Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

THE chap who took this picture was Roger Wilmshurst, and it is one of a series of RSPB images.

It shows what all song thrushes do in hot weather '“ break open snails to eat the innards.

They leave these piles of empty shells on the paths, known as thrush anvils. It's a bit like litter louts throwing out their rubbish after a picnic.

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I'm very grateful to Roger. Back in 1964, he started me on recording positions of breeding birds for the CBC '“ Common Bird Census.

This was one of the first methods of finding out what was happening to birds in this country. Were they increasing or decreasing? The British Trust for Ornithology started the scheme under a namesake of mine, Kenneth Williamson. He was no relation.

Anyway, Roger lived in Sussex and came over to Kingley Vale to set me on the business of listening to birds singing in the breeding season and marking their position on to maps.

I have carried out my CBC every year since 1964 and that meeting with Roger, and it must be the longest-running in the UK.

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Roger went into the antiques business and the BTO has now abandoned its CBCs, but my records for Kingley Vale and West Dean Woods go on regardless.

The Kingley Vale records show how downland birds have decreased dramatically.

Gone are the corn buntings, stonechats, lesser whitethroats, lapwings and cuckoos. The stone curlew is but a distant memory.

Still there in the same number are the bullfinches, blackbirds, robins, green woodpeckers, great tits, song thrushes and sparrowhawks.

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Increasing are the buzzards. Fifty-six species have bred there.

West Dean Woods is a hazel coppice and oak standards nature reserve. Numbers of birds here have hardly altered over the decades, with 42 species normally in residence. We get plenty of warblers here because of the thick, low cover of newly cut coppice.

Titmice and woodpeckers thrive in the old oaks. Robins oscillate up and down over the decades with the same frequency as they do on the Downs. We have lost tree pipits and cuckoos but buzzards are common, while hobby falcon and raven have newly bred.

All my records will go into a new book about these places, so will my records for butterflies and orchids, which go back decades as well and show the way things are changing.

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But Roger started me off on this trail of discovery four decades and more ago so thanks very much to him if he ever reads this: your two days of instruction were not wasted.

The feature was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on June 4 2008.

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