Five decades of monitoring the UK’s rare breeding birds

As part of our activities to mark the 50th anniversary of the RBBP’s formation as an independent body with the responsibility for monitoring the UK’s rarest breeding birds, the Panel has published two review papers in the journals British Birds and British Wildlife. These look back over the five decades since 1973 at how both the work of the Panel, and the populations of rare breeding bird species that we monitor, have changed, as well as summarising how we operate nowadays.

The paper in British Birds, The Rare Breeding Birds Panel: five decades of monitoring the UK’s rare breeding birds (Stroud et al. 2023) is now available open access, and can be read here (and the supplementary online material is here). It focusses on the development of the Panel’s work, describing how this has evolved in step with the technology that supports the collection, sharing and use of data. It stresses how the birdwatching community plays a crucial part in the ability of the organisation to run effectively, set against the background of major change in the numbers and distribution of our rarest nesting birds.

The paper in British Wildlife, Monitoring five decades of change in the UK’s rarest breeding birds through citizen science: the Rare Breeding Birds Panel (Eaton et al. 2023) will be made available here in due course – presently it is available through subscription at www.britishwildlife.com. This paper focusses more on the birds themselves, describing some of the basic patterns of change in rare breeding birds over the last fifty years – the arrivals and departures, rises and falls. It shows that 14 species have colonised the UK since 1973, while seven species have ceased breeding over the period.