‘No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.’ - ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson.
This week's photo of a happy couple of House Sparrows was kindly donated by ©Maït Foulkes
Please will you consider signing and sharing the petition to reduce the use of cruel bird deterrents on buildings? Thank you.
#BanBirdNetting #NoToBirdSpikes #Nature
We are in a crucial decade where we must surely decide to reduce CO2 emissions to ensure global warming doesn’t go above 1.5c to be able to avoid catastrophic climate change. COP26 in Glasgow is fast approaching on 31st October. World leaders will gather to agree what they intend to do to tackle the global warming which is causing more life threatening, food and habitat destroying floods, fires and drought across the world. The threat has been called existential on the news. We are at a crossroads like never before. Writing updates weekly for this petition has been a journey for me. My eyes were opened to some key themes I want to share with you below that society could consider to react in the most positive way to climate change. I will share a story of my own which I hope will help illuminate the deep changes we need to consider which can benefit us all.
I started this petition after seeing a dead Herring Gull seemingly killed by bird deterrent spikes on a rooftop. Herring Gulls are not the only rooftop birds affected by the bird deterrents. For example Kittiwakes are affected also and like Herring Gulls are red listed as of conservation concern. The Lesser Black-backed Gull is also on the amber list. All seven species of gull are birds of conservation concern. The causes of their decline is still uncertain. It may be due to changes in their maritime environment such as pollution and overfishing.
Populations of other rooftop birds such as Swallows are fluctuating for a variety of reasons including climate change, while Swifts are on the amber list having declined by over half in recent years. Rooftop birds ranging from gulls to pigeons, birds of prey, crows, swifts and swallows, are all vulnerable to being injured or killed by the rooftop bird deterrent netting or spikes.
“In nature nothing exists alone.” - Rachel Carson, ‘Silent Spring’, Penguin Classics
Please will you consider signing and sharing the petition to reduce the use of cruel bird deterrents on buildings? Thank you.
#BanBirdNetting #NoToBirdSpikes #Biodiversity
Two Joyful Sparrows and Two Easy Actions
Many rooftop birds like Gulls, Wagtails, House Sparrows, Blue Tits and Swallows often use nooks in house walls and eaves or rooftops to nest. Rather like humans, House Sparrows are noisy and gregarious. And like our misunderstood larger rooftop nesting birds, such as gulls, they too are definitely the ‘entrepreneurs’ of the bird world; successfully adapting and having managed to colonise most of the world and thriving in our built environment of houses, towns and cities though they probably once nested in rocky places.
Fortunately, Sparrows, are small enough not to be affected by rooftop bird deterrents like netting and bird spikes but charming residents of our rooftops and gardens. The UK House Sparrow population has declined severely in recent years dropping by 71% between 1977 and 2008. They are vanishing from the centre of cities and are still visible in most towns and villages or on farmland. Reasons for their rapid demise may include food availability fluctuations, for example invertebrates appearing late, affected by late springs or hotter summers, agricultural intensification and changes in building design. Some good news is that House Sparrows numbers have started to increase in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland though they are way below 1970s numbers. Sparrows readily use nest boxes and feed on seeds and invertebrates and food scraps. Pairs will keep returning to the same nest site and remain together for life. If one of the pair dies though, they thankfully quickly pair with another within days. Feeding them mealworms and having food sources for caterpillars in gardens can also help them when rearing their young.
A Scottish pest controller shared with me that he has had to retrieve 20 dead gulls and more than 100 pigeons and even the smaller swifts caught in such rooftop netting in the last year. Can you imagine how harrowing it is to see them affected in this way?
Please will you take action now to make the rooftop world of birds less cruel? Sign and share the petition using the link above? Thank you.
If you haven’t already, add your voice by taking one of the 2 simple actions below?
Email a letter to George Eustice MP or DEFRA or your political representative using the text and contact details below, share the petition or kindly support the petition?
Action 1: Sign and share the petition using the link below.
