[Amarillo]

Originally Posted by speckled wood

CP Bell seems to be venting his fury against the BTFO and RSPB, what I find curious is that there are several well funded anti-raptor organisations that should be all too willing to fund his work .. I wonder why they are not doing this, could it be that they too recognise that there are many apparent weaknesses in his research methods and that his conclusions would all too easily fall apart should they be put to close scrutiny?

I've been thinking the same thing. Mr Bell is not interested in the real cause of sparrow decline, he is simply desperate to prove that one particular factor is the crucial one so why not approach those organisations with similar motives?

[AlfArbuthnot]

Originally Posted by Amarillo

I've been thinking the same thing. Mr Bell is not interested in the real cause of sparrow decline, he is simply desperate to prove that one particular factor is the crucial one so why not approach those organisations with similar motives?

My thoughts too. It seems to be more about winning an argument than solving a problem, hence the ongoing 'debating' style that glaringly sidesteps any questions that contradict.

But CPBell's problem is that he wants to 'prove' that Sparrowhawks also show a correlation with other bird species, his idea of a 'signature decline', which he thinks will bolster his claims about Sparrows. And, for that, he needs the BTO's data. Nobody else has it, and nobody can go back in time to get it again. But, seeing as his methods in the Sparrow paper appeared so open to error, he would probably just end up with more unreliable and potentially misleading results the second time around if he did the same thing, so it is probaby a good thing that he wont ever get to mess around with it.

But these gross correlations are also a very crude tool, even if done properly, as they would be very lucky if they managed to encompass all of the relationships they're looking for. There are usually too many confounding factors that are not taken into account (because there is no data for it, or it's too complicated, so it's just ignored). So if CPBell is really interested in Sparrows then he would better spend his time and effort adding to our knowledge by doing a local population study and seeing where and how predation has an impact. He should get some good data after about 10 years. He could do this in his free time, just as many BTO volunteers do similar individual and organised studies.

[CPBell]

Originally Posted by speckled wood

I can't help but perceive that you have some other undisclosed interest in this matter .. perhaps as part of that fringe that is seeking to find excuses to cull raptors, would you care to confirm or deny this?

Originally Posted by speckled wood

CP Bell seems to be venting his fury against the BTFO and RSPB, what I find curious is that there are several well funded anti-raptor organisations that should be all too willing to fund his work .. I wonder why they are not doing this, could it be that they too recognise that there are many apparent weaknesses in his research methods and that his conclusions would all too easily fall apart should they be put to close scrutiny?

You’re going to have to decide whether my work is suspicious because I am funded by ‘anti-raptor organisations’ or because I’m not funded by them – which is it to be?

Originally Posted by Nightranger

So let me get this straight, you want to request the data for your hobby but you also want to use the data for your research? Certainly, if you are analysing the data then I fail to see how that is not research. The BTO has not labelled you a researcher...you ARE a researcher albeit an amateur one...in fact, just like me. The difference is that I recognise the work I am attempting could take years becuase it is unfunded and and I have to fit it round the rest of my life.

There are lots of wider issues, as you put it but if you are so sure the BTO are doing something wrong then surely it would be a matter for a legal team rather than planting conspiracy theory all over the Internet. I have heard the argument countless times that it costs to take legal action but this is just a blind comment because there are ways and means. The real problem is that the way you have chosen to deal with this subject is with your YouTube and BF attacks on the organisations in question. Should you choose to take action now, it is likely that a counter-claim would call into question many of the rehtorical claims you have made.

Nightranger – master of the non-sequitur.

The provision in the contract for charging researchers is clearly intended to apply to professionals - why else would there be a clause specifying free provision of data for enjoyment? We do this either because we enjoy it or because we get paid – and before you get too sentimental about the BTO, remember they are just a bunch of money grubbers. They would stop doing what they do the minute they stop getting paid to do it. Nobody has paid me a penny to do ornithology for nearly 20 years, yet the BTO insist that I pay them tribute for the privilege of doing vital work that they are unwilling or incapable of doing themselves.

I’m happy to work to support myself while I do research to find solutions to problems in ornithology, but not to support the BTO’s rent-seeking activities –or incidentally, to further enrich the legal profession.

http://www.cpbell.co.uk
http://www.youtube.com/CultoftheAmateur

[Wildmoreway]

Originally Posted by CPBell

You’re going to have to decide whether my work is suspicious because I am funded by ‘anti-raptor organisations’ or because I’m not funded by them – which is it to be?

More fudging and evasion of the questions that you have been asked, I suspect that you are not funded by anyone for the simple reason that your methods are questionable and would not stand up to scrutiny.

[Amarillo]

Originally Posted by CPBell

Nobody has paid me a penny to do ornithology for nearly 20 years, yet the BTO insist that I pay them tribute for the privilege of doing vital work that they are unwilling or incapable of doing themselves.

