Issue 400
Birdwatch magazine celebrates 400 issues. As ever much of it is too twitchy for me, but the photos alone of the rare Red-flanked Bluetail, as on the cover, are worth the price of admission.
I confess to having wanted to see a Chough for a long time though (a black corvid with strikingly bright red beaks, legs and feet) and Hilary Mitchell gives us a history of its loss from and return to Cornwall. It is not quite the usual story. The last surviving Chough disappeared from Cornwall in 1973.
They are specialist feeders, probing the earth for invertebrates and so they need “short grazed heath or grass with bare patches.” Such habitat was created by grazing animals including perhaps ponies from the Cornish ministry industry. When these disappeared the Chough became much rarer and (this is the usual story) therefore prized by Victorian trophy hunters and egg collectors. Gin traps used to snare rabbits damaged the population too.
They are an iconic species in Cornwall, appearing on the coat of arms of the county and various prominent families and King Arthur’s soul was said to have transformed into a Chough, although they are not of course confined to Cornwall. Meyer, above, calls it the “Cornish Chough”.
A small number of the birds appeared on the Cornish south coast in 2001 and habitat restoration and protection by volunteers ensured their success. One pair fledged 46 chicks over eleven years. But it was still slow progress, not helped by Raven predation. By 2020 there were more than 20 breeding pairs, carefully monitored, and the disused mines provided good nesting sites as do the natural granite cliffs. Also helping are the introduction of Dartmoor ponies and cattle and there are now estimated to be some 350 birds. Now it is hoped that the population will expand outside Cornwall along the south coast.
The illustrations above are from Gould, Meyer, Morris and Lilford:
Gould (John). The Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873.
Meyer (Henry Leonard). Illustrations of British Birds, c.1835-1844.
Morris (Francs-is Orpen). A History of British Birds. Six volumes. Groombridge and Sons, 1851-1857.
Lilford (Lord, Thomas Littleton Powys). Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. Seven volumes. Chromolithographs mostly by Archibald Thorburn. R.H. Porter, 1897.
Morris gives a host of alternative names: the Red-legged Crow, Cornish Daw, Cornwall Kae, Killigrew, Market-Jew Crow, Chauk Daw, Hermit Crow, Red-legged Jackdaw, Cliff Daw and Gesner’s Wood Crow. “Chough” itself is onomatopoeic.
Market-Jew, formerly Marghasjewe and Marghasion, is a small town in the Penzance area. Linguistically it seems to be a corruption rather than a reference to Jewish settlements in Cornwall. I assume Gesner is Conrad Gesner, sixteenth-century polymath, responsible for Historia Animalium, 1551-1558, a monumental work containing over 1,500 woodcuts.
Morris also speaks of a nineteenth-century “”war of extermination” against the Chough, along with doling out the anti-corvid accusations of thievery typical of his time. And indeed arson by means of carrying lighted sticks and setting fire to houses.
Chris Habard tells us about bird (and certain other non-mammalian) chromosomes, very different from ours. There are “about 40 pairs … (songbirds have 41)” as opposed to our 23, males having two large Z chromosomes, females one Z and a smaller W. Eggs have either a Z or a W from the female and a Z from the male, so chicks have ZW or ZZ. The latter produces testosterone. It isn’t common but sex-reversal is a known phenomenon: genetically female birds with male reproductive organs and genetic males with ovaries. We don’t know why this happens. There is also gynandromorphism where birds exhibit male and female characteristics. In some cases this is bilateral with the two different plumages found symmetrically on either side of the body. I hardly dare even mention human sexuality such a trigger has the subject become, but it has occurred to me before that given that homosexuality is so common in animals other than humans (tortoises and sheep to name but two) why do we make all this fuss, why there has been such a history of intolerance and persecution? Data like this makes it all seem rather absurd and of course absolutely none of anyone else’s business. I have been surprised and disappointed to come across some extremely retrogressive attitudes still amongst otherwise rational and intelligent people.
Chris Habard contributes another interesting piece on how birds balance. The vestibular system is the same as in humans, located in the inner ear, but some birds such as Kestrels, Hummingbirds and Kingfishers have and extra optic system which links to the eyes and the inner ear allowing them to watch prey or a source of nectar while their bodies remain in motion. Unique to birds is another balance organ, the lumbrosacral organ. This sits in the spinal cord “with fluid filled canals running across the cord.” We suspect but are not certain this is also to do with balance. It may also help birds to stay upright when sleeping.
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If I have any readers on the Isle of Wight I have no wish to offend or lose them, but I am just back from a business trip there and cannot say I was bowled over. I vaguely remember visiting as a child.
The sky and sea were a particularly dull grey. Sunshine would have tinged my view differently I am sure. I visited the Needles which were close by the bookshop I had been asked to visit. There’s a visitor centre which reminded me of the ruination of Land’s End by something similar, only here on a very much cut-price level. The Needles themselves are not really that spectacular in my opinion and it’s hard to believe as claimed that they are one of the most photographed landmarks in the world. Perhaps my travels have spoiled me (“I have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…”) I took the chairlift (hardly a snip at £10) which was quite fun and the multicoloured sands of the cliffs are truly impressive, but there’s a whole shop selling the stuff. I remember a little test tube filled with various coloured layers from my childhood trip but this seemed like overkill to me. I’d booked an airbnb in Ventnor which is supposed to be the nicest part of the island and probably is, but it was much smaller and frankly gloomier than the photographs had led me to believe and the promised spectacular view really just wasn’t. So I changed my ferry booking and skedaddled back home.