Action 2: Copy, paste and then email the letter text below to your local politician or prioritize sending one to George Eustice at DEFRA.
Email the short letter using the text below to George Eustice, MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or DEFRA. Use either of these two emails -
defra.hotline2defra.uk OR george.eustice.mp@parliament.uk
You can also email your local MP, MS or MSP or councillor, to get them on board. Contact details of all local representatives can be found at writetothem.com
Remember to change who you address your email to and include your address and contact details.
Wales: The minister responsible for this issue is Lee Waters MS, Deputy Minister of Climate Change email: lee.waters@gov.wales
Scotland: Michael Matheson, MSP for Falkirk West, Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport. (Use above website for representatives).
Suggested text for the letter..
_________________________________________________________
Dear Rt Hon George Eustice MP,
Reduce the use of cruel bird deterrents on buildings
I write to you to ask you to speak up for rooftop birds and urban wildlife. In the face of the climate and biodiversity crises ahead of this autumn’s proposed COP26 meeting in Glasgow, please make a commitment to ensure a reduction in the use cruel bird deterrent measures such as cruel mesh netting and metal bird spikes on buildings.
I am alarmed many declining or even red listed birds are injured or killed as a result of the cruel deterrent measures on rooftops in the UK. Despite current methods to ensure ‘humane’ control of birds causing ‘nuisance’, wildlife rescue centres, pest controllers and roofers are reporting slow, lingering deaths or injuries to declining and common bird species.
Birds affected importantly include red or amber listed gull species, birds of prey, and declining species such as swallows and swifts.
Faced with the climate and biodiversity crises, it would be timely to better understand and reassess our relationship with urban nature species including rooftop and even common birds reconsidering how they are treated in our towns. The definition of bird nuisance could be better nuanced so inappropriate use of bird deterrents is designed out.
Since the use of bird deterrents crosses many areas of administration it would be helpful to focus on stamping out cruelty and species loss by action across agencies rather than simply focusing on reducing bird nuisance.
Please stand up for urban wildlife. In particular commit to a new vision for our diverse rooftop bird species and ensure urban wildlife crimes are followed up and prosecuted.
The recent report from the IPCC and IPBES made clear ‘- every local nature-based biodiversity solution in our cities and towns matter as they accumulate together on a global scale’. Changing public and industry behaviours on how we treat our urban wildlife can help mitigate the interrelated crises of biodiversity and climate change. It will also importantly help accelerate collective action by the community.
I trust you will help stop the cruel bird deterrent measures and will fully support this collective campaign.
Yours sincerely
(Your Signature)
______________________________________________________
A Myriad of Fluttering Moths and Metamorphizing Who We Are to Avoid a Silent Spring
When I was a kid in the 70s I was lucky enough to grow up in a very rural area of Cornwall. My playground was the countryside. I grew up in what was at the beginning, a building site. Together as a family we renovated an old tumble down cottage that had been due for demolition. Lucky enough to have a hillside field and tiny wood with the cottage we had enough space to grow vegetables. Dad was good with onions! We grew potatoes and Xmas trees in part of the field and kept chicken for their eggs. I had ducks and we even had a Jersey cow for milk and clotted cream. A donkey we had my father later exchanged for a wood turning lathe with a man at the pub. Yes, my late father was a character and well liked.
Before school in the spring one of my chores was to feed a number of orphan lambs we got from the local farm. I would get impatient with the lambs as they took way too long to drink the made up powdered lambs milk I feed before walking down the hill to catch a bus to school. One of the lambs we called Fritz grew fast and adopted a habit of butting my Dad up the backside giving us all a laugh! In the wood was a tiny freshwater spring. Amazingly back then we were able to pump up fresh water to drink to a large tank above the house which washed us and quenched our thirst. I’ve never tasted better water of course! In the spring you could spot leeches and caddis fly larvae covered in multicoloured bits of sand. The water was so unpolluted you could drink straight from the tiny trickle in the few places it gathered in pools. At weekends we would sometimes get up really early and walk or bike ride miles along the country lanes and through neighbouring farmland as we knew the farmers. I learned early to enjoy and celebrate nature be it picking mushrooms, apples or blackberries for crumble. We played around on the one sandbank in the muddy estuary below, trying to catch silvery sand eels and Dabs (tiny flatfish) or purloined half rotten boats that had slipped their long forgotten moorings. I quickly learnt to wonder at nature and I began to learn about and realise it was all so interdependent and complex. For example some plants were only found in certain habitats; rare Yellow Bartsia on a local flood plain, Ruppia, a flowering plant grew submerged in the murky salt water pools on the salt marsh and Musk Mallow was found only on sun warmed calcareous soil.
