What a difference 37 years makes...

I was leafing through my 1979 diary this afternoon, looking up what that particular year's June had to offer, when I came across an entry from June 24th. I was then acting as assistant warden at Dungeness Bird Observatory, and had gone out into the recording area where...

"I conducted a survey, plotting singing Reed Buntings and Yellowhammers. The trapping area provided 4 Reed and 6 Yellow; the lower long pit 6 Reed and 2 Yellow; the upper long pit 11 Reed and 5 Yellow; revealing totals of 21 pairs of Reed Bunting and 13 pairs of Yellowhammer."

 Any current shingle-lurker will know that if you repeated this survey now, you would find no Yellowhammers at all. They've long gone. The last DBO report (2014) records just four single birds each on a single date - and that was considered a 'good' year!

Back in 1979, the ever-present song of Yellowhammers and the almost daily capture of them in the mist nets were an expected part of my summer / early autumn stay at the observatory. I took it all for granted. In 2016, not only have they abandoned the greater Dungeness area, but most of the inland Walland Marsh as well.

Comments

Derek Faulkner said…
Yellowhammers seem to be going down the same route as Tree Sparrows. We lost both species here on Sheppey in almost the same year.
Tell me, why do those pratts non Springwatch insist on calling everything animals, moths, bees, insects of all types, lizards, everything is called an animal, have I missed out on some new classification.
8 June 2016 at 19:24
Steve Gale said…
Part of the cuddly push to make everything acceptable to the general public Derek. Spring watch is trying to appeal to everyone, which is an impossible task really!
8 June 2016 at 20:20
Paul Trodd said…
Sad to say I think Yammers are going the way of many other farmland birds; ie downwards. The frightening thing is the rapidity of it all. I`ve only lived down here for 10 years and in that short period their decline has been obvious across the Marsh. The only area that they are reasonably common is beside the Royal Military Canal, but even there I struggle to find them sometimes. Unfortunately, with increasing agricultural intensification and monoculture I cannot see things improving much for our farmland birds, certainly in the short term anyway.
9 June 2016 at 07:18
Steve Gale said…
You are right there Paul. They most probably abandoned the obs because the vegetation just erupted, but that wouldn't apply elsewhere in the area. Funnily enough they are still here in my part of Surrey - even had a flock of 60 last winter.
9 June 2016 at 08:12
DorsetDipper said…
I'm not sure that farming has much to do with this. Farming practices have changed all over, but we still have Yellowhammers in decent numbers in Herts. We don't have Tree Sparrows, and they have disappeared from areas that have seen no change in environment. My view is that global warming is pushing species north, so we see birds disappearing at the southern edges of their distribution. House Martin, Cuckoo, Willow Warbler are all disappearing from the south but strongly present in Scotland and northern England.
16 June 2016 at 19:52
Steve Gale said…
The Yellowhammer seems to be holding on in pockets as you say DD. But as to why those particular pockets still have them is a mystery to me...
18 June 2016 at 20:16
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more