Ingham’s W RLD
LIFE in the wild is nasty, brutish and short – sometimes. Garden birds certainly have to run the gauntlet of a plethora of perils: cats, sparrowhawks, magpies, nest- robbing squirrels, disease, food shortages, snow and ice, flying into windows and dodging traffic. To name just a few.
But reader Barbara Orsborn from Copthorne in West Sussex asks how long birds can expect to live. Sadly most fly for only a short time over this world.
Paul Stancliffe of the British Trust for Ornithology ( BTO) said about 80 per cent of most small birds die in their first year, which is why parents lay so many eggs. But if a bird survives to its first breeding season, life looks up. By then it will be streetwise, know the best feeding spots and where predators lurk.
The BTO’s BirdFacts website says the average lifespan of a robin, long- tailed tit, goldfinch or wren is two frantic years of seeking food. But many live much longer. Recoveries of ringed birds show that the oldest wren was seven years old and the oldest robins, goldfinches and long- tailed tits clocked up more than eight years.
Three years is the typical lot of house sparrows, blackbirds and wood pigeons but some have made it to 12, 14 and 17 respectively.
Generally the bigger the bird the longer it lives and the fewer eggs it lays. So Europe’s smallest bird, the goldcrest, can lay 16 eggs a year and is ancient at four. But the oldest ringed golden eagle – which lays two eggs a year – was 16.
The birdworld’s Methuselahs are seabirds. The oldest known UK razorbill was nearly 42 while our longest- lived bird was a Manx shearwater, a sort of northern albatross. It was last seen in 2008 aged 50 years 11 months and 21 days despite migrating from North Wales to Brazil every year.
Yet it was a youngster compared with the world’s oldest known bird: a Laysan albatross. Named Wisdom it was first ringed as an adult in 1956 on Midway Atoll in the north Pacific by biologist Chandler Robbins who still visits her despite being 97 himself.
She is thought to be about 65 and is busy rearing her 40th chick. Over her lifetime she has flown three million miles or the equivalent of six round trips to the moon, quartering the Pacific in her relentless hunt for squid. So sometimes life in the wild can be nasty, brutish... and very long.
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