Category Archives: Conservation

Summer in Gunnersbury Triangle

4 June 2015 Ian Alexander

Suddenly it’s actually hot in the nature reserve.

The wildflower meadow in front of the hut shimmered in the sunshine, with bumblebees buzzing around the many Red Campion flowers. A Brimstone visited, for once perching quietly to drink nectar from the flowers. A large brown Shield Bug flew in and clambered up a twig in the hedge. A Red Admiral flew over too. We spent the morning making pegs – like overgrown foot-long sharpened pencils – to fix down the long thin logs we’re using as path edgings. It was pleasant working as a team, with cutting to length and then sharpening with the billhook going on simultaneously.

In the woodland where little shafts of sunlight reached the understory, Speckled Woods danced about or perched.

Down at the pond, Azure Blues (the ones with the little drinking-cup mark at the base of their abdomens) darted about, chasing each other off perches and flying in cop with what seemed to be rather few females compared to the number of eager males. A smaller number of Large Red Damselflies similarly chased and mated.

The “Mangrove Swamp” has lost almost all its standing water now: last week it had risen after being very low, but it only takes a few days for the level to fall dramatically. The frog tadpoles in the last pool were wriggling in a few centimetres of muddy water. I scooped them up in a bucket and popped them into the pond, where they’ll have to take their chances with the ducks alongside the toad tadpoles. The toad-poles may be somewhat distasteful like the adults, so perhaps the frog tadpoles are more palatable?

The Yellow Irises on the pond are starting to suffer from Iris Sawfly, a few of the leaves showing many small bite-marks along their margins.

A small diving beetle obligingly came to the surface to replenish its air supply, staying up there for a minute and then zooming down to the bottom when I came close.

Conservation, Environment, Natural History

Sussex Coastal Geography in the Spring

13 April 2015 Ian Alexander

Cuckmere Haven with bar, lagoon, and wave-cut platform

Down in Sussex for a few days, we walked the Seven Sisters from Cuckmere Haven to the Birling Gap.

We had a taste of the scale of human interference with the world’s climate in the shape of a thick haze of pollution trapped by an anticyclone: on the Weald approaching Lewes, we could see the thick haze below the level of the South Downs, and taste the acridity on our tongues. On the coast itself, it was less noticeable in the sea breeze, but the visibility was much reduced with the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry quickly fading into the murk. The BBC warned of high local pollution (worst near Hastings) and an expert advised against strenuous exercise.

The photo of Cuckmere Haven had to be enhanced as it actually looked all washed out in the haze. The geography is interesting: the Cuckmere River emerges (as a dark horizontal line) through what looks from this viewpoint like a continuous shingle bar across the mouth of the valley. The ‘lagoon’ on the landward side of the shingle is part of a former meander of the river, now cut off as if it were an oxbow lake; the current watercourse is canalized with artificial embankments. In the background are vertical sea-cliffs of chalk, with softer (brown) sands above, eroding at a shallower angle. At the base of the cliffs is a white line of fallen chalk rubble, and a dark horizontal surface, a wave-cut platform of chalk (with dark seaweed). In the foreground is the slope of chalk grassland and (left centre) two wartime concrete pillboxes defending the haven.

Seven Sisters - coastal cliff erosion — Seven Sisters – coastal cliff erosion

Gingerly approaching the cliff edge at a crawl, I took this photo, showing a large cave in the chalk: the waves fracture and undercut the cliff at high tide, causing progressive and often sudden cliff falls. The coastline recedes by about 70cm per year, but this bland average conceals a very different reality: the cliff edge barely changes from one year to another, until in some specially violent winter storm, perhaps three to five metres of chalk grassland and hundreds of thousands of tons of chalk suddenly collapse all at once into a gigantic white heap on the beach. The cave in the photo has created an overhang of more than 10 metres; it will certainly collapse one day in the next few years.

