Home is where the heart is

My love of wildlife started when, as a very small person, I began exploring the damp, crumbly places that I found under the stones and hedgerow of our modest Southampton home. As I grew, my home range extended to the bomb site at the bottom of the road. There I found a common lizard that scuttled around a big pile of rubble and a fabulous butterfly bush that attracted scores of peacocks, small tortoiseshells and the occasional comma.

I still find the best wildlife close to my home here in Gloucestershire. My patch now includes organic allotments that have given me two wildlife “wows” in the last month – two creatures at very different ends of the visibility scale but each having their own magic.

The allotments that my wife Margaret and I run are managed of the perma-culture raised-bed system. This includes the use of carpet to cover paths and uncultivated spots. Each year in spring we look forward to our first sighting of the slow worms that have emerged from their winter hibernation. Last Sunday we found two adults, one of them probably the mother of two exquisite babies that lay curled nearby. Even the Royal jeweller could not create such beauty as their tiny bronze bodies with jet black undersides.

At the other end of the show-off scale was the red kite that drifted along the scarp inspecting the allotments in the clear hope of some tasty snack! The kite is a spectacular bird, graceful in the air and mildly patterned in reds and subtle gold. It has not yet re-established itself as a breeding bird in the county but it cannot be long before it does.

Slow worm (c) Colin Varndell, Red kite (c) Wildstock

A spoonbill's appraisal

In business the terms ‘back and front’ office are used to differentiate the parts of a company. The front office delivers products and services to customers, whilst the back office manages the mechanics of systems, finances, training, health and safety and sundry other important issues.

As a Wildlife Trust we try to manage our back office, including our priceless membership database, to the highest possible standards. The downside for those of us who spend most of our time in the office is that we are separated from the very things that drew us to nature conservation in the first place – WILDLIFE.

It was therefore a real treat for me yesterday when I visited Coombe Hill Nature Reserve. The purpose of the visit was highly worthy and very back office – my important annual appraisal with Trust Chairman Andrew Kerr. However, the delight of the visit was not just in seeing such a fantastic Severn wetland full of waders, warblers and ducks on their Autumn passage, but it coinciding with the visit of two rather aloof and clearly superior water birds – Spoonbills.

Now I am no twitcher and I have never before seen any of the passing rarities that drop in on our sites from time to time. However, the spoonbills were magnificent. What makes their visit so tantalising is that they breed locally just across the channel in the Netherlands. Will they ever make the leap across to become a fully fledged (bad pun) British bird rather than the intermittent breeder that they are now? No-one knows and even the clairvoyant and seminal ‘A climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds’ is no more informative.

For me I will continue to consider my forays onto our nature reserves as journeys of discovery and savour those chance encounters that make nature such an immersive experience. Every visit is a delight and I will try to leave as few carbon footprints as I can justify.

And the appraisal? Best not to discuss in public!

Miserable weather...

So, we've had a miserable cloudy wet August with copious rainfall. How is this evidence of climate change? Terry Wogan, TOGMeister and leading vocal climate change denier, has used the weather as more evidence that global warming is a invention of the environmentalists. Hurricane Gustav is probably being cited in the same way in an American context.
The fact is that individual weather events can not be linked with climate change. Nor does climate change infer that we will be experiencing warmer sunny summers as standard. IT is the case however, that globally average temperatures are increasing. Climate change models also predict increasing storminess and greater variability in weather systems. We are seeing these trends on both sides of the Atlantic.

And is there any real evidence that our native wildlife is suffering from these changes? Well, I've just returned from a study trip to Scotland and it is clear that their uplands are changing at quite a rapid pace. The snowfields that once hung on in the corries of the Cairngorms well into summer are now a thing of the past. Indeed, the headwaters of rivers such as the Dee, which were once fed by cold snow melt, are now up to 2C warmer in summer. Such is the change that there is real concern that the 'King of Fish' that Atlantic Salmon may no longer be able to spawn in its headwaters.

The sensible argument for climate change is lets live within environmental limits, consume less and then, even if wrong (which personally believe is an enormous if) we will be leaving less of a mess. We are overspending hugley on our environmental credit card. A global environmental credit crunch would be much more serious than a stalled housing market and slow high street sales.