UK residents put out enough bird food each year to feed more than 3 times the entire populations of garden bird food consuming bird species if they ate nothing else. In response to emerging evidence, the RSPB has asked the public to rethink this practice. Research has shown that heavily used bird feeders can become hotspots for disease, with serious consequences for wild bird populations.
Dr Jack Shutt, a member of our Agroecology Group and a Research Associate at the Centre for Landscape Regeneration, explained why this change in advice is necessary.
A welcome change
The RSPB has changed their advice on bird feeding in an effort to reduce diseases causing population declines in birds such as greenfinches and chaffinches. The new advice includes stopping garden bird feeding in the summer and removing flat surfaces like bird tables.
Dr Shutt’s research has helped to focus attention on how garden bird feeding on such a wide scale could contribute to declines in wild-bird species. He spent several years researching the knock-on impacts for competitors of species benefitted by garden bird feeding. Many of these competitor species are declining sharply. Why this is happening is yet to be fully understood, but the RSPB advice-change is a step in the right direction.
Dr Shutt said, ‘I welcome this progressive policy change from the RSPB following the latest science. It is an initial step in better appreciating the wider impacts of garden bird feeding, which, while it is very effective for connecting humans to nature and improving mental health, has mixed impacts for the birds themselves, which we are only starting to uncover.’
Career path and experience
Dr Shutt completed his PhD in Ecology at the University of Edinburgh in 2018 before spending eighteen months working on conservation projects around the world. Following this, he undertook his first postdoctoral role at Manchester Metropolitan University during the Covid pandemic. He later joined the University of Cambridge to work with Professor Lynn Dicks, who leads our Agroecology Group. He is also a member of the Centre for Landscape Regeneration.
At the CLR he analyses the impacts of land use change on biodiversity, aiming to target conservation efforts more effectively for maximum reward with minimal negative knock-on consequences.
Reflecting on his current research, Dr Shutt said, ‘Being a part of the CLR has enabled me to expand my research experience and become more interdisciplinary, working with social scientists and chemists to help propose land management solutions with multiple benefits.’
Balancing nature and food production
Initial insights suggest that successful compromise land uses may be easier to find in some UK landscapes than others. A good example is wood pasture in the Lake District. This supports abundant biodiversity across many taxanomic groups compared to current practices, while continuing to produce agricultural and economic output for farmers.
In contrast, compromises might be harder to achieve in high productivity regions like the East Anglian Fens. Here, large agricultural outputs would be lost or exported by land use change. In these areas, biodiversity gains may be achieved more effectively through targeted measures, such as improving drainage ditches at field margins, rather than large scale changes with wider knock on effects.
Connecting science, advice and action
Together, the RSPB’s revised bird feeding advice and Dr Jack Shutt’s work at the Centre for Landscape Regeneration point to a shared message: to support biodiversity both garden scale and landscape scale actions must be guided by scientific evidence.
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