08 Mr. John Tully (2012)

On moving to Bristol with his family in 1978, he joined the Club (BOC) and in 1979 began one of his finest studies, the Common Birds Census (CBC) of Blaise Woods. CBC surveys are demanding - ten visits with a map in the breeding season, starting early, mapping everything you see or hear, and deriving from that a knowledge of the territories of every species. It was then the BTO's prime research tool to monitor the process of change. He wrote about it in 1984 and in 1987 examined the trends from five other woodlands and sought to relate them to the weather. His maths came in handy. He loved graphs, as I do, as it allowed so much information to be conveyed so vividly in so little space. He wrote up the first 25 years' of the study in 2004 (Bristol Orn. 27: 3-33), and subsequently completed it up to 2011. I have prepared the final eight years' results which are published elsewhere in this issue. This also contains a summary of the full 33 year run of the study (see page 3). There are few, if any, other CBCs that have run for so long.

He naturally became involved with the BTO's National Breeding Atlas for 1988-91 (BTO 1993), during which almost every one of the 400 tetrads of the Avon area was surveyed. He and I prepared a report on that survey; I wrote the text, he created the complex series of maps that we published in 1992 (Atlas of Breeding Birds in Avon). From 1991 to 1996 he was Treasurer of the BOC.

During the Atlas work breeding Peregrines returned to the Avon Gorge for the first time since 1947. John at once became involved in trying to ensure their success by baiting an area about 1500m from the eyrie with grain, which attracted flocks of Feral Pigeons. The object was to prevent the Peregrines hunting the birds belonging to Pigeon fanciers in south Bristol who for good reason were unhappy about the Peregrines in the gorge. He was involved in the daily watch on the nest that the BOC maintained for several years, and he began the process of monitoring the prey (Bristol Orn. 22: 3-15). This has since led to some startling discoveries about the diet of urban Peregrines and their use of a city's lights to attack migrants after dark.

Bristol's Feral Pigeons then became the focus of his attention. They are the world's most widespread and familiar species, and as a result few serious bird watchers or ornithologists had ever bothered to study them. Coverage in the BTO's 1988-91 Atlas was abysmal, and there was little knowledge of their numbers or what controlled them. John demonstrated that, at least in this region, it took 52 people to support one Feral Pigeon (Avon Bird Report 1998: 139-144). He then followed this up in 2005 with a marvellous study of dovecotes in the region, and the remarkable conclusion that in 1780 the population of Feral Pigeons which existed in dovecotes was only slightly larger than that which exist in towns today (Avon Bird Report 2005: 171-175). The former, of course, were 'farmed' as a source of food.

Shortly after the Atlas was finished the BTO decided to try a new monitoring system for common birds, the Breeding Birds Survey (BBS), and John took this up with enthusiasm. It was much simpler than CBC, and, crucially, randomised. This created the opportunity for precise measurement of change, rather than of population density as such. From 1994 he built up support for the scheme in the region so that since then we have counted a million birds, and cover annually over 10% of the surface area of the region. He summarised the annual results every year in October and circulated them to all observers and to the local authorities concerned. He ran an annual training morning to keep the supply of observers growing. As an offshoot in 2001 when the countryside was closed by Foot and Mouth, we sought to do a total BBS of the 113 squares in the city of Bristol, and this was finally published in 2010 (Bristol Orn. 30: 3-59).

In 1996 the BTO launched the new Garden Bird Watch (GBW) scheme - which asks observers to pay £15 a year to help administer the scheme. The uptake exceeded everyone's expectation so that there are now as many members of GBW as there are in the BTO. The scheme however, did not ask about birds nesting in gardens and John thought that urban bird populations were far greater than was believed at the time. So he got a BTO grant to print cards that were sent to some 5000 members of GBW asking about the birds that bred in their gardens. He and I ploughed through these, worked out all the details, and concluded, in an article in Bird Study, which received massive help from the then Director of the BTO, Jeremy Greenwood, that urban areas held far greater breeding populations than previously thought.

During this time John joined the Regional Network Committee of the BTO - a body meeting annually to look at the problems that regional representatives were having, and he later became its chairman. This involved on occasion some delicate handling of personalities, at which John was naturally very adept. In 2005 John was awarded the BTO's Jubilee medal for "Committed devotion to the Trust"

Urban birds led naturally to House Sparrows and the great declines that had been noticed. John carried out two excellently detailed surveys of one kilometre squares close to his home, demonstrating the extraordinary differences in population between areas that were physically very close. He knew the individual address of each sparrow pair, and this must have meant hours of early morning walking the streets, notebook in hand (Avon Bird Report 2000: 181-182, 2001: 153). Ken Livingstone, no less, took up the cudgels on behalf of the humble 'spadger and hosted a conference in London, to which were summoned all the sparrow experts in the land. That led to an international structure of Sparrow research, with which John kept in touch.

Thus John played a huge role not just in local ornithology, but on a wider scale. He gave freely of his advice and knowledge to any who asked, and he was someone whom everyone who met him grew to love and admire. Working closely with John, as I have done for over twenty years, has been a joy and an inspiration. In particular his courage in the past two years living with cancer, but refusing to give up or be sorry for himself, has been an example to all those who know him. We have all been enhanced by what he did and what he was.

Richard Bland