Garden Birds. Mike Toms

      FIG 6. Blue Tits typically outnumber Great Tits in the urban environment, by as much as 3:1, but are the less numerous species within traditional woodland habitats. (John Harding)

      Loram’s work also revealed the spatial pattern of gardens within each of the cities, reflecting variation in the density of the human population and the associated densities of housing stock. The history of each city, together with the geography of its location, contributed to the pattern of housing seen; the notion of a simple gradient in garden size, from the leafy suburbs with their large gardens through to courtyard gardens in the urban centre, was disrupted by these and other factors. This also meant that there was no clear relationship between garden size and distance to the edge of the conurbation within any of the five cities studied. This is important when we look at urban bird populations in more general terms as, for example, examined through the work of Chamberlain et al. (2009a) and others.

      At a wider spatial scale, it is possible to use data from the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey to examine the densities of bird species across the broader landscape and, as was done by Tratalos et al. (2007), to look at the relationship between avian abundance, species richness and housing densities within urban areas. Tratalos et al. (2007) found that total species richness – and that of 27 urban-indicator species – increased from low to moderate household densities, before then declining as you reached higher household densities. Avian abundance showed a rather different pattern, increasing across a wider range of household densities and then only declining at the highest household densities. The researchers were also able to look at the patterns in abundance seen within individual species, highlighting some interesting differences between them. Importantly, however, most of the species showed a hump-shaped relationship with household density, declining at the highest densities. A somewhat worrying finding, highlighted by the team, was that avian abundance almost invariably began to decline at a point below the density of housing required by the UK government for new developments.

      A number of studies have highlighted that within cities it is the suburbs that support the greatest variety of bird species, something that is reflected in the hump-shaped distribution of the relationship between species richness and housing density mentioned above. A widely accepted hypothesis for the shape of this relationship is that the observed pattern is due to the increased habitat heterogeneity present at intermediate levels of urbanisation – i.e. that the suburbs are more diverse than either the more urbanised town centres or the farmland habitats that so often surround our towns and cities. However, it may also be the case that there is a higher availability of food resources in our suburbs than elsewhere (see Chapter 2) and that this, rather than habitat heterogeneity, shapes species richness.

      Where a garden is located along the rural to urban gradient may influence the community of garden birds associated with it. This is something that we have been able to examine by using data from the BTO’s Garden BirdWatch project (Chamberlain et al., 2004a). Looking at nearly 13,000 garden sites contributing weekly data on garden birds between 1995 and 2002, we examined the extent to which the occurrence of individual garden bird species at a site was determined by features within the garden itself or by the nature of the surrounding landscape. Garden size was taken into account because we found that, in most cases, species were more likely to occur in large gardens (and larger gardens were more likely to occur in rural habitats and to have high tree and hedge cover). Exceptions to this were House Sparrow, Collared Dove, Black-headed Gull Chroicocephalus ridibundus and Starling, all of which were more likely to occur in small gardens.