An adder snake could sometimes be seen in the sun in the garden warming its cold blood - then one day unbeknown to me, hid under the shade of a watering can. I of course managed to pick the can up to water the tomatoes and stood frozen and petrified as it slithered by. My brother and I washed out owl pellets regurgitated by two barn owls that nested each year in a nearby derelict cottage. We teased out the tiny bones and mouse and vole skulls that were the prey they’d caught and hopelessly attempted to identify each and every one of them.
I often kept tadpoles in water filled jars and also caterpillars in dry ones which I fed the right food plants to and then, over time, watched them form chrysalises. One day an Oak Eggar moth chrysalis had it seems eventually emerged metamorphosed from a jam jar as a moth I kept in the barn we made above the house. That bright sunny morning I opened the door to the darkness inside the barn to be suddenly surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the buff coloured male moths fluttering around me and stood mesmerised and silent. I later was fascinated to find found out they were attracted to pheromone chemicals emitted by the single emerging nocturnal female moth deep in the darkness of the barn.
I proudly found tiny wispy green seagrass growing in the estuary mud and learnt to identify and treasure seaweeds growing in curious coloured zones on the rocky shore where blenny fish hid in the long damp cracks until the next tide. I regularly attempted to look after injured animals that I found. They ranged from a poor cat-damaged robin and bat to hedgehogs and even once (with the help of the local vet) a heron with a broken leg. The heron’s flexible neck was incredible! Once I almost had my thumb bitten off by a weasel our feisty cat had caught. In prising it from her jaws the weasel latched into me in fear and I ran down the garden path swinging it off my arm just in time for my stepmother to open the door at which the weasel leapt into the house to late be expelled back into the wild for good.
As I grew older with a friend I joined a scheme run by the Young Ornithologists Club to help count the birds on the estuary below. The diversity of wildlife found on the river below was amazing. In the misty mornings we were woken by eerie sounding Curlews. Redshank, Sandpipers, Shield Duck and kingfishers could all be seen where we waited for the school bus and a couple Long Tailed Tits nested in the bush by the bridge and we ducked under the low flying Mute Swans struck by the whisper of their huge wings. In the many bird counts on the estuary a friend and I did, we even counted black-tailed godwits by then already an uncommon wader bird and now near threatened.
One spring day on the local farm I came across a tiny lamb abandoned by its mother stuck in thick oozing mud of a tree surrounded pool. I quickly became stuck in the mud as if it was quicksand with no one anywhere near to hear any cries I might have made I could so easily have died trying to get the lamb out. Another time me and my brothers had to tear across a field, running for our lives, as we were being chased by a raging bull that appeared as if from nowhere. I was the last to get out of the field, too small to jump up the hedge bank helped by my brothers.
In those few long childhood years I learnt a deep respect for nature. I was fascinated by it and realised how it connected us all be it for food or our very existence. I also clearly gained an understanding of natural danger, be it the raging bull or nearly drowning, swirling in a freak mega summer wave on a Cornish beach as my parents sat quietly sunning themselves, blissfully unaware. I also began to see how knowledge, considered thought, planning, kindness, trust and good care could go a long way to help things to survive and flourish and to even become the food that we ate or be the nuts and bolts of saving our blue planet
Living through such challenging times as we do right now, be it the global pandemic, threats of terrorism, the biodiversity crisis and as we only just begin to realise the scary absurdity of the climate emergency that we actually brought upon ourselves; it is surely high time to revaluate just who we are, where we want to be and organise to get to that better place fast. Our work as communities is just beginning as we try to persuade those in power to change their ‘stuck in the mud thinking’ we hope to avoid catastrophe.
