WIDE public outcry has greeted the recent decline of Britain's once plentiful house sparrows and starlings. Now reports are coming in of young birds unable to fly and instead walking around in tight circles, doing somersaults and twisting their heads in a bizarre fashion (
I asked Elliot Morley, the junior minister at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (DEFRA) with responsibility for animal welfare, if his department is backing any research into what is decimating these small birds.
Morley said that DEFRA recently published a report based on research led by the British Trust for Ornithology with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the University of Oxford, the government's Central Science Laboratory and the consultancy Wildwings Bird Management. Both the sparrow and the starling have drastically declined in the past 30 years in suburban gardens, sparrows ...
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