The British press has leapt on a story about a new family tree of birds (Times | BBC | Google )

All sounds very jolly, but this family tree is actually a doomsayer, used to predict the decline of beloved British birds. On the basis of their analysis, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers from Imperial College say the blackbird may soon be a species under threat (paper | press release). The reasoning is that a number of the blackbirds’ close relations, such as the the song thrush, are already in trouble. This decline of related birds, says researcher Gavin Thomas, is a warning sign that blackbirds are going to become endangered in the future, based on the physical similarities of the birds and their positions in the family tree he has devised.

So the new research can be seen as an early warning system for birds, and might help conservationists do something in advance to save the allegedly-threatened birds from a dangerous decline. Maybe someone should stop the singing of the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence”, to avoid any pie-related exacerbation of their predicted dwindling numbers.

Image: Blackbird photo from Foxypar4 on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence