Roy's blog

I visited Sutherland today – a chance to look for a pair of sea eagles and to check the spread of the red squirrels we translocated in 2013. But I mainly I drove north to pay a short visit to the Public Inquiry about a golf development proposed on the Coul Links Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) near Dornoch. It is being held in the Carnegie Hall, not the famous one on 7^th Avenue New York, but the small one built in Clashmore by the same Andrew Carnegie. I quietly slipped into a seat at the back of the village hall and listened to the proceedings. I wanted to be there to show support for those who are opposed to damaging Coul Links. It brought back memories, from the 1970s onwards, of other inquiries where my RSPB colleagues and I were being questioned by lawyers as we fought to protect a nature site. We won some and lost some, but why are they still being won or lost?

Then our focus was on the protection of birds so there were many people who weren’t impressed by that, for the cry then was ‘do you want birds or jobs’. But now it is a much more important matter – we desperately need these special areas of nature to ensure the future of our earth. Outside the hall, it was like a spring day, rather than the 27^th February. My car radio told me these were the hottest days on record in a decade of some of the hottest years on record. Flick the channel and a reporter is talking about the massive declines of insects. On another the Green MP is talking about tomorrow’s debate at Westminster on ‘climate change’ or better stated ‘climate breakdown’.

Coul Links with Loch Fleet is a SSSI as well as being a Ramsar Site and a Special Protection Area. There are just over 1400 SSSIs in Scotland covering just under 13% of our country, so why are we putting any of them at risk at a time of great risk to the future of our grandchildren. Some world visionaries believe that to ensure long-term survival of the earth’s ecosystems we will need to have 50% of the earth’s land and seas dedicated to nature and natural processes. I am a firm believer of that target. We cannot lose any more nature sites and the huge areas of land degraded by fire and livestock require to be ecologically restored. Ecological restoration on a large enough scale to attempt to ameliorate the increasing levels of carbon and to restore earth’s ecological processes will be job creation on a truly massive scale. It will require bold far-seeing political leaders and the diversion of major funding from other budgets. It is no longer a choice. As I listened to this morning’s evidence, expert against QC, I also thought that the term SSSI is now antiquated and does not command public respect. They need rebranding in today’s perilous times – may be something like – Areas of Ecological Importance.

In a few weeks the red kites will be soaring above their nesting sites, nowadays throughout Scotland and England, yet 30 years go before reintroduction the only ones were in Wales.

Today I came across this link to a specially commissioned engraving by Alison Kinnaird in 2003 for the National Gallery of Scotland of the kite story.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/76227/roy-dennis-born-1940

The jays are flying high again and that’s because it’s October. For the rest of the year they rather skulk around the woods yet you know they are there from their raucous calls. But now the oak trees are full of ripe acorns and that’s what the jays are harvesting. For some reason after they have stuffed four or five acorns into their gullets and they’ve got the last one gripped in their bills they leave the trees and fly high across the countryside instead of low into woods. I saw them yesterday morning when I was out for a walk and they were taking the acorns about three quarters of a mile to a scraggy area of small trees and grassland. This is where they must have been burying the future food supplies. But why do they fly so high, it cannot be that they want to know where they’re going, but I wonder if it’s to avoid predators. Jays feature regularly in the diet of goshawks living in the forests.

What that flight does do is to announce that the acorn harvest is underway. Jays collect prodigious amounts of acorns and spread them over such large areas of the countryside. Several thousands per individual and up to a mile or more away from the harvested tree. Of course most of the acorns are eaten, not necessarily all by jays but also by small rodents, but sufficient remain to allow new oak trees to grow in new places. The jays often hide them in bramble patches and  places with cover and that’s exactly where young oak trees prefer to grow because they get an early break from being browsed down. Jays only reached the North of Scotland thirty years or so ago and evidence of them moving oaks, and in a few places sweet chestnut, is really noticeable. As they fly day by day through the acorn season, the jays work hard in what is really a true act of altruism. Of course for their species planting acorns ensures that there are more oak trees in the future, but they, as individuals, are not going to benefit. But future jays will and so will an incredible number of species that benefit from the growth of oak trees. Even we do in many ways including the photosynthesis ability of oak trees to take in carbon and release oxygen.

As the jays start their autumn harvest, the red squirrels are finishing theirs. They have been so busy through September gathering hazelnuts from the grooves of hazel trees that grow along the bank below my house. They come from the pinewood about 100 yards across the road but there must be others as well from further afield that know that September is the month to gather nuts. Some days as I sit at my desk I watch them scurry back and for. They come round house, run across the lawn, climb up over my woodpile, through the lilac hedge and into the first hazel tree. I can see them clambering around in the upper branches and then in no time they return over the woodpile and across the lawn with a mouthful of hazelnuts. Usually they head off for the pinewood to store their haul of nuts in secret places.

