Where have all the birds gone?

Another Life:  There are big questions in life to which I cannot always find an answer, and "Where have all the birds gone?" is one of them. Anguished and baffled, resonant with loss, it wings in by e-mail at regular intervals and touches my sympathy at once.

"Week after week, for perhaps eight," laments a reader in Tipperary, "our large garden has been silent and empty of little birds. Our feeder is full, our cat is old, Otto the dog is uninterested, so where are OUR BIRDS?" In bird-obsessed Britain, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is so used to the question that it has two separate webpages to deal with it (at www.rspb.org.uk/advice). "Where have all the birds gone in summer?" one asks, explaining the fall-off in garden song as birds stop proclaiming their territories and get down to the furtive business of hatching and raising their young. Afterwards, in late summer, garden birds are moulting their flight feathers and lie low until new ones are airworthy.

"Where have all the birds gone in autumn?" asks the other, explaining that birds are too busy enjoying the abundant fruits and insects of the countryside to bother with garden bird-tables and tubes of peanuts. This, indeed, is true, but doesn't explain why my tangled acre, now dripping with weed seeds and scarlet berries, has also been missing its birds for weeks, apart from the odd skulking blackbird and ticking robin. My morning march to the river, escorted earlier by linnets, pipits and stonechats, has too often been a solitary ritual, monitored by magpies and ravens in an otherwise empty sky.

Where are the flocks of finches, thrushes and starlings, what's happened to the tits and house sparrows? I've no idea: they're out there somewhere and they'll be back. Even as I write, on a deliciously wintry morning, the attractions of a sheltered acre, loaded with food, are clearly coming into their own, as fresh little birds sift in from the fields around: the first blue tit in weeks has just appeared on my window sill, peering around expectantly. It's time for a trip to the co-op for a 25-kilo sack of nuts.

Google the question about disappearing birds and one meets an American blogger convinced that Bush and the Zionist bankers are poisoning wildlife by spraying it with airliner vapour trails, and while Bush may be be capable of anything, one doesn't want to get like that.

In the real world, the Countryside Bird Survey of BirdWatch Ireland, running since 1998, is beginning to chart some meaningful trends among the species, by no means all of them dispiriting. Most landbirds are holding their own, or even increasing slightly. Goldfinches, our most gloriously colourful songbirds, are doing especially well - perhaps, like the blackcaps, from having discovered garden peanuts, but also, more probably, from greater survival in warmer winters. Bullfinches, too, are thriving throughout the country, which can't be because everyone is planting fruit trees with buds for these birds to strip in spring.

The survey is the work of BirdWatch volunteers and rangers from the National Parks and Wildlife Service counting birds on early-morning patrols. Its eight years, so far, are just about enough for serious comparisons, but it began too late to catch some earlier and dramatic declines - such as the loss of yellowhammers from the west with the disappearance of small-farm cereal plots (they are managing to hold their own among the barley fields of the east and south).

The familiar decline of the skylark, however, continues inexorably as the bird retreats from lowland farms, breeding mostly on coasts and in the uplands.

In judging declines of migrants, changes in Ireland have to be balanced against possible changes in Africa or the weather for migration. Numbers of swifts, swallows and wheatears can vary sharply from year to year, so that real trends need a long term to measure properly. Apparently substantial declines of swallows and wheatears in the west could have something to do with fewer old barns for nesting in, or loss of the short-grass habitat that wheatears prefer, but we will have to wait longer to see what happens to the graphs.

Most puzzling of the declines, perhaps, is that of the kestrel, a resident bird of prey down by six per cent. It's quite a scarce bird nationally, breeding in only about 40 of the 380 10-km squares covered by the survey, so a few birds either way can make a big difference.

Scotland's kestrels are down by two-thirds since 1994 (blame the gamekeepers?) but the Irish population may have other problems, yet to be discerned.

The BirdWatch survey programme is immensely worthwhile and still needs volunteers: it's only by such monitoring that conservation measures can hope to catch up with damaging changes in the countryside (if you're interested, contact Dick Coombes at rcoombes@birdwatchireland.ie).

Finally, magpies . . . no change nationwide, whatever you thought, but two per cent of ours in the west have moved over to the east. Readers there are welcome to them.