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Postcode Lottery for Birds

July 23, 2001

Scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) have discovered that it's not only people who can suffer from 'postcode lottery' syndrome, but birds too can have radically different life spans depending on where they live.

The research, published today (26 July) in the international journal Nature, shows for the first time that black-tailed godwits, a migratory bird that winters around the coastline of Britain, have significantly different survival rates and breeding patterns depending on where they live.

Dr Jenny Gill, of UEA's School of Biological Sciences, studied black-tailed godwits wintering in the estuaries of the south or east coasts of Britain, before they returned to their breeding grounds in Iceland. She found that the birds on the south coast lived longer, on average for 16 years, compared with the birds on the east coast who lived to an average of just 7 years.

"We found that the birds from the south had two main advantages over their east coast cousins - their food supply and the time they arrived at their breeding grounds in Iceland," said Dr Gill

"Once the normal food supply in the estuaries ran out, the southern birds were able to move to nearby recently-flooded pastures and eat earthworms. This option wasn't available to the godwits on the east coast. Secondly, the birds from the south coast arrived back at their Icelandic breeding grounds much earlier in the season than the ones from the east. Getting back to be breeding grounds often means that the birds get access to the best sites and so have higher breeding success," she continued.

During the study, Dr Gill carried out a nationwide advertising campaign asking birdwatchers to report any sightings of the godwits. She was astounded by the response: "posters were placed in hides and birdwatching newsletters around the country, the response was amazing, at the height of the campaign I was receiving around 10 e-mails and letters a day from people who had seen one of the godwits we had ringed earlier in the study."

The project was carried out jointly with the Portsmouth-based Farlington Ringing Group, the British Trust for Ornithology, the University of Reading, the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and the Wash Wader Ringing Group.

"Our members, who are all volunteers, have helped in this study by ringing more than 140 godwits in the last 10 years, and there have been over 6,000 observations of those birds recorded so far," said Peter Potts of the Farlington Ringing Group.

"The team from Britain came over to Iceland at the start of the breeding season last year, and together we visited sites all around the country to observe the birds and check which UK location they'd come from" said T'�mas Gunnarsson, a PhD research student now also at the University of East Anglia.

East Anglia, University of

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