Is ever-increasing traffic to blame for collapse in England's population of Cuckoos (and possibly Nightingales, too)?

 

Cuckoo - a bird that likes to eat caterpillars but, according to Paul Donald's book, hates to hear traffic 

COULD traffic - especially its noise -  be implicated in the decline in Britain's Cuckoos since the 1960s?

This possibility does not chime  with the more commonly held theory that intensive agriculture has decimated the countryside of the large hairy caterpillars on which the species likes to feed.

Other commentators have suggested that Cuckoos have fared much better in Scotland because these birds take a different migration route - one less prone to drought -  from the one favoured by their English counterparts.

But in his lively  and controversial book, Traffication (a word contrived by him), Paul Donald advances the traffic noise theory that was first  advanced - to modest publicity - by Dutch researchers several years ago.

Donald revisits this suggestion on the basis that, among the few places in England where cuckoos are holding their own are Dartmoor, Salisbury Plain and the Brecks of East Anglia - 'windows of calm' as he describes them.

As such, they are comparable to much of Scotland, where, evidently to the benefit of Cuckoos, traffic is similarly lower than in most parts of Britain.

The author goes on to  maintain that, as well as traffic noise,  moths - and hence their caterpillars - are also likely to be adversely affected both by pollution from vehicle exhaust fumes and by artificial light from cars and roads. 

And that's all to the detriment of Cuckoos.

Donald, formerly the RSPB's principal scientist, goes on to extend his traffic noise theory to the decline in Britain of two other summer -visiting species - the Nightingale and the Turtle Dove.

"These patterns of decline  may have other explanations," he writes. "But surely traffication  demands further attention.

"If we find that the problems facing our vanishing wildlife have their origins in our road system rather than in the vast expanse of the African Sahel or in the global pandemic of climate change, then they become easier to fix.

"Even if turns out that traffic is only a really small part of the problem, reducing its impacts might still throw many species a lifeline.

"One of conservations core paradigms is that reducing one threat to a species usually enables it to cope better with others."

Sections of Traffication are speculative - fanciful even - but credit to the author for his readiness to raise his head above the parapet and court controversy even if it means  treading on the toes of powerful lobbies, not least the automotive industry.

Warming to his argument, he insists:  "The scientific evidence is overwhelming.

"We are blasting our wildlife away with traffic noise, flattening it with cars and poisoning it with exhaust fumes.

"Traffic has sucked the life out of our countryside - we are quite literally 'driving' our wildlife to extinction."

Traffication is published in paperback  at £11.99 by Pelagic Publishing. https://pelagicpublishing.com/

                                                 

'Traffic has sucked the life out of our countryside,' claims the author