Ingham’s W RLD
WILD bubbling calls greeted me as I visited an estuary at low tide last weekend, delivering a haunting, age-old song of moorland and water. There, among the black-tailed godwits already donning their brick-red breeding plumage, were the long-legged choristers.
Several curlews were walking slowly across the wide mudflats of Suffolk’s River Blyth, probing for food with their long, curved bills and pausing to sing the song that gave them their name.
Yet the latest “State of the UK’s Birds” report this week put these sedate waders on death row.
They joined the ranks of the UK’s 67-species Red List for birds with declines of 50 per cent or more in the past 25 years.
As the UK is home to one in four of the world’s breeding curlews, which are also declining across Europe, they are now considered “near threatened globally”. So here was a bird in a similar plight to the European otter.
Yet here they were in good numbers, fattening up, waiting for a break in the weather further north so they could return to Scotland and Scandinavia to breed.
Also dropping on to the Red List was the mistle thrush even though I regularly see or hear them when walking my dog in Surrey. They have an aggressive alarm call like someone dragging a pencil across a comb’s teeth.
The list goes on. Long-term residents in nature’s intensive care unit include house sparrows and starlings. Yet they were the two commonest birds in the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch in January.
These sightings, boosted by winter visitors, are deceptive. In recent decades numbers of breeding house sparrows have declined by 70 per cent and of starlings by 75 per cent. When I was a child, I never paid them any attention. Now I fix them in my binoculars as if they were exotics from the East.
But the report by the RSPB, British Trust for Ornithology and Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust highlights some good news – mainly thanks to concerted action by conservationists. Bitterns, secretive brown herons, and nightjars, nocturnal moth-eaters from Africa, have climbed off the Red List while golden eagles and cirl buntings are recovering.
Great spotted woodpecker numbers have soared nearly fivefold since 1970 and ring-necked parakeets, whose vivid green, screeching squadrons are spreading across the south, have enjoyed a 14-fold increase in 20 years.
Nature never stands still, but as the plight of the curlew so clearly reveals, you need to enjoy it while you can. HAVING seen Pink Floyd (at Knebworth way back in 1975, I’m afraid) I can confirm that they are very loud. And a new Panamanian shrimp was this week named after them because its claw snaps are louder than gunfire. Synalpheus pinkfloydi was named by fan and Oxford University zoologist Sammy de Grave, says the journal Zootaxa. He has rescued the shrimp from millennia of obscurity. SEARCHING for barn owls in Suffolk at the weekend, I spotted what looked like a giant hare racing over the water meadow, chased by a herd of cows. My binoculars revealed something even more bizarre – the “hare” was a Chinese water deer. The cattle wanted it off their patch. GREEN TIP: Use peat-free compost to protect peatlands – vital for birds such as curlew. MYANMAR – Burma to you and me – was the scene of a special Easter egg hunt this week. Experts found 44 eggs laid by the world’s rarest turtle on the banks of the Chindwin. There are only five female Burmese roofed turtle left in the wild, so the haul is being incubated in safety by the Wildlife Conservation Society and Turtle Survival Alliance. WARRIOR ants are a band of brothers, German researchers tell Science Advances. African Matabele ants often get wounded hunting termites. They then release a chemical SOS. Brother ants race to the rescue, take them back to the nest and tear off the termites. It’s the first time invertebrates have been seen helping injured colleagues.