Date published: 2005/03/22
The BBC says:
The house sparrow tops the table for the highest number of sightings in the UK's annual Big Garden Birdwatch.
An average of 4.56 sparrows per garden were seen during the count, conducted over the weekend of 29-30 January.
Even so, this represents a huge decline in numbers from the first such survey organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds back in 1979.
Then, an average of 10 sparrows per garden were observed; it means over the period there has been a 54% decline.
The sparrow swaps places with last year's number one - the starling. It averaged 3.63 birds per garden - again, a massive drop on 1979, when 15 could be seen over the two-day period.
The blue tit completes the top three.
Nearly 400,000 people watched their gardens and local parks during Big Garden Birdwatch.
Over six million birds were recorded and 210,000 gardens surveyed.
Richard Bashford, the Big Garden Birdwatch co-ordinator, said: "Big Garden Birdwatch allows hundreds of thousands of people to get involved with a project that tells us how some of our best loved birds are faring.
"This sort of survey enables the RSPB to understand more about the population trends of UK garden birds."
As with most of these kinds of reports on the BBC, this reads just like a press release from the RSPB. Unfortunately the survey is non-scientific so its results have to be taken with a pinch of salt. In particular back in 1979 there were almost certainly fewer people taking part in the survey, and these people were probably more expert at identifying birds, and these people were almost certainly more bird-friendly so had gardens encouraging birds, and these people were quite possibly more middle class so had bigger gardens, so all in all it is not too surprising that there were so many more birds observed in 1979. Note specifically that the survey numbers quoted are per garden not per hectare, which is already worrying just by itself. Is there any quality control done on the survey submissions? Does the RSPB not have any worries about their methodology?
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