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BTO Blueline
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BTO Blueline
SAND MARTIN
Riparia riparia
Sand Martin © Tommy Holden
 

• Population
  changes

• Productivity
  trends

• Additional
  information
Conservation listings
Europe: SPEC category 3 (depleted)
UK: amber (European status)
Long-term trend
UK: fluctuating, with no long-term trend
UK population size
85,000–270,000 nests in 1990 (1988–91 Atlas: APEP06); 66,300–211,000 pairs in 2000 (updated using WBS trend: BiE04)
Status summary
This species is conspicuously difficult to monitor, because active and inactive nest holes are difficult to distinguish, and because whole colonies frequently disperse or shift to new locations as suitable sand cliffs are created and destroyed. WBS counts are of apparently occupied nest holes, and suggest a stable or shallowly increasing population, with wide fluctuations, and a decrease since the late 1990s which has been steep enough to raise BTO alerts. BBS counts, which are of birds seen, show clearly that large year-to-year changes occur, but do not reveal a clear trend since 1994. Winter rainfall in the species' trans-Saharan wintering grounds has been shown to affect annual survival and thus abundance in the following breeding season (Szép 1995). Nest record samples are small, but indicate that nest success has improved enormously since the 1960s, and that clutch size has also increased.
 

Population changes
WBS UK graph
 
BBS acknowledgement
 
BBS UK graph
BBS England graph
 

Productivity trends
 
Clutch size graph
Brood size graph

Chick nest failure graph

Chick nest failure graph

Laying date graph

 

 

Insufficient data on CES
available for this species

 
 

Additional information
BTO blue divider
BirdWeb logo, click to go to BirdWeb

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This report should be cited as:
Baillie, S.R., Marchant, J.H., Crick, H.Q.P., Noble, D.G., Balmer, D.E., Coombes, R.H.,
Downie, I.S., Freeman, S.N., Joys, A.C., Leech, D.I., Raven, M.J., Robinson, R.A. and Thewlis, R.M. (2006)
Breeding Birds in the Wider Countryside: their conservation status 2005.
BTO Research Report No. 435. BTO, Thetford. (http://www.bto.org/birdtrends)

Pages maintained by Susan Waghorn and Iain Downie: Last updated 19 May, 2006