But other days they just potter around on the lawn, choose places that seem to have no merit, then a quick little dig, a nut is pushed into the hole and the grass quickly patted down. Then onto the next. Some days they bury dozens. I never know how they find them again, but they certainly don’t find them all because young hazel trees are always popping up in unexpected places in the garden. And in many places in the surrounding land. The red squirrel is just such a great creator of new hazel trees, and another example in my view of altruism towards future squirrels, but how wildlife and we appreciate hazel thickets. When I was young I remember us, boys, searching for really good hazel sticks to make bows or catapults; while older people in the farming districts did an annual harvest of hazel wands to season for walking sticks and handles for various farm implements.

Last week while I was watching the first of the jays and the last of the squirrels carrying out their annual harvests, I listened with incredulity to a news report on the radio that a bottle of whisky had been sold at auction in Edinburgh for £840,750! I suppose my first question was why – the purchaser is not even going to drink it. My second thought was what a weird world we live in. Such a huge amount of money for an item of no true worth at a time when our planet needs every effort to prevent climate breakdown. That will require massive funds being redirected to conserve and restore planet Earth rather than profligate spending on luxury non-essentials of all kinds. I gather the whisky, which was specially bottled in 1986, had been made in Speyside in 1926. Then, at least, it would have been truly organic, the barley would most likely been grown on a mixed farm, with cattle, sheep and poultry, and horses to draw the plough and do the work on the farm. The rotational crops would have included barley, oats, turnips, potatoes and grass fields for making hay and for grazing. Annually, the fertile soils would have received farm manure and lime. Now those same fields that supply barley, for ever-increasing whisky production, are deep ploughed and instead of organic dung the crops grow due to copious supplies of artificial fertiliser and chemicals. Surely it’s essential we think more seriously about the future for most of present farming systems do not have long-term sustainability unlike the altruistic activities of the red squirrel and the jay.

Last evening at home I had a phone call from LBC radio station in London. Sophie asked if I would talk with Clive Bull about the ‘Insect Armageddon’ trending the news yesterday. Why me? – I guessed at this hour I could be found on a phone. Fortunately I had looked at the report by scientists on the 76% reduction in flying insect biomass in 27 years up to 2016 on 63 German nature reserves, so I did know the story – see in the journal Plos One. I also felt strongly connected to this news as I am old enough to remember car trips to the New Forest in the late 1950s when after 20 miles you’d have to scrape the windscreen clear of dead insects and from time to time clear the radiator grill. And that was also true in the Scottish Highlands in the 1960s. Just imagine what the reduction of flying insects really has been in the UK if you used 1950 or 1960 as the baseline not 1989. It’s truly disastrous.

Ornithologists are used to the severity of the declines – 97% of turtle doves gone since 1970. When I heard some singing in Andalusia this past April it reminded me of my childhood in rural Hampshire – what a loss to our enjoyment of the countryside to lose that gentle purring in the hawthorn hedges. Then don’t get me started but look at the appalling loss of grey partridges, corn buntings, yellowhammers, poppies, corn cockles and marigolds to the chemicalisation and intensification of agriculture since the 1960s. To understand these dramatic changes you must read Ian Newtown’s new book ‘Farming and Birds’ in the New Naturalist series. I’m two-thirds of the way through – it’s a brilliant read and a weighty tome (it’s also too heavy to read in bed!) which explores the whole history of farming and birds – the relationships good and bad – but details fully the dramatic changes due to the intensification of farming, the onslaught of a bewildering array of chemicals – insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, artificial fertilisers and the loss of wild plants, insects and soil ecosystems. Although individual chemicals are tested for impacts – the real problem is the cocktail of chemicals from intensive agriculture added to emissions from industry and the way we live, including acid rain.

It shocks me that scientific reports continually document the impacts on wildlife and the threat to future global ecosystems yet society seems unable to rein back the worst aspects of intensive agriculture. When I started working with wildlife in the early 1960s the immediate worry was the rapid declines of raptors such as peregrines and golden eagles. Scientists soon proved this was due to new chemicals used in sheep dips and agriculture. The conservation bodies, government and NGOs, demanded changes and within a reasonable time the offending chemicals were taken out of use, and the problems subsided. Why are demands for change not met nowadays – are the bodies less able or organised, are the politicians more negligent or are the chemical companies and the farming industry much stronger?

My very strong view is that we need immediate change not more research – governments and big business love research it means they don’t have to do anything NOW. And nature if given a chance can bounce back, even on farmland, as I saw when I again revisited Knepp Estate in Sussex. There 3500 acres of farmland were turned over to rewilding some 16 years ago and the return of nature has been fantastic – even turtle doves and nightingales, purple emperor butterflies and a childhood delight grasshoppers exploding as we walked through the long vegetation. My view is that for the sake of future generations and the planet we need to do that on a very big scale – not a field on a farm or a farm here and there, but big places – the South Downs, Salisbury Plain and other big ecosystems where nature takes precedence. In my mind, 40% seems about what is needed but a big hot potato to weigh up Society’s and the Earth’s long term needs against individual farming rights. But it has to be done.