Index – Intro – Ch.1 – Ch.2 – Ch.3 – Ch.4 – Ch.5
Ch.6 – Ch.7 – Ch.8 – Ch.9 – Ch.10 – Ch.11 – Ch.12 – Ch.13
From “The seabird’s cry” by Adam Nicolson (paperback edition William Collins 2018, p.352)
A few years ago, I went for a walk at Sissinghurst in Kent, a place I have loved all my life, and took with me a friend, Claire Spottiswoode, an ornithologist now working at the universities in Cape Town and Cambridge, but who was brought up in Africa and has spent her life documenting the birds of that still-enriched continent. After a while in the heavy summer woods and fields, I turned to her and asked what she thought of this place, expecting her to love it’s deep and rooted beauty, the shadows of its oak woods, the glow and burnish of its summer meadows. ‘There is nothing here,’ she said. ‘Where is everything? Where are the animals? Where are the birds? It is empty. Everything has gone.’
It’s something that’s been bothering me for some time. Nature reserves display panels with the type of animals that can be found within its boundaries, but more often than not you don’t stand a cat’s chance in hell of encountering them. You have to make a concerted effort to try and spot anything that’s worthwhile mentioning, and most of the time a casual walk won’t reveal anything of what the reserve is supposed to contain.
Take for instance Cosmeston Lakes near Penarth. An information board near one of the ponds, showing three animals you might possibly see: kingfisher, bittern and otter. You couldn’t ask for a harder-to-find trio! You might as well place dragons and mermaids on the board and have the same chance of seeing them!
Likewise in our neighbourhood, the majority of birds are what you could call commensals: magpies, jackdaws, wood pigeons, house sparrows, blackbirds, and lesser black-backed gulls that have established themselves on the roof of a neighbouring house. And even the flock of sparrows are not as regular in their visits as they used to be.
As for the nearby Forest Farm local reserve, the only birds you’re guaranteed to see on the Glamorganshire canal are mallards and moorhens. If you’re willing to spend half an hour in one of the hides you stand a good chance of spotting a kingfisher or a grey heron, and there’s the usual assortment of great tits, blue tits, dunnocks and robins near the feeders, but once you’ve seen the usual suspects, that’s about it. OK, sometimes you encounter the odd surprise, such as a water rail that pokes its head out of the reeds, or a little egret that chances to pop by, but they’re the scarce exception, never the rule
+ add a bit about the birds that aren’t in Forest Farm : swallow, swift, starling, coot, great crested grebe + wonder why that should be so
David Grayson Botswana tally = 139 types of bird. My tally (with some overlap): Maun 15, Okavango 23, Victoria Falls 6, Chobe 36, Moremi 33, total 83 with pictures, plus a few that I saw but didn’t manage a picture of (e.g. thick-knee, hoopoe).
The conclusion is that of a life impoverished, diminished. The irony is that in comparison with the UK, countries like Spain and Portugal care far less about their local birdlife – they don’t appear to have the same giant memberships of bodies like the RSPB or the various Wildlife Trusts, but on the other hand, birdlife appears to be more colourful and less monotonous than it is in Britain. Have we become so concerned about wildlife because there’s so little of it left?
That’s also the view stated in a book I encountered on various European bird sites, which includes Norfolk and the Outer Hebrides in its listings, and states the following :
Britain is something of an enigma in terms of its birding heritage. On the one hand, birding is perhaps more popular here than just about anywhere else and the flagship conservation organization, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, is one of the best, if not the best, in the entire world. On the other hand, the actual birdlife of the islands is surprisingly modest. Of the 560 or so species that have been recorded up to 2010, less than half are breeding or regular wintering species and the rest are made up from a very long list of freak waifs and strays. You might even say that the birding facilities, knowledge and know-how are a lot more impressive than the birds.
+ add a bit about Mark Cocker’s “Our place: Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it’s too late?”, especially the bit where a states that most people don’t want uncontrolled wildlife, they’d rather have “tidy” gardens and landscapes rather than messy wild ones
To be honest I’m dubious when it comes to expect people to change their behaviour fast to avert disaster. Not enough people are convinced in their gut that the onslaught of global warming requires a turnaround in behaviour, and we see that despite all the nice words and worthy initiatives, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere accumulates apace along a “business as usual” scenario. Likewise the alarming signs of how the ongoing sixth mass extinction is now affecting most creatures that attempt to share the earth with the 7+ billion humans and their agricultural (plant and animal) domesticated products. The way I see it, those that can’t adapt and fit into the interstices of human society are ultimately doomed to try and scrape a living in ever more marginal and cramped conditions.
So welcome to the 21st century, where successful wildlife will be of the rat, and birds of the flying rat, variety. And many will rather blame a lone sparrowhawk rather than their cat for the decline of the local songbirds, or prefer the untrameled freedom of their dog over the feeding needs of shore birds and the nesting needs of ground-nesting birds. As long as we value our own needs and those of our domestics over everything else, there’s no hope for the survival of any animal apart from the luckiest. Time to rethink the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and limit those rights to acknowledge the right of other organisms to have their fair share of the terrestrial pie?
Index – Intro – Ch.1 – Ch.2 – Ch.3 – Ch.4 – Ch.5
Ch.6 – Ch.7 – Ch.8 – Ch.9 – Ch.10 – Ch.11 – Ch.12 – Ch.13
Marnix's Bird Gallery 