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BTO Blueline
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BTO Blueline
TREE SPARROW
Passer montanus
Tree Sparrow © Tommy Holden
 

• Population
  changes

• Productivity
  trends

• Additional
  information
Conservation listings
Europe: SPEC category 3 (declining)
UK: red (>50% population decline)
Long-term trend
UK: rapid decline
UK population size
68,000 territories in 2000 (1988–91 Atlas estimate updated using CBC/BBS trend: BiE04, APEP06)
Status summary
Tree Sparrow abundance crashed between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. BBS data indicate significant increase since 1994, in England and in the UK as a whole, but it should be remembered that the current population level is still only about 3% of that of the 1970s and any recovery therefore has a very long way to go. Clear range contractions occurred between the two breeding atlas periods (Gibbons et al. 1993), and have continued subsequently, with many local extinctions occurring during the 1990s. Components of agricultural intensification, such as reductions in winter stubble, are likely to be implicated in the decline. Breeding performance has improved substantially as population sizes have decreased, suggesting that decreases in productivity were not responsible for the decline. It is more likely that survival was the critical demographic measure, although ring-recovery analyses have produced equivocal results because of small sample sizes (Siriwardena et al. 1998b, 2000b). Following declines across western and northwestern Europe during the 1990s, the European status of this species is no longer considered 'secure' (BirdLife International 2004).
 

Population changes
CBC/BBS England graph
 
BBS acknowledgement
 
BBS UK graph
BBS England graph
 

Productivity trends
 
Clutch size graph
Brood size graph
Egg 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 2 May, 2006