Few, if any, British garden birds are as well-known or well-loved as the blackbird. Yet a combination of warmer, drier springs and a mosquito-borne disease in the UK – both the result of the climate crisis – have put this member of the thrush family under threat.
Like many other common and familiar species, blackbirds evolved in woods and forests but then learned to take advantage of the plentiful food and suitable nesting sites in urban, suburban and rural gardens. They often feed on lawns, using their powerful bill to probe for earthworms and other invertebrates beneath the surface of the soil.
But the UK’s warm, dry springs – 2025 was officially the sunniest since records began more than a century ago – force those creatures deeper underground and bake the soil hard, so that blackbirds cannot find the food they need for themselves and their growing chicks.
And, in a double whammy, since 2020 the Usutu virus, spread by mosquitoes from Africa via continental Europe, has been detected in blackbirds in south-east England, with London’s population falling by 40% in five years.
If you want to help this charismatic bird, the British Trust for Ornithology is running a Blackbirds inGardens survey. Like so much of that organisation’s fine work, this relies on ordinary people – citizen scientists – to provide the evidence and raw data scientists need to track the ups and downs of Britain’s birds.
