New arrival ruffles feathers
CONSTERNATION. Disquiet. Misgiving. All, in roughly equal amounts, surround the announcement that an alien avian species has discovered the UK, decided it quite likes the place and has moved in.
The red-billed leiothrix (commonly known as the pekin robin) has, according to scientists, found a move to a warmer – and warming – Britain quite an acceptable step.
Normally an inhabitant of subtropical regions, it has now established colonies in Wiltshire and Somerset, though has been sighted, equally, at locations as far apart as Merseyside and Kent.
But its arrival has hardly been an occasion for joy, with warnings from the scientific community that it could soon start colonising gardens across the country and ‘changing the dawn chorus for ever’. So what?
Is this diminutive and brightlycoloured arrival posing any kind of threat? Does it go round uprooting agricultural crops or ripping the tiles off roofs? Is it given to emitting a raucous bark fit to waken the dead during the small hours?
Not as far as I am aware. Indeed, given that the bird’s other soubriquet is the Japanese nightingale, it could well be that the dawn chorus will be greatly improved by its contributions, especially as native nightingales are now comparatively rarely heard.
I fail to see why any of this should warrant alarm bells being rung. After all, I can remember the first time I heard collared doves – the species only arrived here in the 50s. Now they are harmoniously naturalised and there are few gardens where either form of their calls cannot be heard.
Similarly, large areas of London and the south-east have been colonised by ring-necked parakeets descended from a pair of escapees. My sister-in-law’s Chelsea garden is a stopping-off point on the flight path between Hyde Park and Battersea Park, both home to considerable populations, and it’s not unusual to see five or six of these exotic additions to the UK’s bird life perched in her tree for a fag break.
Egrets and even spoonbills are already common sights in some habitats in the south of the country and no one, as far as I am aware, is shouting the odds about them becoming invasive species.
So why should we complain about a technicolour songbird which wants to add an exotic touch to garden bird populations? When we are witnessing declines in so many native species surely we should be rolling out the red carpet and filling the seed feeders for any new species that care to put down roots here.
And why should it be acceptable to introduce cranes to the Somerset Levels in the interests of broadening their biodiversity yet somehow unacceptable when biodiversity is given a helping hand by the process of natural migration?
More to the point, what scientist has any right to try to put up the ‘house full’ sign on the basis that the country’s bird population is pretty much as he would like to see it and no further migrants will be allowed in? for example, to shelve rewilding plans and extend polytunnel and glasshouse production to reduce our reliance on imported salad crops, there’s no point in farmers growing anything unless they have the staff to pick it.
And currently scores of growers are suffering from a chronic labour shortage, thanks mainly to Brexit having signalled a mass exodus by Eastern European workers. We are also in the anomalous situation of growers being able to make more by selling their produce as feedstock for anaerobic digesters than by hawking it around retailers.
Which brings us to the other point: farmers are not going to carry on growing anything if they can’t turn a reasonable profit. And achieving that is looking increasingly difficult. Having been seduced into voting to quit the EU by Government assurances that they would continue to be looked after in the style to which they had become accustomed, many farmers are now finding a knife protruding from between their shoulder blades as their support gets cut by 20 per cent.
And this at the worst of all possible times.
Input costs have soared on the back of events in Ukraine and various climatic disturbances, throwing financial planning into chaos so that the number of enterprises trading in the red is certain to rise this year.
At the same time, with retail food prices rising and the cost of living heading roofwards, expecting supermarkets to up the prices they pay producers is pretty much futile.
But the future is not necessarily a bleak one: by way of contrast with a Government policy document full of blather and froth comes a clearlystated one from the Sustainable Food Trust setting out ways in which we could improve our self-sufficiency, deliver a better diet, combat climate change and protect the environment.
Which all sounds a bit of a magic wand job. But the trust insists it is achievable, particularly if we abandon intensive systems and return to a mixed farming regime producing crops and livestock in rotation to create better soil health – the oldfashioned approach to farming which was all but eradicated by the stampede towards intensification in the post-war years.
The downside is that food would become more expensive to produce so that some form of state intervention would be necessary, though restoring EU-type, full, index-linked support to farmers would be the obvious and most cost-effective method of getting round the problem.
And the notion of sustainable farming, as opposed to allowing a rewilded countryside to produce nothing but weeds and brambles is, surely, something all right-minded farmers could support.