The walk was constantly accompanied by the song-flights of Skylarks, and their darting duels low over the grass. A few Ravens flew about the cliffs, and many Jackdaws; a pair of Carrion Crows mobbed a Raven; a few Magpies brought the number of members of the Crow tribe up to four. Near Birling, Chiffchaffs crept about an orchard, and Blackcaps dived into gorse bushes. Hundreds of Brent Geese flew Eastwards in V-shaped skeins or long lines half a wingspan above the waves. Four or five Little Egrets darted about the Cuckmere Haven lagoon, spearing small fish: a century ago they were hunted to local extinction for their plumes, used for elegant ladies’ hats. The RSPB was founded partly as the “Fin, Fur and Feather League”, a women’s campaign against the cruel and pointless use of animals in fashion that became a major force in bird conservation. In the last thirty years or so they have quietly returned to the south coast and are increasing in numbers.

Conservation, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Digging a ditch

Image 2 April 2015 Ian Alexander

Newly dug ditches … turning into a seasonal pond

After just three short sessions of ditch-making, we have a little network of waterways, an island sporting a natural tuft of Pendulous Sedge, some impressively high banks of muddy, gravelly spoil, and a new feature for the reserve. We hope to extend the ditch down the natural line (was it a ditch before?) to the trees at the end. The existing seasonal pond certainly had a ditch-like extension to just across the path (from where the lower photo was taken), and we intend also to clear that out – it shouldn’t be difficult as, unlike the current ditchworks, there are no stones, roots or ivy entanglements to cut through.

Today (7 April) the sun shone in a cloudless spring sky, and we worked to the song of a Chiffchaff. Two Blackcaps were singing elsewhere in the reserve, along with Wrens, Dunnocks, Great Tits, Blue Tits and some non-vocal Magpies, a Jay, Wood Pigeons, a Heron and Mallard. The insects, too, have emerged to exploit the sudden warmth, with plenty of Peacock butterflies, a Brimstone or two, and a Holly Blue; I saw a Small White in my garden. There was a 7-spot and a Harlequin ladybird, and the pond was alive with a new crop of Pond Skaters.

The grass is racing up; Broom is coming into its handsome yellow pea-flowers; several tufts of garden-escape Mahonia and Daffodils are richly yellow; red deadnettles tempt several species of bumblebee including buff/white-tailed and carders, and the honeybees are active.

Conservation, Love of Nature, Nature Reserves

Scything the Anthill Meadow, Gunnersbury Triangle

17 March 2015 Ian Alexander

Spring, as in so many years, seems to be coming and going. Today, despite a gloomy forecast, the sun came out, coats came off, the Chiffchaffs started to sing, and we went happily to work in the sunshine. We fixed a new rail to mark off a Forest School area as “not a path”, despite appearances: we rigged it up with a hinge one end and a keeper – posh name for a pair of bits of batten screwed on to the post – to hold the rail the other end when it’s in the down position. We cleared up a vandalized loggery, using the stray bits of log and lots of cut ivy to block off an undesired path, and filled in the hole.

And then we all had a lesson in scything – you have to put the thing together to fit your height and arm length. The main pole is ingeniously not quite straight; the two handles each fit on with a bolt; the blade fits on with a lug and two grub screws in a metal housing. It sounds a bit fiddly and it takes a little time to adjust it, but when you have it exactly right, it’s a pleasure to use, and astonishingly light to swing. The blade needs to be sharpened every few minutes to keep it slicing effortlessly through grass, which contains silica (aka sand) and quickly blunts blades. But, well-maintained, the scythe is a remarkably efficient tool, and environmentally friendly. Contrary to expectations, it does not cause strain or backache, and people large and small can use it effectively. It’s trickier on bumpy ground covered in anthills. Five of us mowed the picnic meadow and the anthill meadow in an afternoon: it was no quicker (and a lot noisier) with the brushcutter. We disturbed a small frog or two, and accidentally scraped a small toad that was hiding in the long grass, but it wasn’t seriously hurt.

On the common I heard a Mistle Thrush calling, and a flock of Goldfinches. A party of Long-Tailed Tits visited the garden. Red and White Deadnettles are in bloom; Cow Parsley is coming into fresh leaf.

