On Mon, 22 Mar 2004 23:15:18 -0000, "Christina Websell"
christina.websell@zoomdotcodotuk wrote:


W K wrote in message
...

"Colonel Bloomer" wrote in message
...

doubtful it even
reaches four figures in total.

Funding a PhD student costs a lot more than that.

Particularly if she has 600 nest boxes up.
Bloomer for the killfile I fear.
Kate's work has really been very impressive. She appealed on local radio at
first for people who had sparrows and would be prepared to let her study
them. Then the preliminary surveys of the sites offered, and then the boxes
installed and visited and examined weekly. Adult roosts identified,
mistnetted, and birds rung and recorded late in the evening.
Birds nesting in my eaves observed using an oscilloscope. Nestboxes checked
for nest material, then for eggs, then chicks rung, and weighed and also
measured each week for leg length, wing length and feather growth. Faecal
samples taken and analysed, both from the chicks and from droppings of the
adults, scraped from my windowsills.
Vegetation in gardens regularly examined for invertebrates, samples taken
from hedges, trees, bushes and plants. Newsletters produced and distributed
to participants and regular phone and email contact for matters of interest
relating to sparrows and all this over three years. And more I don't know
about, no doubt.

I would suggest that this would take plenty of funding and I say well done
all who funded it. RSPB/BTO etc.
And well done to Kate who cares about sparrow's decline.

Tina

You would appear to be missing the point. Yes, kate is doing a grand
job, no one claimed otherwise. The RSPB however are offering lip
service to a very serious problem, this should be a national,
scientific, peer reviewed study on a grand scale, we've certainly paid
for it an without it the results are meaningless. this SHOULD have
been done five, ten years ago. Lets hope it's not too late, certainly
if we waited for the RSPB to dip into their pockets it will be.

The RSPB have managed to raise over £5 million pounds to fund a ruddy
duck cull that no body wants except a few twitchers obsessed with
their own self importance. Surely they could put as much effort into
raising the same kind of over funding for the decline in sparrows etc?

Regardless it comes from RSPB coffers or tax payer, the RSPB can do it
and yet have done nothing!

In the meantime whilst we all wait around for them to do something,
because we expect them to do something and that's what they are there
for, the declines are looking pretty serious and some are talking of
extinctions!

You might be gullible enough to consider kate is the savior of the
sparrow and nothing else needs doing. I'm not.