FLYING AROUND THE FARLEIGHS WITH RAY MORRIS
STOP PRESS: BULLFINCHES THREATEN UK FOOD SECURITY
Such could have been a press release, fifty years ago, for the first West Farleigh Lifeline dated April 1975, had the concept of food security been in use then.
According to the entry accredited to H. Payne Farms, Ltd: ‘We should soon start spraying the Bramleys for scab, but with the ground so waterlogged we can’t move. In any case, the bullfinches have eaten seventy-five percent of the bud. Never seen bullfinch destruction on such a scale before.’
Losing three-quarters of our apples to a single species of bird was clearly a significant problem for agriculture. By 2022, according to Fresh Produce Journal, ‘Almost 50% of apple packs on UK supermarket shelves in October and early November were imported, according to surprising new research’. Since then, we’ve had the collapse of the Kent apple market and the grubbing out of orchards changing our countryside landscape.
So how much blame can be laid at the feet of this colourful species? A local farmer tells me that as a lad fifty years ago, he and his friends would sit under a particular ash tree (whose seeds are also a favourite of bullfinches) and easily shoot fifty of them in a short space of time, so plentiful were they. There is no doubt the birds can do serious damage and although they are now protected by law, it is still theoretically possible for a farmer to get a licence to shoot them. Ironically, studies already being carried out at that time at the East Malling Research station were identifying two simple steps that would reduce their population and the impact of their predations – but as numbers of all farmland birds had already started a steep decline it proved unnecessary. Since the time of that first Lifeline, we have lost considerably more than half the population of bullfinches.
Nowadays my farmer friend would be hard pressed to see just five in a day, let alone shoot fifty in a few hours, such has been their decline.
It’s just as well for us that the male bullfinch’s plumage is so bright – females, like many species, retain a dull brown colouring throughout the year.
Being very wary of humans too, the most likely view you might have of either sex is of them disappearing ahead of you along a hedgerow, when they are easily identified by their bright white rump.
Their behaviour and lifestyle differ in many ways from most other common Farleigh birds. To begin with, they are rarely promiscuous – males and females are both socially and sexually monogamous. It’s normal in most other species for the young in any brood to have been fathered by more than one male. It’s because of this monogamous pair bonding that male bullfinches have no need of a loud song to ward off other potential male suitors, or to demonstrate their virility by having a loud and varied song. The male’s song, therefore, is an almost inaudible (to my elderly ears anyway) brief, piping ‘peep’ sound. It has been likened to a squeaky barrow. You can hear its song here. The male’s virility, in fact, is genuinely low as studies of their sperm have demonstrated.
But looks and behaviour can indeed deceive. In the past, bullfinches were highly prized by bird catchers – people who took birds from the wild and trained them to whistle human songs, then sold them as household pets or novelties. As young birds (always the males) learn their species’ song from other males, they would be kept in a dark cage – or worse, deliberately blinded – while tunes were played to them on a flute or whistled by their trainer. A well-trained bird could fetch a handsome sum. The problem for bird catchers, though, was that they had to acquire the male bird before it left the nest to get it at its most impressionable. The sex of nestlings cannot be determined on sight - this can only be done when it has its first moult in the autumn, and by then the window of musical opportunity has passed.
Bullfinches, though, were certainly worth the effort as they possess an astonishing ability to learn two, sometimes three, folk tunes, even though in the wild they only memorize a brief whistle. By their trainer whistling the same tune, in the same key, day after day, they quickly acquire their repertoire making them a valuable novelty for the rich – Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II each had their own. They are also capable of recognising individual humans, creating pair bonds with their favourites. The male’s spectacular colour (bullfinch is a corruption of the German for blood finch) simply adds to their attraction as a desirable pet. And that’s another reason, incidentally, for them to be fully protected by UK and European law, lest they become another victim of mankind’s greed, exploited for the pet trade.