The following article ran in today's Independent. If you have birded England
or are just interested in conservation it is worth a read.
Good birding, David Flood

Found: the little-spotted woodpecker
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
The Independent (UK) On-line Edition
21 May 2005

Watching something that's disappearing is a curiously moving sensation. You
feel you must focus on it as hard as you can, while you can, for you may not
have the chance to see it again.

At least that's what it felt like this week when The Independent, after more
than a year of trying, caught up with Britain's most rapidly vanishing bird,
the tiny and elusive lesser spotted woodpecker. After a long wait deep in a
Cambridgeshire wood, staring at a nest hole the size of a 50p piece near the
top of a dead birch tree, we finally glimpsed a bird few people ever see -
and which, if present trends continue, people in Britain may never see
again.

Dendrocopos minor is at the top of the list of a whole suite of birds of the
woodlands, such as the spotted flycatcher and the willow tit, whose
populations are tumbling at a rate that threatens them with extinction - and
no one knows why. Over the past 40 years, Britain's farmland birds such as
the skylark and the grey partridge, have suffered massive declines, but the
major cause is known - the intensification of agriculture - and policies are
in place to bring them back. With woodland birds, whose declines have only
recently been registered, the cause is a mystery.

The problem is perhaps most difficult of all with the lesser spotted
woodpecker, because very little is known about the bird to start with. Quite
uncommon and very small - about the size of a Mars bar, and weighing less
than a packet of crisps - it lives in the dense leaf canopy of woodland
trees, and unlike its relatives, the great spotted and green woodpeckers, it
virtually never descends to the ground. Shy and retiring, it does not feed
on your lawn like the green woodpecker (which is doing fine); it does not
visit your garden bird table like the great spotted (whose numbers are
shooting up).

Attractive though it is - the male has a bright scarlet crown - the only
people who ever see it are the birders or professional ornithologists who
determinedly seek it out in spring, when it can be located by its call and
by its drumming as it excavates its nest hole in dead wood. And even now,
there is little detailed knowledge about its range, its nesting requirements
or its preferred habitat for foraging. So the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds is launching a research project to try to understand the
species, so that the causes of its decline may eventually be teased out.

More than a year ago, The Independent asked the RSPB to find us a lesser
spotted we could view and photograph; this week they provided one. The pilot
study for the research project is focusing on a nest deep inside Monks Wood
near Huntingdon, the largest wood in Cambridgeshire.

Derek Gruar, an RSPB conservation scientist, found the nest in March after
about 30 hours of searching through the dense woodland of oak, birch and
hazel coppice, tracking the male bird down by its drumming. Mr Gruar and his
colleagues have succeeded in netting and ringing the male, and fitting a
minuscule transmitter to its tail.

When we were shown the bird's tree in the dark woodland, it took a few
minutes, even with binoculars, to spot the hole; and then there was a long,
long wait. But eventually a shadowy form flickered into view from out of the
leaves and there was Dendrocopos minor in all his tiny glory, come to feed
his chicks with a beakful of grubs. He landed on the birch trunk above the
nest, shinned backwards down the bark, and disappeared into the tree. Then
after a few seconds the bright scarlet crown appeared in the nest hole, the
bird took a quick peek left and right, and was away again.

It was memorable to a degree - not least because it was a sight that may not
long be with us. "Any bird whose population has crashed by 80 per cent has
to be a cause of serious concern," said Mr Gruar. "And the main problem is,
we don't yet know what the problem is."

. Anyone who thinks the idea of wild birds going extinct in England is
far-fetched, should be aware that there are several gloomy precedents: 30
years ago we lost what was then the fourth of our woodpecker species, the
wryneck. This small brown bird - named for its weird ability to turn its
head through more than 180 degrees - started to disappear after the Second
World War. Its population of perhaps 400 pairs in 1954 shrank to fewer than
50 by 1967, and by 1974 it had stopped breeding in England.