 2nd edition here) and make it more appropriate for a Channel Islands audience. Paul Hillion and Melody Press in Guernsey helped in design and printed the booklet. M & S (Guernsey), The Channel Islands Co-operative Society and Ronez funded the costs of production and helped make the booklet available to RSPB Guernsey Group, La Société Guernesiaise, Alderney Wildlife Trust and Birds On The Edge.

The booklet includes information of artificial boxes and ideas for helping swifts find sites to nest.

In Guernsey, swifts breed in a variety of ‘typical’ locations like churches and housing. Vic has received sterling support in his campaign to educate about what is happening to swifts and how everyone can help through often simple measures like the provision of boxes where access to holes in buildings has been prevented. It all starts with remembering about the swifts!

Rather curiously, in Jersey, we only know of swifts nesting in fortifications (castles, towers and a fort), part of the St Helier Harbour walls and fully natural sites on the north coast like Plémont. There are no records of swifts in any houses or churches which seems rather strange. Roderick Dobson (in 1952) reported the same situation (and pretty well the same sites) that we see today. Dobson also reported a decline in swifts at Mont Orgueil because or repairs and pointing to the walls – something the birds are again facing! This year we plan to give the swifts help in the castle by improving nesting opportunities modifying some of the post holes in the walls. We expect to be able to report more on this project soon.

The 28 page booklet will be free to anyone who would like a copy and will be available at several locations around the Islands so please look out for it. However, you can also download a copy here thanks to Melody Press.

By Stuart Croft: Cirl Bunting Reintroduction Project Officer, RSPB

The programme to increase numbers of cirl buntings in the south-west of England and especially the translocation of chicks from Devon to Cornwall was a major inspiration in the establishment of Birds On The Edge. Not so long ago cirl bunting was an easy bird to find in Jersey and with so few in England we were regularly asked to show tourists our (then) big four – cirl bunting, serin, short-toed treecreeper and Dartford warbler. The disappearance of our serins and cirls coincided it seemed with dramatic changes in the fortunes of the cirl bunting in England. We then needed to speak to the English for tips on recovering the bunting population. The cirl bunting, meanwhile reappeared and, despite its tenuous foothold back in Jersey, is once again on the Island. Stuart and the RSPB kindly allowed Birds On The Edge to repost this piece previously published on the RSPB Community blog site

The Cirl Bunting Reintroduction Project – a partnership project between the RSPB, Natural England (NE), the National Trust and Paignton Zoo, with assistance from the Zoological Society of London – began in 2006. The aim of the project is to re-establish a self-sustaining population of cirl buntings on the Roseland Peninsula in south Cornwall, by taking chicks (under license from NE) from nests in healthy populations in south Devon, and translocating them to the site in south Cornwall. Here they have been hand-reared by aviculturalists from Paignton Zoo, and released into an area of suitable farmland habitat. Though reintroductions of other bird species, as well as other forms of wildlife, have been successfully undertaken in the UK and further afield, the reintroduction of a small, song bird like the cirl bunting had not been attempted before in Europe.

The first batch of young birds was released in 2006, and releases continued for a total of six years, until 2011. Throughout the project all the birds have been monitored by the field team – a process aided by the fact that all the hand-reared birds have been fitted with a unique combination of coloured leg-rings. This has allowed a great deal of information to be acquired relating to many aspects of the birds’ life histories, e.g. their seasonal movements, habitat selection, breeding ecology and longevity.

We have learnt that, just like in Devon, the Cornish birds do not wander far, choosing to settle in an area that, crucially, contains all their year-round requirements i.e. weedy stubbles to forage for seeds in the winter, thick hedgerows where nests can be located away from disturbance and extensive grasslands rich in variety and abundance of insects to feed chicks in the summer. Thanks to the willingness of the local farming community to adopt Environmental Stewardship, in the form of Higher Level Stewardship (HLS), more of this preferred habitat mosaic exists on the peninsula than it did just a few years ago.

During the breeding season pairs are usually faithful, though we have recorded several instances of polygyny – one male breeding with two (even three!) females simultaneously – whilst ‘divorce’ – with partners from a pair splitting and re-pairing with different partners – is novel behaviour that has been recorded. Though cirl buntings are relatively short-lived, with 2-3 years being typical, the oldest known colour-ringed bird so far, died just one month short of his fifth birthday. We are hopeful that there are still a few remaining ringed individuals that stand a chance of exceeding that lifespan.

Following the first recorded breeding of the reintroduced birds in 2007, the population has been steadily increasing, both as a result of further releases, and due to productivity in the breeding population. Despite some poor summers, which have limited breeding success, the population exceeded its target level of 30 pairs in 2012, with 44 pairs recorded. However, the exceptionally wet summer of that year resulted in very low productivity, resulting in a decline in the population the following year. Fortunately, the following two summers have been a vast improvement and the population has responded well. Last year 39 pairs raised well over 100 fledged young – the highest number in any year by far – and we are optimistic that 50 breeding pairs is a realistic possibility this year – a great milestone to reach in the tenth year of the project and one step further forward in establishing this bird back in the Cornish landscape.

The success so far shown from this project is a great example of team work – where various different individuals and organisations have worked collaboratively. We would like to thank all those who have supported the project over the years, in particular the farmers who have given us access to their land, which has enabled us to monitor the expanding population – without their support this project would not have worked.

For more information on the Cirl Bunting Re-introduction Project see the Project’s pages online