Bye-Bye Blackbird

£60,000 raised. Thank You!
Work to capture 2,000,000 records on computer has been completed.

The Blackbird Initiative was launched by Chris Mead back in August 2000: "We have lost up to four million Blackbirds from our countryside. The Blackbird Initiative should give us the funds we need to work out why. You can help our Blackbirds in two ways, by helping to fund our research and by following our top ten tips to help Blackbirds in your own garden."

There is nothing more frustrating than to know that you have the answer to a question written down somewhere, but not to be able to find the piece of paper. That is how BTO staff feel about Blackbirds - and we have lots of pieces of paper. Our archive includes records of 1.5 million ringed Blackbirds and 75,000 nest record cards.

The answer to the question "Why the decline?" is hidden in these piles of ringing details and nest record cards. To tease out the answer, we had to put all of these paper records onto our computer.

Thanks to the generosity of our members and Garden BirdWatchers, we were able to employ a small team of dedicated home-workers to input all of the Blackbird data.

We can now carry out research to find out what has changed since the 1970s. Here are some of the questions we hope to answer:

We can then go on to see if we can work out why there are differences. There might be one reason - one season of the year in which food supplies are very low, for instance - or there could be a mix of factors which have caused the population decrease.