Volume 35, number 6
My buddleias, a butterfly favourite, are now in flower, see above. The yellow flowers in the background are from headily-scented curry plants.
This May issue, featuring a Swallowtail caterpillar on the front cover, opens with a terrifying piece by Patrick Barkham, author of Badgerlands and other books, on the threat to the butterflies’ only territory in the UK, the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads. It’s the usual suspects – climate change and pollution, whether from diesel boats and agricultural run-off, which were at their worst during the last century. Now flooding and drought may cause widescale salination and much of the Broads may simply disappear.
I don’t know if butterflies generally are having a terrible year (all that rain?) but I have seen less than half a dozen altogether so far this summer.
Brett Westwood writes about Green Huntsmen spiders. The males do not spin webs but instead rely on their eyesight and speed to pounce on their prey. Steven J.R. Allain’s subject is the Common Midwife Toad, so-called because the males show a high degree of parental care. They were an accidental introduction here around 120 years ago, but the article concludes that in all probability they are not a threat to native species. They have not been found to carry disease and are most likely filling an ecological niche rather than out-competing other species.
Conservation advice from the RSPB reports on the management of silver birch on Bucklebury Common nearby. They are one of my favourite trees (I grew up with one in the garden at home and my father was hugely fond of it too) and I had not realised they were ever a problem. The management looks pretty brutal and is not, it seems, even terribly successful.
The causes of extreme loss of biodiversity on arable land are well-known and instinctively obvious, but there is much scientific support in another article in this issue: a decline of habitat diversity on farms, increasing field sizes, the loss of hedgerows and of course the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
I always enjoy Amy-Jane Beer’s pieces and she does not disappoint with this one on the joys and perhaps importance of nature-inspired music, old and new. There is also a guide to mustelid track identification, but I think my brain is too full to attempt to learn about this in much detail. Likewise birdsong, but I am at last getting somewhere with that, at least with the birds I hear all the time in the garden.
I identify strongly with the nature geeks and nerds discussed by Simon Barnes, but as he says of our passion, “Nature is the passion of passions.”
Guy Freeman’s Conservation news section reminds us of just how far ahead Scotland is of England when it comes to wildlife protection and confirms this year’s relatively small numbers of wildfowl being due to climate change enabling birds to short-stop – some no longer need to come here for warmer weather. Our National Parks continue to be, pretty much, wildlife deserts, largely due to private land ownership (especially grouse moors of course) and lack of funding.
In “Food and Farming” we read of chemical giant Bayer’s continuing fight for the usage of Glyphosate, its best-selling but hugely damaging herbicide. In Wales data released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that 80% of 83 dairy farms checked were found not be complying with anti-pollution regulations. A farmer in Somerset, in spite of his denials, was found to have released effluent into the Fivehead River, six times more toxic than human sewage, reducing oxygen levels from 70% to 12%. He was fined, wait for it, £228. That number is not missing any zeroes at the end. I would have suggested at least three. One dairy farm in Wales which had received over £3m since 2009 in compensation payments for Bovine TB was found to have committed massive fraud, swapping ear tags between infected and TB-free cows so that the cheaper, uninfected animals were slaughtered whilst those of higher value with TB were retained. TB was probably thus spread to other farms nearby. In Galloway, there has been much illegal clearing of rocky outcrops to further enable intensive farming, destroying wildlife habitats in the process. Where is the enforcement?
The wildlife crime reports are too depressing to reiterate here. Suffice to say there has been a lot of it.
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