You may understandably think cruelty to our humble rooftop birds is something of a minor matter. I believe though, how we choose to treat these birds, be they pigeons, jackdaws, gulls or sparrows, can give us some helpful pointers to how we can change ourselves and wider society to ensure our survival. In my last update I spoke of how the cruelty we choose to bring on rooftop birds points at themes of trust and connection. These themes, I now realise, are also closely interconnected with our innermost fears, our sense of responsibility, our belief in so called freedom and choice, our desire for security and the very our deepest doubts about ourselves as beings, or indeed in some cases sadly about our neighbours.
When I ran from that speedy bull as a kid I felt the fear that I suspect the first women and men perhaps felt too when they came bleary eyed out of the dark caves on to the sunlit plains to grow and nurture their first crops. We assume they learnt to fear the teeth and claws of the mountain lion, the crop killing droughts and fire and occasional plagues of locust, yet also found time to realise the possibilities around them. Over time, they learnt that there was security in numbers to be able to hunt safely or ward off competing neighbours, the amazing cooking power of fire and then its clearance power too to be able to investigate which plants were safe to forage and later grow so they could survive and face the dangers stronger together.
Fear of the unknown is such a useful survival mechanism and a driver to find solutions fast with our abilities to analyse, rationalise and make. Fear and these incredible talents may though have turned us into the biggest threat to our collective future. Fear pushes us with gut reaction to run for our lives in panic or fight. It can sadly push us into war so we put our own lives or our immediate family’s lives or even our nations lives above everyone else’s all at the expense of our neighbours, our youth and our environment. Our talents for agriculture, extracting, powering, manufacturing and ultimately consuming all that we reap may be a road to nowhere unless we learn to balance our powers with the providence that is Earth.
Our relationship with nature has been that we take solace in it, yet on the other we quickly learnt to fear becoming apprehensive about it early on then ultimately separated ourselves from it choosing to exist in an imagined ‘safe’ human world. In doing so we set ourselves on a path to catastrophic climate change and chaos. We constructed a world of home, of certainty, the urban organised security of our civilized, amazing but gas guzzling cities. Our actual homes too became the castles we defend against all odds. We kill the birds on our roofs, build fences to keep out the neighbours and clean all trace of fallen leaves or weeds from our gardens. We in our local communities and nations and corporate businesses long lost touch with the complex interrelated tooth and claw and web of connection that is nature. We believed we were special and unstoppable with our super abilities to project our abilities onto and claim almost every part of the earth’s surface extracting wherever we landed.
We can all, of course, be both cruel and good at different times just as we can all extract, consume or give back. It turns out though the world we created isn’t fair at all, the ‘luckier’ ones are rich and often make the poor, poorer. The entrepreneurs take control of our lives and even geolocate us to be able to sell more stuff to us, while the multi nationals built ways to hide their wealth sucking it out from any possibility of being used to give back better for a more connected and equal society. Further adding to the absurdity is that we even developed ways to bet on success or failure with obscene hedge funds.
Just like we ‘othered’ the gulls and pigeons on our rooftops we chose and still choose to ‘other’ each other perhaps rather more surreptitiously with unequal access to land, food, wages, capital and opportunity. We simplistically think we can each wish for things and attain them as we are ‘responsible for our own destiny’ as individuals. But that destiny is not equally open to all of us. Pride does too indeed come before a fall. A ‘meaningful life’ of achievement can suddenly lose all meaning when for example we are hired and fired as merely a another resource to be wrung out of the system like a wet rag. We deceive ourselves that we each have agency of our own and denigrate those that fall assisted by billionaire owned media moghuls and ‘poverty porn’.
