Conservation Note
Simon Tonkin on farmland birds
A conversation on the conservation of farmland birds, and on working with the agricultural systems that determine what survives on them.
An episode in the Conference Calls series with Simon Tonkin, whose work has centred on the conservation of farmland birds and on the farming systems they depend on.
Farmland birds are the group that has declined furthest across Europe, and the reason is not mysterious: the resources they need (winter seed, insect-rich ground for chicks, nest sites in hedges and margins, wet corners) have been progressively removed by intensification, each for a sound agricultural reason.
That makes it a conservation problem with an unusual shape. There is no site to protect and no threat to prohibit; the habitat is somebody’s business, and it changes when the economics change. Work in this field is consequently as much about advice, scheme design and demonstrating that particular measures are compatible with a working farm as it is about ecology.
Tonkin has since worked extensively on farmland bird conservation in southern Spain as well as the UK, where the same species face a different set of pressures, abandonment and scrub encroachment alongside intensification, sometimes within a few kilometres of each other.