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Even by the standards of this blog, this is off-piste, but I am becoming increasingly concerned about the ubiquity and normalisation of hard drugs, specifically cocaine and ketamine. Cocaine transcends class and other barriers of course, it is the party drug, more profitable from the dealers’ point of view than ecstasy, which seems relatively harmless, but it seems increasingly the case that it is no longer a weekend special but a prerequisite before some people step beyond their front door. I am historically no saint in these matters and have no objections whatsoever to weed in its various forms, I have long believed that it should all be legalised – the war on drugs will never be won. We know that from American Prohibition, and illegality results in organised criminality, cartels and extreme violence and suffering. And there has never been any doubt in my mind that continual ingestion of cocaine alters, irrevocably, people’s personalities whether making them alternately paranoid and extremely arrogant or leaving them liable to irrational outbursts of angry hatred. It is hardly surprising. If you are taking cocaine all the time of course you will not be able to cope with work and other pressures and that will inevitably take a heavy toll. What has shocked me most recently, perhaps, is the abandonment of a car in the village which had a small bag of cocaine left on the passenger seat. The police were called but said that there was “not enough” for them to bother with. That is normalisation. There no longer seems to be any attempt by addicts to conceal their habit. If my children were younger than they are (the youngest is nineteen now) I would be even more concerned. There is, according to a short documentary on the subject, a generation of young teenage ketamine addicts who, by the time they are in their twenties, will have started having to wear nappies for the rest of their lives (prolonged use of ketamine does very serious kidney damage). Both cocaine and ketamine seem to be everywhere, more readily available than a packet of cigarettes and a mere phone call away.
Reggae icon Gregory Isaacs, himself a victim of cocaine as, sadly, were a number of other reggae musicians no longer with us, said it all in his song ‘Hard Drugs’: “De more dem get it, Ah de more dem want it … Talking about hard drugs, De more dem get it, Dem still want more.”
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We have had our share surely of utterly appalling, morally vacant prime ministers, especially of late Johnson, Truss and worst of all Blair. Starmer long since joined that list. He is now talking about “the soul of the country” which is odd coming from a man who gives no hint of having one himself. He is perhaps not to blame for Angela Rayner’s demise (and I am not entirely sure she is wholly responsible although undeniably careless and foolish) but he is to blame for Mandelson’s reincarnation before his latest fall from grace. Were it not so dreadful, it is almost amusingly predictable that Sarah Ferguson was yet another servile friend of Epstein long after his conviction. Musk probably too. Quelle surprise.
Starmer is certainly in a difficult position. The Tories are clearly dead in the water but if there were an election tomorrow it’s thought that Farage would romp home leaving Labour with fewer than 100 seats which would be the worst defeat in the party’s history. Instead of following Sadiq Khan’s unabashed decrial of Trump following the latter’s attack on him, Starmer, rather than denouncing the racism, xenophobia and mendacity of Farage (I am not sure he is actually a racist at heart but he certainly likes people to think that he is and exploits it) tries to emulate it. Farage doesn’t really like beer and will adopt whatever views he feels will serve him best in the moment. From Starmer there was the notorious “island of strangers” speech and now he is trying to reclaim patriotism describing it as “a love for your country and our values, our history and our heritage.” I’ve always been with Samuel Johnson, it’s the last refuge of a scoundrel. What are “our values” exactly? Which aspects of our history and heritage should we be proud of, which should we abhor and seek to make reparation for? Or does he mean we should love all of it?
So, what has he come up with in preparation for his party’s annual conference? A dozen new towns. With up to 300,000 homes. I really, really don’t get it. It’s build, build, build (Johnson) all over again. Of course young people need to be able to get onto the property ladder, there needs to be “affordable” housing, but this cannot be the way. The bricks and mortar are there already, the planning permissions are in place, but the system is abused and distorted for financial gain by the land bankers and property developers. And how iş it that we can suddenly afford this? How is more destruction of our ecosystem the top priority? The thought of a Reform government is absolutely terrifying and we know how bad the current regime is proving in countless ways, but whatever I personally would wish for (a Green landslide), I completely fail to see how Starmer hopes to win anyone over with this ludicrous, repellent plan.
From Yahoo”News: “Sir Keir Starmer said that a “poison” is threatening to take a hold of the UK as he condemned the “politics of predatory grievance” being used to whip up division across the country.” But he has been doing precisely that himself whilst failing to achieve anything to deal with the perceived problem.
Starmer thinks people should feel “safer and secure within … their borders”. That is divisive rhetoric and it’s meaningless.
Kemi Badenoch meanwhile has failed to condemn Musk’s inflammatory words at the recent “festival of hate”, the right-wing rally in London organised by so-called Tommy Robinson. Laurence Fox and Katie Hopkins took to the stage at the rally, no comment necessary. A lot of people, over 100,000, attended but that was the case at the Restore Nature Now protest last year – over 60,000 who merited barely a column inch in the media.
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