I’m happy to work to support myself while I do research to find solutions to problems in ornithology

But once again...you're not looking to find solutions, you're looking to prove specifically that raptors are responsible for falling songbird populations and you want to do so out of spite for those organisations which you hold a grudge against NOT in the interests of science. If you were doing it in the interests of science, you'd take on board some of the constructive criticism and open your mind to "other" factors that may be responsible for sparrow decline.

[Jos Stratford]

Originally Posted by CPBell

I’m happy to work to support myself while I do research ..., but not ...incidentally, to further enrich the legal profession.

Little wonder.

Not only was your last attempt at legal action a pathetic attempt to screw ex-employees for sacking you following your abusive behaviour, but it might be reminded that you have also quite happily resorted to the illegal activity of illicit recording of phone calls to further your campaign of attempting to discredit all and sundry.

[AlfArbuthnot]

Originally Posted by CPBell

You’re going to have to decide whether my work is suspicious because I am funded by ‘anti-raptor organisations’ or because I’m not funded by them – which is it to be?

I can't see the option to select "is suspicious because it has an inadequate methodology of small sample sizes, sloppy data handling, and failure to consider spatio-temporal changes in data classification"....

Originally Posted by CPBell

and before you get too sentimental about the BTO, remember they are just a bunch of money grubbers. They would stop doing what they do the minute they stop getting paid to do it.

You spend a lot of time on the internet, so it is surprising that you missed this http://btoringing.blogspot.co.uk/201...-rewarded.html which outlines the VOLUNTARY contributions of time and eqiuipment that BTO staff make to several monitoring schemes run by their employer. Note that 1st May was a Bank Holiday! So, you are demonstrably and utterly wrong, but I doubt you'll be offering an apology or retraction?

Originally Posted by CPBell

Nobody has paid me a penny to do ornithology for nearly 20 years, yet the BTO insist that I pay them tribute for the privilege of doing vital work that they are unwilling or incapable of doing themselves.

I had to wait a while before I stopped laughing, but if it's so "vital" (to whom, anyone else, or just you?), and you are so "capable" then why do you think that nobody will pay you? Not even GWCT (who are currently studying Sparrowhawk predation on gamebirds), or SongBird Survival (who are currently funding a trial of predator control for songbird conservation), nor Defra (who are currently funding work on the declines of farmland birds)?

Perhaps the fact that nobody has (or will?) employed you in ornithology, despite your having an ornithology PhD (which is public money that you didn't mind wasting), offers some clues to your competence and suitably for such "vital" work?

Originally Posted by CPBell

I’m happy to work to support myself while I do research to find solutions to problems in ornithology, but not to support the BTO’s rent-seeking activities –or incidentally, to further enrich the legal profession.

Was enriching the legal profession through paying your costs when you lost your case against ZSL an exception to your rule, or the beginning of it?

And mores the pity for you that the BTO is the sole owner of the data that you want/need to further your slipshod approach to spatio-temporal modelling (where you manage to mishandle the spatio AND the temporal and just end up with a 'model'!), and you can ask and demand and argue all you wish, but they will never give it you, which any lawyer could tell you, but which I will tell you for free (and with pleasure).

[Nightranger]

Originally Posted by CPBell

Nightranger – master of the non-sequitur.

How very mature of you Dr Bell. Oh but then again, your arguments are not based on non-sequitur are they? They are however, based on a heavy dose of semantics that no one in the legal profession would touch. There is a big difference between non-professional and researcher and these are not interchangeable definitions. If my posts are in your opinion non-sequitur, then that is because you change your response ever so slightly each time you give it. It was not so many posts back that you blatantly blamed the RSPB's information about feeding garden birds for the decline of house sparrows yet this entire thread has been based around your faulty modelling of scenarios where sparrowhawks were the culprits. Just up for this post you argue that the BTO will not give you the data even though you are an amateur but you are not a researcher. In the same post, you admitted you wanted to analyse the BTO data despite clearly stating yourself that this is not a condition of being supplied with the data free of charge. Yep, Dr Christopher P. Bell - king of the semantics.

I will leave this thread to others but if I can just leave you with a bit of advice - get over yourself and get on with your research even if it means getting your own data. Once you have done that, I will look forward to reading your work and I hope one day you get a chance to read my work on house sparrows in my hometown. As Alf mentioned, local studies are going to be the way forward with house sparrows and it would be nice if you would get on with it instead of destroying your own reputation out of a sense of bitterness.

[AlfArbuthnot]

Originally Posted by Nightranger

it would be nice if you would get on with it instead of destroying your own reputation out of a sense of bitterness.

That happened on about page 4 of this thread. We are now on page 54, and he's still digging.

[Motmot]

...