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Quick, Fix Those Nestboxes! The Natural History of Nestbox Damage

11 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Fixing anti-squirrel plates to nestboxes

Quick! Spring is in the air, the Dunnocks are passionately singing their tuneless songs, the Great Tits are yelling Zi-Za-Zi-Za-Zi-Za endlessly, the Greenfinches are wheezing out their odd song (‘Zheee’), it’s time to fix those nestboxes. Most of those in the Gunnersbury Triangle had been “hammered” by Tits or Woodpeckers, or gnawed by squirrels. And a few had been rather roughly drilled by humans. So the warden decided that all of them should be given anti-squirrel plates; all, that is, except the Robin boxes, which have a wide rectangular opening in the front.

A few of the boxes seemed to have been attacked by squirrels. This one has what could be toothmarks and signs of extensive tearing of the wood outwards at a shallow angle, which looks like gnawing rather than hammering. It isn’t obvious why the basically herbivorous Grey Squirrel should do this.

This box, on the other hand, seems to have been hammered at a sharp angle to the surface, whether by the Tits themselves (they certainly do this sometimes) or by Greater Spotted Woodpeckers preying on nests – although they mainly eat insects and seeds, they do take eggs and chicks when the opportunity arrives.

At least 4 of the nestboxes had substantial and reasonably fresh remnants of nests inside; this older one contained two long-addled tit eggs (just one shown here; it was 16 mm long) with a mixture of moss and down as insulation.

Tegenaria, the Giant House Spider, at home in a very messy nestbox

Finally, one very old nestbox, carefully engineered with beading around the hinged lid complete with little brass hooks, contained a Giant House Spider, Tegenaria, a lot of beetle pupae, and what could be Gypsy Moth pupae as well. The box was a messy tangle of thick sticky cobweb, and the spider was distinctly reluctant to leave, seeming to want to stand and fight off any intruder.

All in all, what might have seemed a mundane bit of metalwork turned out to be a day full of interesting natural history. (But the metalwork was fun, too.)

Conservation, Natural History, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Animal Tracks in the Snow

3 February 2015 Ian Alexander

Animal tracks: Fox, Crow, and Squirrel prints on a snowy boardwalk

Today we woke to a snow-covered city, just a light dusting; and as often with snow, the weather was appreciably warmer than before the snow arrived.

Down at the nature reserve, the paths were empty of human footprints, but thickly sprinkled with animal tracks. Here some crows had walked to and fro across the path; there, a fox had jogged along the trail. But better was to come: the boardwalk across the pond was interlaced with tracks. On the left, a fox had gone the length of the boardwalk. In the centre, a crow had walked unsteadily along, the same way as me; and it, or another, had walked more rapidly back. On the right, more birds’ footprints: and the four-feet-together group of a squirrel, the smaller front prints clearly showing the marks of the sharp claws.

On a Birch branch above the anthill meadow, a Green Woodpecker hammered in search of food. Down by the ‘mangrove swamp’, a Jay screeched harshly, either for us or for a fox. Near the picnic meadow, a Sparrowhawk flew from its high perch, wheeled above the treetops, dived rapidly out of sight.

We carried tools and a ladder to visit the nestboxes and take down all that needed repairs. While I held the ladder, a party of four Long-Tailed Tits blew by, crossing from one Birch to the next one at a time. One of the boxes contained not just a mossy nest (like three others) but two old addled eggs, probably of Great Tit. While we struggled to prise off a somewhat too well attached box for maintenance, a Robin perched nearby, in hope of eating any grubs we might have disturbed. Several boxes had had their openings enlarged by much hammering by Blue Tits or Great Tits: nobody knows why they might do this, as it increases the threat to their nests from predators. We will make aluminium plates for the fronts of all the Tit boxes (the ones with circular holes): the Robin boxes just have a wide rectangular opening, which they definitely prefer. Inside one of the boxes was a mass of woodlice in the moss; another had a plump dead Noble False Widow Spider (Steatoda nobilis) inside.

Conservation, Environment, Politics

Ah, the Irony: Prime Minister Bitten By Own Green Committee

27 January 2015 Ian Alexander

Ah, the irony. Do you remember when Cameron used to talk about leading the “greenest government ever”? (It was Friday, 14 May 2010, to be exact.)

