About
What the status colours mean
Some species carry a conservation status — a quick sense of how much concern there is for the population. It's shown as a colour: red, amber or green.
For birds, this is the UK's Birds of Conservation Concern assessment — a traffic-light system drawn up by the country's leading bird and wildlife organisations. Every regularly-occurring species is placed on one of three lists, based on things like how fast its numbers are changing, how rare it is, and how important the UK is for it.
Red
The highest concern. These species are globally threatened, or their numbers or range have fallen sharply — often by more than half in recent decades. They need urgent help.
Amber
Moderate concern. These species have declined less steeply, are rare or localised, or the UK holds an internationally important share of them. Worth keeping a close eye on.
Green
Least concern. These species are stable or increasing, with no pressing worries about their numbers — the good-news end of the scale.
A green status doesn't mean a species is common everywhere, and a red one doesn't mean you won't see it — a few red-listed birds are still easy to find locally. The colour is about the health of the wider population, not your chances on the day.
The bigger picture — the IUCN Red List
The Red/Amber/Green lists describe how a species is faring in the UK. Globally, the standard measure is the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, run by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It sorts wildlife the world over into categories of extinction risk:
- Least Concern and Near Threatened — widespread and abundant, or close to qualifying for a threatened category.
- Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered — the three "threatened" categories, in rising order of extinction risk.
- Extinct in the Wild and Extinct — surviving only in captivity, or gone altogether.
The two systems don't always agree: a bird can be Red-listed in the UK because it's declining sharply here, yet still Least Concern globally because it thrives elsewhere. The UK lists are the better guide to what's happening on your doorstep; the IUCN Red List is the guide to a species' fortunes across its whole range.