There has been some awful journalism over the past week that has painted the Sparrowhawk as Public Enemy Number One. Anyone who has seen the joint BTO/St Andrews University paper cannot help but conclude that our commonest raptors are having little impact on the majority passerines.
I wrote the following article in the Sunday Express. I hope it puts things in perpsective.
I was informed that the authors of the paper said this piece reached an accurate conclusion.
JAMES Lovelock has the wonderful demeanour of the elderly gent in the Werther's Original adverts and a brain as nimble and incisive as Wayne Rooney's feet.
His views on climate change and the future of our living - some may say dying - planet may seem doom-laden, but his underlying philosophy, honed during his 90 years, is deserving of religious devotion.
At the heart of Professor Lovelock's beliefs is the Gaia Theory: Earth is effectively a living, breathing organism and the planet's thermostat is controlled by the plants and creatures that live on it.
Last week, I was lucky to hear the professor delivering a lecture at London's Science Museum, explaining how the chemical balance of our small rock was kept in check by the biological processes of billions of living things. In short, without life there would be no life.
I left thinking about a newly published scientific work on the impact predators are having on songbirds. One shock headline summed up it up: "Sparrowhawk boom to blame for the vanishing songbirds" and another, "Named - the guilty hawk".
Reading a release from the British Trust for Ornithology, based on the paper published in the Journal Of Applied Ecology, I had a completely different take.
The research was certainly thorough. Detailed observations from more than 200 sites carried out between 1967 and 2000 for the Common Bird Census were matched with recent findings from more than 2,000 volunteers who have been carrying out the Breeding Bird Survey.
Far from painting the sparrowhawk and our other well-known raptors, buzzard and kestrel, as public enemies, the most significant finding was out of 29 potential prey species - which includes all of our best-known garden and farmland species. In all but seven cases there was no significant link between the increase in predator numbers and the decline in prey.
Out of seven species where negative impacts were identified, three well-known birds - tree sparrow, bullfinch and reed bunting - appear, and I use that word advisedly, to be suffering the worst, to the point that the scientists say there should be further investigations.
I have seen sparrowhawks take countless collared doves, starlings, blackbirds and blue tits, but I have never witnessed bullfinch, tree sparrow or reed bunting kills. I believe these species have suffered declines over the past 40 years because of habitat loss. All like the tangled hedgerows that have been regularly grubbed up to make space for housing and farming.
This brings me to the fact that of the 22 species studied, there is "no statistically significant link between the increase of predator numbers and the decline of prey numbers".
My view is that far from having a negative effect, the balance between predators and prey is as nature intended - in balance.
They need each other to ensure nature's most important rule is obeyed: survival of the fittest.