Yes, that was just as he came to power. Since then he’s done next to nothing for nature, and plenty against (silencing Natural England from protesting about anything, giving planning authorities a presumption in favour of “sustainable” development – i.e. intentional unfairness of process, to name but two; but I digress).

But on coming into office, he did keep one small promise. He set up a Natural Capital Committee to look into the value of nature to the economy. In the dismal jargon of political bureaucracy, the committee had to investigate what the natural environment would be worth as if it were an investment of money — capital — by adding up what it contributes each year to the economic benefit of the country, considered as a financial return — interest.

So, for example, if we had an acre of woodland and it allows a class of schoolchildren to do a bug-hunt for which the school pays the wood’s manager £100, the woodland has earned £100 per acre. At 5% interest, that would value the acre of wood at (at least) £2000. If ten school classes can visit each year, the value jumps up to £20,000. If we can now find other ways to value the wood — perhaps it helps to clean the air in the city; perhaps it provides a place for a beehive full of hard-working pollinators; perhaps it allows city-dwellers a relaxing walk — then we can add those “services” (I told you the jargon was dismal) to the interest earned, and tot up the “natural capital” value.

Whether it makes the slightest bit of sense to try to put a price on Nature (no, of course not – see George Monbiot’s The Pricing of Everything) is not questioned by either Cameron or the Committee. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that treating nature in this way is absurd. How can we add up the value of all that is, all around us? We depend absolutely and totally on the “environment”, in other words the world, the universe. We have “only one Earth”, “one small planet”. Its value is infinite. But I digress.

Anyway, the young, fresh-faced Cameron of five years ago set up the said Committee, presumably with the general intention of kicking the green issue into the, ahem, long grass, and instantly forgot all about it.

Now, five years later, the Natural Capital Committee (Cameron: Eh? What’s that?) has reported. It says that the “natural environment” is in deep decline (yeah, what a surprise) and the “natural goods and services” it can provide: clean breathable air; clean drinkable water; food; recreation (i.e. fun) are all in steady long-term decline too.

The good Committee, noting that food, water, air and fun are pretty much all the essentials of life, wrote a truthful report saying that investing in nature for say 25 years would give returns as good as any Cameronian mega-infrastructure project like high-speed railway lines (and be a lot more popular, but they tactfully didn’t mention that).

They pointed out truthfully that

cutting air pollution would save the NHS tons of money on respiratory diseases;
restoring peat bogs and making new wetlands would save the environment agency bulldozer-loads of loot by preventing floods;
improving fishing waters and green spaces would save the country zillions of days off work by improving physical and mental health.

Labour (in the form of Maria Eagle, who hopes to become Environment Secretary) jumped on the bandwagon to remind Cameron of his broken promises and the continued decline of nature in Britain. She conveniently forgot to mention that it had declined all through Labour’s time in government too, and promised that Labour would “make public access to green spaces a priority” and that she would “take real steps” (is there any other kind of step?) to “give communities power” (what’s a community? a local authority perhaps?) “to protect and improve the natural environment”.

Anyway, here we have the amusing sight of Cameron being confronted with some truths about nature, and his own broken promises, as a result of an investigation that he ordered. And of Labour talking up the value of nature, which they ignored while in office, and have pretty much forgotten in their election campaigning too.

Ah, the irony.

Conservation, Environment, Politics

2009 Prediction Correct: 2015 Catastrophic Drought in Brazil

24 January 2015 Ian Alexander

“Brazil’s most populous region facing worst drought in 80 years” screams the BBC News headline. The three states with the largest populations, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais are all desperately short of water.

Bad luck? A natural disaster? Act of God?

None of the above. It was simple bad planning, and failure to heed loud, clear, accurate warnings. Back in November last year, the area was correctly said to be “sleepwalking into water crisis“. What got done about it? Nothing. The journalist, Wyre Davies, asked rhetorically “So how does a country that produces an estimated 12% of the world’s fresh water end up with a chronic shortage of this most essential resource – in its biggest and most economically important city?” He was too polite to say “By a lot of politicians shoving their heads in the sand.” This isn’t just Brazil. Brazil’s politicians are no different from your politicians or my British politicians. ALL OF THEM have their heads in the sand. Climate change isn’t some vague, aesthetic, dilettante bit of academic test-tube arm-waving with a wussy computer model that probably proves something-or other. It’s happening now, and it’s frankly disastrous.

