Issued in a BTO paper entitled “APEP4 Population estimates of birds in Great Britain and the United Kingdom 2020“, the plight of various birds becomes clear when they either don’t appear in the top 25, or are shown in red because of alarming drops in their populations.
In fact, someone queried on Facebook why house sparrows are show on the red list when they’re still the third most common bird with 5.3 million pairs; the answer is that in the past (which is only a few tens of years back) they were far more numerous, and these days there are areas where they are virtually extinct where once they were plentiful.
Likewise for starlings: many a person with fruit trees in their garden can testify to the fact that less than 50 years ago, they were pests to be discouraged from ruining your fruit harvest by any means. These days they are absent from large areas, something that is sometimes masked by the presence of large murmurations in the winter, which for a large part consists of winter migrants from continental Europe.
Marnix's Bird Gallery 