By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Saturday, 23 January 2010 One of Britain’s most attractive songbirds has vanished from most of southern England in a dramatic population decline, new research shows. The whinchat is a summer visitor from Africa with an orange breast and a prominent white eyestripe. It was widely scattered across the country 20 years ago, but is now virtually extinct south of the Pennines, apart from colonies on Salisbury Plain, Exmoor and Dartmoor. The astonishing extent of its disappearance has been revealed by fieldwork for the new atlas of the breeding birds of Britain and Ireland, which will be published in 2012. This shows a conspicuous thinning-out of whinchat records across the British Isles, compared with those in the last atlas, which covered the period 1988 to 1991. But the most remarkable aspect of the new research is the wholesale vanishing of Saxicola rubetra from huge swathes of southern England, including areas which were once considered whinchat strongholds, such as the Brecklands of Norfolk, and the New Forest in Hampshire. “It’s a pretty alarming decline,” said Dawn Balmer of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), who is co-ordinating the Bird Atlas 2007-11 project. Ms Balmer stressed that the results were provisional, and more records might come in for Scotland and Ireland. But southern England, she said, had by now been comprehensively covered and the current map was likely to show the true picture. “We don’t really know why it’s gone, because in many of its former breeding areas, such as Shropshire, nothing has really changed. Something could be affecting the species on migration,” she said. … several other sub-Saharan migrant species are showing similar substantial declines. These species range from the turtle dove (66 per cent decline since 1995) and the wood warbler (60 per cent), to the pied flycatcher (51 per cent), the nightingale (41 per cent) and the cuckoo (37 per cent). …
Going for a song: a mysterious vanishing act
