Lack of insects, birds starving

[noblegiraffe]

I'm seeing a lot of discussion on twitter about a distinct lack of insects this year, possibly due to the cold spring, but obviously pesticides are also an issue.

Birds who eat insects are really struggling and there are reports of baby birds dying because their parents can't feed them.

Please put food (and water) out for the birds! My bird feeder has been mobbed all week.

https://twitter.com/woodlandbirder/status/1662080648922779650?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g (warning: contains picture of dead chicks)

We have just been to a Greek island for 2 weeks, one of the top 10 bird watching destinations in Europe. We were amazed at the wealth of wild flowers everywhere, except in the farmers’ fields obviously; but as there are 11 million olive trees there, there aren’t all that many fields of grass and arable crops really! It’s all organic farming anyway!

We saw numerous bee eaters, because there are just so many bees; not to mention masses of hirundines over the rivers!

Same here! There's so many greenfly in our garden this year. We don't normally notice them, but on Saturday when I was doing some gardening, they were on everything, both plants and garden furniture. Also seeing a lot of moths out in the evening.

You should see all the car bonets and windscreens near me, that's probably why there is a shortage!

I seem to remember ours went down late May/early June. We didn't get the full range of flowers that first year but we did get some.

Going to a bait shop for half a pint of maggots always goes down well for nesting birds.

We have a wild aka messy garden! When we bought our house many years ago the lovely then owners told us "keep the wildlife garden and fill the house with the sound of children laughing". And we've certainly done both!

Our garden is wild, we actually got an award from our local wildlife trust! We have a nature so no fish pond, bird feeders, hedgehog houses, organic veg patch, compost heap, 2 water butts, lots of wildflowers so we get lots of bees, butterflies, damselflies and dragonflies. We have blackbird chicks every year in the ivy, this year we also have wood pigeon chicks I think, we had baby bluetits last year but sadly they died 😞

Would love to do more can anyone advise on anything else we could be doing?

Decaff
^see above. Wildlife gardens are only going to do so much if they're tiny islands in a sea of industrial agriculture.
Eat less meat, and make sure that the meat you do eat comes from a farm that practices regenerative agriculture (if you can afford it).
Eat organic (if you can afford it). Organic producers don't necessarily farm for nature, but at least use a minimum of agricultural chemicals.
Vote and campaign for political parties that are serious about biodiversity and promise to, for example, fund the Environment Agency properly (unlike this bunch 🙄)

Er, it’s not just the farmers destroying our meadows with their agricultural practices. 800,000 acres of meadows have been lost to the urban sprawl of new housing estates since 1990. But also since 1990, and on a positive note 1.2m acres of meadows were rewilded into woodland since 1990. The WWII landscape was a bit deforested.

I agree hedges are not being properly coppiced but chainsawed by machinery that kills anything in its path and destroys the health of the hedges themselves.

Glyphosate is a menace and I am disappointed the ban never seems to take effect and keeps getting pushed off.

Me too :)

AP5diva
Are you getting traditional hay meadows mixed up with.......fields? Not every field is a meadow nowadays.

Is this really true or is a corner being turned? I drove Home Counties to and from Devon and noted that the number of fly squishes on the screen was significantly more than last couple of years.

The baby starlings really do have a voice that only a mother could love. (And even then ...) It is very cute when you realise that godawful racket is the little fat things squawking to be fed. The parents look very harassed.

We moved into a new build in 2021, with construction still going on behind us, and not a garden bird to be seen. So we put feeders up with a wide variety of food. At first, nothing. Then after a month or so - a single robin. Then a couple of blue tits, then great tits, sparrows, a flock of long-tailed tits, and loads of goldfinches. We tolerate the occasional magpie, crow or pigeon. There’s a pair of blackbirds - though the female isn’t our best buddy, as she keeps sitting on the outer handle of the French doors pecking at the chrome and pooing over the door!

Last Autumn we clearly became a feeding station for all the local juvenile sparrows - there would be up to 40 of them sitting on the fence, just waiting for us to refill the feeders. They can empty a full feeder in a few hours, so we’ve had to limit the number of times we fill it to avoid bankruptcy.

In the past week, I’ve been delighted to see a greater spotted woodpecker on the peanuts, several times.

As well as the food we put out, we do our bit for biodiversity by being lazy gits who can’t be bothered to garden embracing no-mow May and a generally more natural, relaxed look to our lawn and borders.

Ariela that is encouraging - I haven’t noticed here but we do have a lot of oil seed rape in our area which I’ve heard is more sprayed than most crops.

It’s squirrels eating the bird around here. I have seen them push eggs out of a nest to the ground, and then eat the smashed eggs. Also seen them eating baby birds.

Here’s a corner of my world. Despite the 200+ flowers in this meadow, the insects are definitely down when I walked across just now. It’s windy, that may be keeping them down.

I need someone to bring their goats and sheep here to munch at this lot.

I filled a bowl with water, then put some mealworms in it and put it out for the birds this afternoon. There were 50 starlings milling around the bowl! It lasted less than 10 minutes!

I like that meal worms tip.

We suddenly have loads of starlings in our garden. I don’t know where they’ve appeared from.

They've all fledged their babies this week it seems. I'm going through fat blocks every day with them raiding my garden about 30 at a time! I don't mind one bit they're like a mob of 1930s gangsters strutting up and down!

This wildlife garden podcast is suggesting a north/south divide in terms of insect depletion. Even this thread suggests some areas are more affected than others.

https://twitter.com/thewildgdn/status/1663572141927723011?s=46&t=vKGM6xpoeW3wdlaVVVagQA

Not just amateurs reporting a lack, but entomologists too https://twitter.com/briane_cambs/status/1662790393304346631?s=46&t=vKGM6xpoeW3wdlaVVVagQA

Many birds that we see here over winter in Africa.

They have to run the gauntlet of drought, pesticides (many of which would be illegal in the UK and Europe) wiping out their food sources and Mediterranean hunters wiping out tens of millions of song birds

https://migratorysoaringbirds.birdlife.org/en/news/illegal-hunting-methods-closer-look-mediterranean#gsc.tab=0

It's heartbreaking

plus the effects of avian flu.
I've seen many dead birds where you would usually see only the odd one run over by a car.

There is also desertification - many have to fly over the Sahara, which is always getting bigger!

Just walked the dog round the suburbs here, flock of 25-30 swallows swooping and whirling for the bugs put up by someone strimming in their garden. Amazing sight.

I’m potentially moving so I’ve stopped feeding the birds so they won’t be reliant on me.
it is honestly really hard, more so when I read things like this.
I hate it. I love my garden friends.