“It’s too big a risk to assume that these sensitive, magnificent and ancient creatures will adapt to the clumsy experiments of humankind.”

As deaf whales are washed ashore in Taiwan, with hearing loss being the ‘primary reason’ for their demise, I ask the question: are stranded British whales and dolphins casualties of the offshore wind industry in this country?

Practically every day brings new reports of stranded whales and dolphins around the British coast, the numbers are on the rise and nobody seems to know why.
Ever expanding wind farms are beginning to dominate our coastal seas.
Is there a link?
I’ve suggested in previous articles that it might be wise, indeed essential, to halt the further proliferation of offshore wind farms until we have safely established whether or not giant fields of humming wind turbines are causing havoc to sound-sensitive marine mammals — but the industry seems to be oblivious to the signs. Something is definitely awry. …

Recently I dusted off my old record collection, something I’d been meaning to do for years ever since I had reluctantly consigned my treasured vinyl LPs carefully to boxes in the depths of the loft, my record player having finally succumbed a few years earlier to a perished drive belt and a worn needle — and me having succumbed to the dubious lure of CDs and streaming mp3's. …

Natural England, the UK Government’s Nature Agency, approved the trapping and killing of rare songbirds, including Willow Warbler, Dunnock, Coal Tit, Wren, Starling, Blackcap, Goldfinch, Chiffchaff and Long Tailed Tit in the name of ‘science, research and education’.
The controversial agency also permitted the removal of 175 baby birds from nests in the wild, under a single licence application.

For the past few months, I have been investigating the controversial activities of the UK government sponsored agency, Natural England.

I’ve uncovered shocking and extensive statistics which show just how many ‘lethal control’ licences the agency has been issuing to kill wild birds in England. The list includes at least 65 species, many of them categorized as being of critical conservation concern. …

The world was coming to an end.

Few people had noticed.

There were some who waved banners outside government buildings, others who marched and held aloft placards depicting trees, and even some who went on television, looking very concerned and worried, who spoke of emergency measures.
None of them mattered very much. Because the world was ending anyway.

The ones who knew the truth had sensed it long ago. …

Herring Gulls are down 82%, European Shag down 51%, Razorbills down 55%. The list goes on….
* The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is just a few miles away.
* Isn’t there a conspicuous connection?

The Isle Of Man wildlife charity Manx Birdlife has reported a shocking 40% decline in the populations of many species of sea birds around the island’s coast.
The worrying figures emerged following a comprehensive census that took place over two years. Whatever the reason for the sharp decline of the birds, it illustrates that something has gone very wrong. …

​”The ‘pest’ controllers who ‘managed’ the Passenger Pigeon into oblivion at the turn of the 20th century, seem to still be actively going about their business today….”

We tend to think of conservation as a modern day invention, blaming previous generations for not really caring about wildlife and assuming that they didn’t have much awareness of the need to protect threatened species. Indeed we often blame them for remorselessly hunting species to extinction — which they did in some cases — just as they still do today…..
Now, in the 21st century, we claim (with a degree of smugness) that we are the ones who know better, the ones that can ‘save the planet’, the generation that really truly cares about the imminent demise of the rare animals that managed somehow to survive the apparently callous attitudes of our ancestors.
But it’s wrong thinking on two counts.
Because in 2019, not only do we destroy wildlife habitat at a terrifying pace, we also still hunt animals voraciously to the very brink of extinction. We are not necessarily the enlightened modern society that we proudly declare to be, because in fact many of our Victorian ancestors were just as pro-active in trying to conserve wildlife in their day as we are today.
I’ve discovered that more than a hundred years ago, the public were all too aware of the damage human beings were wreaking on other species — and people were doing everything they could to deal with the problem, desperately seeking solutions to everything from uncontrolled hunting to over-fishing and habitat destruction.
In fact they cared then just as much as we do now. …

“Marketing the red as a ‘national treasure’ and the grey as a ‘pest’ merely transfers the label from one innocent species to another when all along the real problem, as usual, has been human interference in nature….”

A little while ago I added my name to a petition. It calls on the British government to amend a new law that will criminalise wildlife rescuers who rehabilitate grey squirrels.
From October, under new regulations, it will be illegal to release rescued greys back into the wild — they will have to be kept in controlled captivity under strict licencing — or exterminated. The licencing criteria are not clear at this point. What is clear is that the government has labelled the grey squirrel as a pest that needs to be ‘managed’.
Whatever your opinion on grey squirrels, surely intervening to help any animal in distress amounts to a simple matter of compassion. To save a life is something that most of us find an instinctively kind and correct thing to do. …

A sight to make a winter-weary heart sing is the first glimpse of a Sweet Violet peeking out from a mass of fresh green leaves, sheltering under an English hedgerow in Spring.
I was lucky enough to happen across a bank of these spirit lifting wild flowers today as I wandered along a little used footpath that meandered through fields filled with Dandelions and along shady corridors of Hawthorn, Elm and Oak.
This is the English Spring of legend, so much more difficult to find in the hustle and bustle of the modern world. But it does endure. Thankfully. Here you can still gather Lilacs and smell the fresh cerulean scent of the Bluebells. It all just becomes ever more elusive as urban sprawl encroaches on the countryside.
Such timeless pathways are more precious than ever. For the scene I saw today had likely not changed in five hundred years. As I ambled on, a Peacock Butterfly followed me along the path for perhaps twenty yards, celebrating the first warm sunshine of the year. I contemplated the thought that the ancestors of this rare, otherworldly creature would have delighted travellers before me who walked this same trail a century ago. Or even a thousand years ago.
Timeless.
It is comforting, in this transient existence, to know that some of the abiding miracles of nature that survive amid the loud, brash, modern world cannot be hurried and will go on.
But, along with the delight and the wonder of discovering the eternal, comes a heart wrenching awareness of the fragility of it all. For the manifestations of eternity can be so easily wiped out in the blink of an eye, at the whim of those who don’t understand. Those for whom wealth or greed might appear to be worth more than the priceless beauty of nature.
Sad folly.
I won’t be telling anyone about my countryside pathway. It’s too precious. But I would urge you to discover your own. …