[CPBell]

Originally Posted by Amarillo

But once again...you're not looking to find solutions, you're looking to prove specifically that raptors are responsible for falling songbird populations

You’ve got this exactly back to front. What I’m looking to do is disprove that raptors affect songbird populations. The point of the methodology that I developed in the Auk paper is that it is critical. The predicted patterns should emerge if the hypothesis is correct, and they shouldn’t emerge if it isn’t. Either way, someone is going to be proved wrong, which is one possible reason why neither side of the political debate is beating a path to my door. It’s much more comfortable all round to do the kind of make-work science characteristic of the BTO and most of the Universities, where the results don’t matter one way or the other, but can be spun as having ‘added another piece to the jigsaw’ – with the picture that emerges being the politically and financially convenient one that the farmer is to blame.

And in case it’s escaped your attention, I've been patiently contributing to this thread for over two years in the hope of eliciting some constructive criticism – if you or anyone else has any, I’m more than happy to respond (health warning: “uhu hu…you got fired five years ago…uhu hu hu” doesn’t qualify).

Originally Posted by Nightranger

It was not so many posts back that you blatantly blamed the RSPB's information about feeding garden birds for the decline of house sparrows

I should probably also qualify this by saying that it has to be a criticism of what I’ve actually written rather than a half-baked caricature, such as the idea that I blame sparrow decline on provision of artificial bird food. My argument was that this would be an equally valid inference from the data presented by Peach as that sparrow decline is caused by insect shortage – i.e not valid at all, because the data presented are irrelevant to the question.

http://www.cpbell.co.uk
http://www.youtube.com/CultoftheAmateur

[Nightranger]

Originally Posted by CPBell

You’ve got this exactly back to front. What I’m looking to do is disprove that raptors affect songbird populations. The point of the methodology that I developed in the Auk paper is that it is critical. The predicted patterns should emerge if the hypothesis is correct, and they shouldn’t emerge if it isn’t. Either way, someone is going to be proved wrong, which is one possible reason why neither side of the political debate is beating a path to my door. It’s much more comfortable all round to do the kind of make-work science characteristic of the BTO and most of the Universities, where the results don’t matter one way or the other, but can be spun as having ‘added another piece to the jigsaw’ – with the picture that emerges being the politically and financially convenient one that the farmer is to blame.

Wait one minute! You criticise the 'farmer-done-it' contention but I thought your work was on urban sparrow populations? I also seem to recall that an important part of your argument was to separate declines in rural and urban populations or have I missed something here? As you will know if you have cheked the literature, house sparrows only rarely venture more than one or two miles in their entire lives (yes, I know about long-range ringing recoveries but they are few and far between) and there is very little post-breeding dispersal of youngsters beyond the general area of the colony. Even then, the youngsters often return to the colony of origin after a few years. This makes some populations almost totally isolated and given that rural and urban house sparrows utilise different nesting opportunities and forage on different food, they can essentially be treated separately. In fact, it genuienly is essential to do so because the cause for decline in each case could be and probably is different.

There is also a basic assumption in this post that says that no researcher is looking for predators as a possible cause for decline. In fact, some very good work has been done on finches, which you obviously know about because you used the same body fat data vs muscle in your work if I am reading your paper correctly. The problem is, that just because no effects have been found or that the effects are not statistically significant does not mean they have not been looked for. Indeed, your basic model depends entirely on this information but the model is flawed because it allows a blip in the data to become statistically significant because of what I have already said, that it is the biological equivalent of the two-body problem from physics and takes no account of any other factors.

Originally Posted by CPBell

I should probably also qualify this by saying that it has to be a criticism of what I’ve actually written rather than a half-baked caricature, such as the idea that I blame sparrow decline on provision of artificial bird food. My argument was that this would be an equally valid inference from the data presented by Peach as that sparrow decline is caused by insect shortage – i.e not valid at all, because the data presented are irrelevant to the question.

Yet again you resort to needling to get your point across. Anyway, I am not going back through the posts to pull your precise words because they are there for all to see. It seems you only want to accept certain evidence anyway and you have never confirmed whether you accept the work done over a lifetime by J. Dennis Summers-Smith so I presume you want to conveniently ignore this.

[AlfArbuthnot]

Originally Posted by CPBell

The point of the methodology that I developed in the Auk paper is that it is critical.

And it is also too simplistic (a single variable), and probably also fundamentally flawed due to your tiny sample sizes, imprecise methods of classification, and failure to account for landscape change over 30 years. That is why nobody is beating a path to your door, and why you didn't win the £5,000 Independent prize, and why your paper is receiving few citations.

Originally Posted by CPBell

The predicted patterns should emerge if the hypothesis is correct, and they shouldn’t emerge if it isn’t. Either way, someone is going to be proved wrong,

Not on the basis of your methodology, as it is NOT rigorous enough to be definitive. You even admit that it is not definitive in the Auk paper, so it is not strong enough to "prove" anything. It is merely suggestive, and only if you bear in mind the large number of caveats.