Many of us believe we can individually overcome; we can soar like birds to become something we are not. We can join the club of our neighbours, by aspiring to be better than the Jones’ in home owning Thatcherite mirage, then quickly switch to disdain those on the other side of the road who we were like in the first place. It is doubt and fear that seems to drive us and with money, corrupts and with knowledge (not free and transparent to everyone) our accumulated power and enhanced agency then blinds us.
We do though have a wonderful way of being curious, to analyse and make things – our abilities if you like. We learnt to work with tools, to grow things for food ever more intensively, to extract natural resources, build houses, lay oil and gas pipe lines, develop new technologies and robots and even go to outer space. These abilities we use to affirm our existence and value, to make at least for some of us our lives ever more convenient and easy and comfortable. To control our desires for both each other and ‘things’ we have built systems of morality and value, codes of conduct, curious customs, religions and spirituality. Yet even with many of these systems which are built to ‘keep the peace’ and in many cases engender fairness instead can be used as boundary weapons that box off as ‘property’ new or long held accepted worlds of religion and belief systems built it seems chaotically over years separating different moralities and values from the world that so often only the chosen ones can inhabit.
On a brighter note, morality thankfully though, is there to be constantly discovered. It is evolved, evolving and can be flexible. We perhaps need to see morality as possibility that flows, whose reach we can make potentially broader. It does not need to be mere limitation, we can collectively vision it ahead of any weighing up and valuing. If we learn to trust the human condition more and realise it has potential to be more diverse. Like a river our human condition could perhaps be seen as flowing like a river delta dropping useful doubts about our collective existence which can considered transparently to offer new possibilities that put down roots in societal norms as it flows onwards to our future. We can perhaps then free ourselves more expansively from constant fear and judgement.
We can build trust and connection across borders across communities and across disciplines. Unlike in science, we can recognise there is no one answer to each and every thing. There are so often many. By always finding only one meaning or always choosing between accepted binary choices of right and wrong it gives us a false feeling of absolutist control of our world and potentially our neighbours too.
True freedom comes with responsibility to others. True love too is expressed by looking outside ourselves. We can be so much more than ourselves. Goodness is out there. Doubt about that actual goodness is also strangely good as it teaches us to take time and reflect. Positive thought can be a tyranny when it limits careful examination. If we can only decide to overcome our fear of the other by looking outwards we can eventually find strength in cooperation, trust in each other and ultimately form an empowering network of connection; an ecology of human kind if you like.
New ways of living and existing can be found together beyond dogma or operating as individuals or self-interested nation states or businesses. We can realise much more than ourselves than just operating alone. Most importantly we must beware a sense of absolute unity as being always good since there is a tension with free liberating thought. There is strength in unity but it can be a dangerous rock to smash others or limit us.
Diversity of thought just as like biodiversity in nature is hopeful and ever curious. It is in the tension between those different thoughts we are capable of finding new temporary worlds and so new ways of being can be found, made and experimented with. Faced by the existential threat of climate change our very survival may depend on all of the above.
So welcome the other, look outward, be transparent, pay attention, question, accept differences of opinion, converse, discuss, connect, decide and then take considered cooperative action rooted in the potential for fluid worldly change.
There are not only sharks below the surface of the lake; there is a myriad of possibility just like the buff moths fluttering in the darkness of the barn I experienced.
Let’s not simply accept just who we are, or what we’ve become. Let’s instead redefine who we could be, reconsider the how; of how we get there, and the limits of what that world and indeed we together might be. Question, doubt, be furious, be mad, be rebellious about every injustice. The world of being is your business too.
Remember too the feathered avian gold living rich, interconnected lives on our bird deterrent covered rooftops.
Help stop the silent spring Rachel Carson spoke in her book. Let’s keep the squawking gulls, cooing pigeons and chirping sparrows thriving and see the wondrous possibilities of this planet, vision them and open ourselves to transparency, trust and connection.
Please sign and share the petition and kindly consider supporting it if you have the means. Thank you too for reading this far! PD