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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 unusually 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, which are of apparently occupied nest holes along riverbanks, suggest a stable or shallowly increasing population, with wide fluctuations, although the ongoing decrease since the late 1990s 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 yet reveal a clear long-term trend. Nest record samples are small, but indicate that nest failure rates have decreased enormously since the 1960s; clutch size has increased, but brood size has fallen and no trend can be detected in the numbers of fledglings per breeding attempt. Rainfall in the species' trans-Saharan wintering grounds prior to the birds' arrival promotes annual survival and thus abundance in the following breeding season (Szép 1995). Annual survival rates from RAS sites in the UK for 1990–2004 were correlated positively with minimum monthly rainfall during the wet season in West Africa (Robinson et al. 2008). More recently, it has been discovered that summer rainfall on the breeding grounds has a negative influence on survival rates through the following winter (Cowley & Siriwardena 2005).
 
WBS UK graph

1978-2008: 0% (confidence interval -35% to 85%)

 
Population changes in detail
 
Demographic trends
 
Additional information
BTO blue divider
 

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This report should be cited as: Baillie, S.R., Marchant, J.H., Leech, D.I., Renwick, A.R., Joys, A.C., Noble, D.G., Barimore, C., Conway, G.J., Downie, I.S., Risely, K. & Robinson, R.A. (2010). Breeding Birds in the Wider Countryside: their conservation status 2010. BTO Research Report No. 565. BTO, Thetford. (http://www.bto.org/birdtrends)

Pages maintained by Iain Downie, Mandy T Andrews and Laura Smith: Last updated 24.09.2010