Originally Posted by CPBell

which is one possible reason why neither side of the political debate is beating a path to my door. It’s much more comfortable all round to do the kind of make-work science characteristic of the BTO and most of the Universities, where the results don’t matter one way or the other, but can be spun as having ‘added another piece to the jigsaw’ – with the picture that emerges being the politically and financially convenient one that the farmer is to blame.

Rather than once again airing your persecution complex, have you considered the more simple explanation that nobody else thinks your paper is strong evidence, because of the clear methodological weaknesses (small sample, imprecise classification, failure to account for change)?

Originally Posted by CPBell

And in case it’s escaped your attention, I've been patiently contributing to this thread for over two years in the hope of eliciting some constructive criticism

But when Jane Turner and others asked you on numerous occasions to state your sample sizes, and how you classified gardens as urban or rural, you didn't give a direct answer, and still have not. And when it was suggested that perhaps these issues may have influenced your results, you flippantly avoided giving answers and instead tried to mock the people asking the questions. You have largely avoided discussing your methodology in any detail at all.

[fugl]

Apropos of nothing:

http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys...arrow/increase

[Jane Turner]

Has anyone ever tracked the spread of trichomonosis?

[Nightranger]

Originally Posted by Jane Turner

Has anyone ever tracked the spread of trichomonosis?

Dr Kirsi Peck at the RSPB was collecting reports but I am not sure if anything more definite has been done in the four + years since I left.

[fugl]

Here's a paragraph from an article linked to in another thread (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...tml?c=y&page=1)

"In the United Kingdom . . the house sparrow is now considered a species of conservation concern. Newspapers ran series on the birds’ benefits. One newspaper offered a reward for anyone who could find out “what was killing our sparrows.” Was it pesticides, some asked? Global warming? Cellphones? Then just this year a plausible (though probably incomplete) answer seems to have emerged. The Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus), a hawk that feeds almost exclusively on sparrows, has become common in cities across Europe and is eating the sparrows. Some people have begun to hate the hawk."

Just this year? What's being referred to here, I wonder? It can't be Bell's article surely which must be a lot earlier than that!

[Jane Turner]

Its probably as accurate in its date as it is in the "almost exclusively"

[PhilW]

Interesting that recent news release fro mBT Oshows House Sparrow populations in some areas now increasing.

[Amarillo]

Originally Posted by PhilW

Interesting that recent news release fro mBT Oshows House Sparrow populations in some areas now increasing.

I joking commented a while back that I wonder whether sparrows will recover before this thread finishes...

I've noticed a huge increase recently and have never seen so many sparrows in the garden as this year.

[Jane Turner]

Greenficnhes too... perhaps it really was trichomoniasis after all. Can I claim the money?

[tittletattler]

Originally Posted by Amarillo

I joking commented a while back that I wonder whether sparrows will recover before this thread finishes...

I've noticed a huge increase recently and have never seen so many sparrows in the garden as this year.

Yup. This was bound to happen.

With the recession, people are less inclined to spend money clearing their gardens of sprog friendly habbo and replacing it with decking. Hurrah for the banking global economic crisis!

[robinm]

I've also noticed that my local council is not sending round the hack merchants to "tidy up" the verges. There are even complaints about it in the local rag.

I have never had so many House Sparrows in the garden despite regular visits from the local Sparrowhawk.

[angusmcoatup]

Originally Posted by robinm

I've also noticed that my local council is not sending round the hack merchants to "tidy up" the verges. There are even complaints about it in the local rag.

I have never had so many House Sparrows in the garden despite regular visits from the local Sparrowhawk.

I was thinking the same thing recently. The local council estate greens are looking nicely overgrown at present, when usually they've been cut and strimmed to bowling green length at regular intervals. House Sparrow numbers have been slowly creeping up close to my home over the last 4 years I've been here. This year they've spread out a little and I can hear them throughout a fairly wide area.

[Wildmoreway]

Another factor is perhaps that because of this thread some of us are looking and listening for house sparrows more, I have certainly noticed more since this thread started. Other factors are that the population dip could have resulted from house sparrows adapting to new conditions or moving into more suitable but different situations that were not previously available to them. Indeed perhaps their population did not actually dip but that they simply drifted slowly into other habitat situations but we failed to adapt our own observation methods to accomodate this, in the meantime we saw a decline in the populations their older habitats without observing them in their new habitats.

One point is that profesional researchers often have more rigid ideas of where a species will occur than an amateur observer might, this is certainly something that I have observed with butterfly watchers.

On the sparrowhawk issue, just watch the outrage at an Osprey chick being taken by a Buzzard and the (ironic) flailing of arms by members of the anti raptor camp.