A new paper, resulting from a collaborative study between BTO and Lancaster University showed that monitoring nests has no effect on daily survival rates of Whinchat nestlings. To ensure that monitoring efforts do not affect survival rate of nestlings and young birds, it is important to assess their impact. Nest monitoring could potentially lead predators to the nest or cause parents to desert or reduce parental care effort to their nestlings. This paper investigated 39 nests to determine whether monitoring has an adverse effect on daily survival rate in Whinchats at Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire. Nests were either visited only once upon their initial detection, or every two days during the incubation period. The visited nests did not have a lower survival rate than the non-visited nests, suggesting that there are no adverse effects of monitoring on incubation. During the nestling stage, the nests were monitored once a day on three consecutive days, by using a video camera to record the parents’ behaviour. This part of the study found that nest disturbance by setting up monitoring equipment temporarily reduced the feeding behaviour of the parents, but this only added up to 0.52% of total nestling time; a non-significant portion of the total time a nestling spends with its parents. In conclusion, this study found that monitoring Whinchat nests every two to three days has no negative effect on survival rate, and although birds can become slightly disturbed, they will soon resettle into normal behaviour. The authors emphasise that precautions to minimise potential impact on nests should always be taken and that guidelines for nest monitoring should always be adhered to.

Issue 6 features articles on whoosh netting in your garden, spring trapping Red Kites and developing a nestbox project for Willow Tits. It also contains details of how to get involved in a new research project on Blackcaps.

Management for conservation often attempts to replicate the practices that were prevalent in historical times. There does, however, appear to be a lack of understanding of exactly what ‘traditional’ management would have involved, meaning that current conservation interventions may not be adequate for achieving their goals. Paul Dolman, Tom Williamson, Rob Fuller and Gerry Barnes describe the characteristics of traditional landscapes that would have been favourable for biodiversity and, in light of this, suggest ways in which current conservation management could be improved.

The time that birds decide to breed has a strong impact upon the likely success of raising their young to independence. Pairs of birds will generally time egg laying to maximise the availability of food for their chicks. However, one of the strongest impacts of climate change so far has been to alter the timing of spring. In response to milder temperatures, flowers and insects are all appearing earlier than they used to. Songbirds struggling to match their timing to the changing climate could be facing population declines. To test this, BTO, in collaboration with The Woodland Trust, Rothamsted Research, Butterfly Conservation and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), have collated some of the most comprehensive long-term data on the timing of spring from across the UK. They have related changes in the timing of leaf and flower emergence as well as aphid, butterfly and moth emergence, to changes in the timing of egg-laying, tracked by the BTO/JNCC Nest Record Scheme. As expected, in warmer springs, birds do tend to breed late relative to the timing of spring. However, by using data from the BTO/JNCC ringing scheme to monitor changes in the number of fledglings produced by each species per year, the study’s authors found no evidence that these mismatched species were also suffering a long-term decline in breeding success. This suggests that the population declines observed in many British songbirds are not directly caused by the effect of mismatch on breeding success. These results significantly increase our understanding of the impacts of climate change upon birds by showing there is not a strong link between changes in the timing of spring and long-term trends in breeding success. The heroic efforts of thousands of volunteers recording information on birds, insects and plants were vital in providing the long-term data required to understand the impacts of climate change upon bird populations, and we thank them for their hard work and dedication.