Abstract

Natural England and the RSPB have collaborated on species-focused conservation projects for several decades. Since 2005, this has been through a formal ‘Action for Birds in England’ partnership programme. Here, we review the conservation delivered through this partnership and assess the progress achieved and lessons learnt for the nearly 50 species of bird targeted. We show that around 70% of research and recovery projects either partially or completely achieved their goals. There have been notable successes for some species, such as the Red Kite Milvus milvus and the Cirl Bunting Emberiza cirlus, but other species, notably more widespread and more abundant species, have so far failed to recover. We conclude that the scale of investment in conservation action needs to be makedly increased if we are to successfully address the biodiversity crisis in England.IntroductionThe loss of nature on a global level has been well documented (e.g. IPBES 2019). In the UK and its constituent countries, monitoring of birds through schemes such as the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and national surveys of rarer species have provided an especially clear picture of the pattern, scale and speed of this loss in birds. For example, the UK farmland bird indicator has declined by 60% and the woodland indicator by 37% between 1970 and 2022 (JNCC 2023), and the number of species on the Red list of Birds of Conservation Concern has risen from 36 in 1996 (Gibbons et al. 1996) to 70 in 2021 (Stanbury et al. 2021). Seven bird species, including the once-widespread Wryneck Jynx torquilla,have been lost as UK breeders in the last 50 years, and there is a long and growing list of species for which this is a realistic future prospect. A recent assessment of extinction risk in Britain (Stanbury et al. 2021) listed 21 bird species as Critically Endangered.The drivers of this biodiversity loss are often well know, although the detailed mechanisms by which they influence trends are well understood for only a few habitats and species. An attempt to quantify the relative importance of the broad drivers of change in the UK’s biodiversity (Burns et al. 2016) identified the following factors as the most significant, in descending order of impact: intensive management of farmland, climate change, hydrological change, low-intensity management of agricultural land and urbanisation.