The paper is an excellent contribution to our understanding of how biodiversity might change with different types of forestry and residential development, and makes a general point of wide interest, that low density housing within wooded areas may enhance biodiversity, whereas plantation woodland does not. Therefore the widespread practice of considering such residential areas as “non-woodland”, while plantation woodland still retains the title of “woodland” may give very misleading impressions when it is assumed that “woodland” is good for biodiversity and “residential” is not. The approach in the paper is to provide several layers of evidence that when taken together give a convincing picture. Some of the analyses may be confounded by variation in detectability of birds between habitats, but this is unlikely to affect the results and this problem has been properly discussed and acknowledged within the paper by the authors.