One of the ecology postgrads working with me at the moment, Dee Patel, has spent this year doing lots of data curation work, and now stats analysis, on my 23-years of ongoing high frequency bird counts between Ōtautahi-Christchurch city and Lincoln town in Canterbury, NZ. That's where I repeatedly map and count birds while biking and running along 172 km of standard routes about the landscape.
Dee got the first preliminary results for all birds this week and one clear story is worth sharing: of the ~21 species of native and endemic birds that were seen often enough to be able to analyse a trend, *ALL* have increased in numbers over the past two decades.
All of them!!
Many have increased by large amounts, and on average, the NZ endemics are up more than the natives we share with other countries.
Over the same period, the introduced birds (mostly English birds) have mostly stayed about the same, with just a few declines (eg Muscovy duck are down a bit).
It's a strikingly different result from what's been reported in the media from some other parts of the world. I expect it's due to the big increases here in regeneration and planting of native vegetation and mammalian predator control, leading to a resurgence of native species in areas where they'd declined last century. We've also had the agricultural intensification and urban expansion and warming climate seen in most of the world, but those negative effects on birds seem to (so far) have been more than offset by the return of native vegetation and reduction in predators.
Dee's due to complete and submit her thesis early next year so there's still plenty of work to do before we get the details ironed out and figure out all the nuances in the story. Still, the overall result is looking really promising for the city's birds.
#birds #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #nz #ecology #LincolnUniversityNZ