But surely, you’ll observe, Brazil could hardly have done much between November and January, however hard the politicians had tried. You’re right. But they were told FIVE YEARS AGO.

Back in 2009 the Brazilian climatologist Antonio Nobre announced that deforestation in the Amazon would within five years cause severe drought in South-eastern Brazil. He predicted that the lack of forest-created cloud (water is sucked up by the trees and evaporates in huge amounts forming clouds every day) would change the region’s climate.

It did.

Nobre warned that if deforestation continued, there would be disastrous water shortages.

It did, and there are.

The meteorologist Jose Marengo called the huge clouds of water vapour that stream from the Amazon rainforest “flying rivers.” They are drying up.

We – you, me, your neighbours – are by our daily choices – flying, buying petrol for cars, buying teak garden furniture, buying cosmetics made with palm oil grown where rainforest used to be, eating meat and buying petfood from cows grown on grass where rainforest used to be – causing disaster in one region after another. The Amazon. The Sahel. Sumatra. Borneo. Sounds faraway? The climate where you live is warming up. The wildlife where you live is vanishing. Not so faraway now, maybe?

Conservation, Environment, Natural History, Philosophy, Politics

What I’d like to know from every political party before the General Election

7 January 2015 Ian Alexander

On the PM programme on Radio 4, the presenter Eddie Mair regretted the long, long wait until polling day, given the inevitable length of the campaign with a fixed-term parliament. He sympathized with listeners at having to endure the same old party political ding-dong as the rivals seek to batter each other into submission. He suggested that we listeners tell him what we would like to know about the next general election.

What politicians want to talk about

The parties seem to want to tell us about the NHS (Labour) and the Economy (Conservative) and Immigration (all of them), so I’d like to hear about, well, anything else: especially nature.

Politicians don’t even call nature by its name any more.

They burble about “Sustainability“, but making our cities larger every year is not sustainable: that would mean a steady state. Think about it. Sustainable living is imaginable, but it would be nothing like how we live now. Everything – I mean everything – would be recycled. We’d use glass not china, so it could be melted down and reused when it broke. We’d burn no coal, oil, or gas. We’d design every product to be broken down into its components for recycling, as they’ve started to do in Germany. In short, current politico-talk about sustainability is just waffle, greenwash. You may have a ruder word for it.
They mumble about the “Environment“, as if nature impinged on our lives solely through dirt or noise in the places where we live. But our impact on the natural world is far, far greater than that. We have ravaged every habitat, every ecosystem on the planet. The African bush, home to elephants, rhinos, gazelles? It’s in free fall. Grasslands and meadows? We’ve lost 98% of ours. Wetlands, marshes, reedbeds? Disappearing everywhere. Mangroves and coral reefs? In crisis wherever they (used to) occur. Rainforest? You know the answer.
They waffle about “Biodiversity“, as if the word were a charm or mantra, calling for impact assessments for each major building project, which the planners then immediately ignore. But the diversity of life in England, like that of the whole world, is in crisis. Many people alive today will witness the mass extinction of perhaps a third of all the species now alive; man-made global warming and the resulting changes to the climate; the catastrophe being visited on all the oceans through overfishing; pollution, overpopulation, deforestation: the worldwide destruction of nature.
They ramble on about “Conservation“, as if nature would be fine if limited to a few nature reserves here and there, and try to change the conversation to the economy/the NHS/immigration (delete according to taste) as soon as possible. But nature is the whole of our planet (including us, if you prefer, but that’s another story). We depend on plants and algae for the oxygen we breathe. We depend on plants and animals for the food we eat. We depend on bees and other insects to pollinate many of our crops. We depend on bacteria to detoxify our sewage and rubbish. We depend on plant genomes for our medicines and our crops’ resistance to disease. We depend completely on nature.

What I’d like the politicians to tell me

I’d like to know what they will actually do for Nature, for everyone’s benefit:

what each party’s policy on nature really is
how they will prioritize nature
how children, NHS patients, and old people will be given access to nature for education, rehabilitation, wellbeing
how fisheries will be protected
how the decline of wildlife on farms will be reversed

Direct answers, please.

