Killed after walking in on horror scene
Food stock hit by climate change
A WOMAN was strangled after she walked in on her father’s murderer dismembering his corpse, an inquest heard.
The body of Marie Brown, 41, was found in the bath along with that of dad Noel, 69, who was missing both arms from the elbow and his right leg.
Both were throttled at Noel’s home in Deptford, South East London, in December 2017, the Southwark inquest heard.
Prime suspect Nathaniel Henry, 37, was found dead of a flu medicine overdose a month after he vanished following the murders.
Assistant coroner Tony Badenoch returned a verdict of unlawful killing.
ELLIE OWEN ON DECLINE OF SEABIRD
Dead birds wash up
THE SCREECHING of thousands of puffins gathered on the sea cliffs would guide fishermen through the fog on their return to the harbour each day.
Their distinctive cries could be heard for miles. But now there is an eerie silence.
Hordes of birds used to gather each spring, covering every square inch of rock or grass at Marwick Head on the Orkney Islands to feed their young, but now there are only a handful. And this colony is, sadly, not an isolated case.
At Sumburgh Head at the southern tip of the mainland of Shetland there were 33,000 puffins on the island in spring 2000, but just 570 last year. Now 450,000, Britain’s puffin population is at a catastrophic low. They are threatened with extinction, driven by climate change affecting their food supplies. Recent surveys of the Farne Islands in Northumberland showed that despite a steady increase over the previous 70 years, numbers have fallen by up to 42% over the last five years.
Ellie Owen, of the RSPB, said: “It is not just the puffins who are being wiped out. This is affecting guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars. If we talk about a change in sea temperature of just one degree, the plankton move north. The sand eels follow, and then the puffins don’t have a food source.
“It all has a big knock-on effect. Puffins can live up to 30, 35 years. They can tolerate one poor season. But when it’s year after year of poor summers, that’s when things go bad.”
In 2013, 5,000 puffins washed up on the east coast after long periods of easterly winds prevented them feeding, leading to mass starvation.
A year later, another 30,000 starved to death amid similar conditions.
Ellie said: “To have species like puffins on the vulnerable list is a real wake-up moment, even for me as a scientist who has studied them all my life. Tracking four colonies we found those doing poorly were travelling 10 times as far to find food.
“We thought puffins would travel about 30km to feed but we found some are travelling as far as 400km.”
She urged readers with photos of puffins taken in the UK to send them to the RSPB’s Puffarazzi Project, no matter how old they are. “You’ll be filling in key knowledge gaps. We need to learn more about how food stocks have changed over the years.”
This is a catastrophe, a wake-up moment even for scientists