David Hill wrote:

Having trouble sending so am re posting this.

"...........We have a lot of buzzards in our area. Perhaps that's
why there has been a decline in songbirds here in recent years...."

We have anything from 4 to 10 buzzards here and I have often seen them
perching on a couple of our poles.
They certainly have done nothing to reduce the birdsong, on Tuesday and
Wednesday I was woken just before 6am by the Birds, don't think I have known
then quite so noisy.
We regularly have chaffinches, green finches, hedge sparrows house sparrows,
blue tits ,long tailed tits, great tits, and coal tits, robins, blackbirds,
thrushes, Collared doves, wood pigeons, a pair of carrion crows, the odd
starling(Though 10 yrs ago we had them by the hundred), Green woodpecker,
magpies, Jays, and the Buzzards, rooks, a couple of Owls we hear at night or
early morning. (NO wrens for the last couple of years).All of these seen or
heard in the last week.
As well tree creepers and nut hatches, flycatchers, bull finches, gold
finches, field fairs,swallows, house martins and swifts, herons, sea gulls
and terns, a pair of peregrine falcons that nest locally, ....... at some
time in the year........ and probably a few that I cant think of now.
Often think we would do better as a nature reserve.

Buzzards rarely eat other birds, generally prefering a range of small
mammals. Although they will eat almost anything, including worms and
beetles. I would have thought that even when they do take birds, the
preference would have been for something larger - partridge, pigeon, etc
rather than song birds.

Anyway, it is a very well established principle and practically observed
fact that predators do not determine the numbers of their prey species,
however counter intuitive it may seem. The numbers of predator species
are determined by the availability of food. Think of Zebra and grass -
unless the natural systems go very wrong, the availability of grass
determines the numbers of Zebra.

Of course, homo sapiens tends to screw up the natural balance - DDT, for
example, having decimated numbers of birds of prey.
--
Larry Stoter