Well, I’d like to know a whole lot more, given the global disaster I’ve outlined, but that should be enough to start with. What would you ask?

Conservation, Philosophy, Quotation

Extinction is forever (probably)

6 January 2015 Ian Alexander

The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo, extinct in Britain

One of the odd things about British attitudes to nature is that the right-wing [Daily] Telegraph newspaper has such good graphic coverage of many issues, such as the ongoing extinction of species in England over the past two centuries. The gallery of beautiful photographs is shocking for its immediacy: there are species I’ve seen, and others I feel I should have, like the Red-Backed Shrike (1988). The Scottish Wildcat is not quite extinct in Scotland — I’ve been lucky enough to glimpse one, as far from anywhere with domestic cats as is now possible in Britain — but has gone from England. Here are birds and butterflies, weevils and the handsome Blue Stag Beetle (1839). The lovely Apollo butterfly is one of 421 species we have already lost.

Of course it’s part of a campaign, the Lost Life Project launched by the Species Recovery Trust.

Local extinction isn’t quite as bad as the ‘real thing’ — extinction from the planet, the fate of the unhappily flightless Great Auk (1820s), hunted until it was gone. It was simply too easy for anyone with a boat to collect a bird or two for their dinner, and this magnificent bird was gone for ever.

That’s the point, really: the reasons for each extinction are banal, stupid. The Red-Backed Shrike was wiped out by three things.

Red-Backed Shrike (Robert Zappaterra/Species Recovery Trust)

First was the steady nibbling away of its heathland habitat for farmland and housing.
Alongside this was the intensification of agriculture — destroying “useless” and “waste” corners of scrubland, “improving” grazing with fertilizer and so (unintentionally or not) allowing taller grasses to outcompete all the flowers of the meadow; and in turn that did away with many of the insects on which Shrikes prey, if they had not been destroyed by insecticides applied to nearby arable crops.
Finally, the illegal collection of eggs, of what was towards the end a very rare and therefore perversely tempting target, helped to eliminate what conservationists, nature-lovers and egg-collectors all presumably agreed was a beautiful and exciting species.

In short, progress or development (call it what you like), greed and stupidity — in equal measure — threw away something we all loved.

A handsome Soldier Beetle like Trichodes alvearius, for instance, is common enough in continental Europe. When I photographed it in France, I knew I’d never seen it in Britain, but supposed it had never lived here. Discovering that it went extinct in the 19th century — that my great-grandfather might well have seen it as he strode about the countryside as a boy — is poignant.

In fact another species of Trichodes, T. apiarius (if this reminds you of bees, you are right: the name means ‘of bee-hives’, as does ‘alvearius’: both species frequent hives, their larvae growing there, feeding on bee larvae), was also driven to extinction here (1830).

The corncrake (1990s), the chequered skipper (1976), the Mazarine blue (1903), the large copper (1864), the large tortoiseshell (about 1953), the Norfolk damselfly (1958), the Burbot (1900s), the greater mouse-eared bat, mosses, moths, sawflies, shrimps, spiders, snails, flowers, grasses, ferns, solitary wasps, the roll-call of doom drones on and on.

If we do nothing there is no doubt at all what will happen, not only in Britain but across the planet. In the plain words of the Lost Life Project:

The world is currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event, caused largely by human activities that continue to damage and destroy biodiversity across the globe.

But the point is, there is hope. If we press for help for our rarest species, we may yet save them. Some species like the corncrake have with help come back from the brink, and can be found in a few lucky places.

How to press? Lobby your local MP. Speak to the other candidates. Ask them what they will do for nature. Will they ensure that all the schoolchildren in their constituency get a chance to see a nature reserve, go pond-dipping, hear birdsong? Will they insist on gardens for hospitals, hospices, and old people’s homes to assist with healing and wellbeing? Discuss it on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, with your friends. Join a conservation group, a pressure group. Give some money. If you can’t think of anything better, sign a petition! There are plenty more sharp questions you can ask (feel free to ask me for some more suggestions).

ObsessedByNature