Songbirds in decline
It all began at two minutes to six on May Day last year, when the sonorous tones of Sir David Attenborough combined with the equally unmistakable call of the cuckoo, heralding the start of Tweet of the Day. The response to the Radio 4 series, produced by my old colleagues at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, surprised even the programme-makers themselves. Despite the early slot, millions of listeners have regularly tuned in to get their daily dose of birdsong.
Almost a year on, the radio series will soon reach its end, with Kate Humble's account of one of our more elusive birds, the stone curlew. After 260 programmes featuring 245 different species, the airwaves will fall silent.
Listeners' sense of loss may be alleviated by the BBC's decision to put the entire series on its website, and produce a book, of which I am a co-author. But when future generations download the recordings, and listen to skylarks and nightingales, cuckoos and turtle doves, will they feel a twinge of sadness that these species are no longer with us?
According to the British Trust for Ornithology, if current population trends continue, it is highly likely that some of these birds will not just decline in numbers, but may disappear from Britain altogether. We know this because of the efforts of more than 40,000 amateur birdwatchers, who together provided almost 20m records of nearly 300 bird species for the mammoth Bird Atlas survey, the full results of which were published in book form last autumn.
Take the turtle dove: the BTO predicts that this attractive summer visitor could go extinct as a British breeding bird by the year 2025. Having declined by 90% since the 1970s, the species has gone into freefall in the past decade, with numbers falling by a further 77%.
Turtle doves have suffered from a triple whammy: intensive farming methods, especially on arable fields, which have drastically reduced their available food supply of weed seeds; drought on their wintering grounds in Africa; and the wholesale slaughter of migratory birds as they pass over the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Malta, where gangs of young men blast any bird that flies overhead out of the sky.
The likely fate of the turtle dove is not just a tragedy for the environment, but for our culture, too. One of the first references to birdsong in the Bible, in the Song of Solomon, mentions this species: "The time of the singing of the birds is come. And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."
The bird's unusual name refers to the soft "tur-tur" call, which was once a classic sound of summertime in rural Britain.
The skylark is another bird more famous for its song than its appearance. Skylarks are smallish, brown birds with a perky crest and streaky plumage. But when they take to the air, they are transformed, hanging like a dust-spot in the blue summer skies for what seems like hours on end, delivering their extraordinary song... read more:
