Consummate irony : water commodified - 'drink bags' in an African forest
The consummate irony of klepto-capitalism run amok. Wasted drinking water bags litter a narrow forest trail in Sierra Leone
Afrotropical's posterous
Life Outside A Desert
Behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa (2) - "Screaming Parties"
Behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "Screaming Parties"
Dear Jochem,
The behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "A Three Palms Screaming Party"
Posted by: "Jochem Kuhnen" this_isnt_the_tenka_ichi_budokai@hotmail.com xjochemx
Date: Sat May 5, 2012 11:55 pm ((PDT))Dear John, (sic!)That is a great story of some great observations! Thank you very much for sharing this with this group! It’s weird that in this time of modern equipment and people travelling all over the world, there still is very, very little to be found (image/video-wise) of Swifts in Africa (please do correct me if I’m wrong here). I certainly look forward to seeing the video you took of the ‘three palms screaming party’!Kind regards from a grey and chilly Beek Ubbergen, the Netherlands, where my only breeding pair is huddled against eachother in the corner of their nest box...Jochem Kühnen.
http://www.xjochemx.nl
Agreed, and because here in Africa (north of the Republic) there are so few locals or residents fortunate to call 'bird-watching' their hobby or profession.
In Sierra Leone there's likely only one or two persons out in the field on most days of the year.
Interestingly they are still here today (May 6), perhaps not so many today. I frequently saw a flock, of perhaps fifty birds, feeding in a swirling mass in and under a forest-generated layer of cloud this morning in the Kunsulma hill range of Tonkolili district.
The points I hope I was making were:
They appear to quite faithful to this one forested area, the air above which which supports several species of swallow and swift in the different seasons. They appear to be staying here rather late. The flock(s) may be non-breeders (though I doubt that is the case), or from northern colonies - or both or comprised of both breeders and non-breeders. They call frequently, and in the mornings (both sunny and cloudy) have indulged in lots of 'screaming' party chases and behaviour more typical of that at a large nesting assembly.
Interestingly there are still other Palearctic migrants about - flava Wagtails (albeit only one and it was flying south!), and there was a new, fresh-plumaged Melodious Warbler in the hills today, also there was a Pied Flycatcher in the same place on May 2.
It is possible that the swifts are roosting at night in some old dead trees which are full of woodpecker holes and the like. There are many such trees in one particular valley in the Kunsulma range and the swifts appear to head up into this valley each evening. There are no real cliff faces to speak of.
I don't think the video will be online until the end of the month.
Warm wishes from here to all swifts and 'swifters' over in Europe!
[the met station here records a range of temperature daily from minimum of 21* to maximum 32*C]
And:
Humidity in the 80s and 90s!
James
The behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "A Three Palms Screaming Party"
Posted by: "Jochem Kuhnen" this_isnt_the_tenka_ichi_budokai@hotmail.com xjochemx
Date: Sat May 5, 2012 11:55 pm ((PDT))Dear John, (sic!)That is a great story of some great observations! Thank you very much for sharing this with this group! It’s weird that in this time of modern equipment and people travelling all over the world, there still is very, very little to be found (image/video-wise) of Swifts in Africa (please do correct me if I’m wrong here). I certainly look forward to seeing the video you took of the ‘three palms screaming party’!Kind regards from a grey and chilly Beek Ubbergen, the Netherlands, where my only breeding pair is huddled against eachother in the corner of their nest box...Jochem Kühnen.
http://www.xjochemx.nl
To: Swallows-Martins-Swifts-Worldwide@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [SMS-Worldwide] The behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "A Three Palms Screaming Party"
Dear Swift lovers,Since April 29, when my bird observations resumed in northern Sierra
Leone (9*N by 12*W) until today, I have been watching flocks of up to
80 "Common" Swifts. Quite possibly they are all members of the same
'meta-flock' as all my observations have been within a radius of 6 km
of our Tonkolili study site.There were heavy evening showers earlier in the week, hopefully the
beginning of the northbound ITCZ rains, after which there have been
some substantial emergences of small black 'flying' ants and other
insects.Each day, from about 8 a.m., often until late evening, the "A.a."
swift flock can be found somewhere - busily feeding. They clearly
prefer the hill evergreen forest, degraded, but a forest none the
less. A sumptuous community in fact, a multi-storied living carpet
that still clings to life, along the Kunsulma ridge-line, about 150
metres above the new 'village' of Tonkolili.
Subject: [SMS-Worldwide] The behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "A Three Palms Screaming Party"
Dear Swift lovers,Since April 29, when my bird observations resumed in northern Sierra
Leone (9*N by 12*W) until today, I have been watching flocks of up to
80 "Common" Swifts. Quite possibly they are all members of the same
'meta-flock' as all my observations have been within a radius of 6 km
of our Tonkolili study site.There were heavy evening showers earlier in the week, hopefully the
beginning of the northbound ITCZ rains, after which there have been
some substantial emergences of small black 'flying' ants and other
insects.Each day, from about 8 a.m., often until late evening, the "A.a."
swift flock can be found somewhere - busily feeding. They clearly
prefer the hill evergreen forest, degraded, but a forest none the
less. A sumptuous community in fact, a multi-storied living carpet
that still clings to life, along the Kunsulma ridge-line, about 150
metres above the new 'village' of Tonkolili.
If there is low cloud, when the forest canopy becomes misty, the swifts tend to feed
individually. Or rather, they fly very low over the canopy, each
individual scything back and fore only a metre or so above the leafy
crowns of the forest trees. Yet all seeking to remain part of one very
loose, almost evenly-spaced, flock.
individually. Or rather, they fly very low over the canopy, each
individual scything back and fore only a metre or so above the leafy
crowns of the forest trees. Yet all seeking to remain part of one very
loose, almost evenly-spaced, flock.
If the sky is clear, or there have been recent insect emergences, or in the early morning hours after
overnight rain, more than likely they will be found foraging in a tall
wheeling column, sometimes high above the eutrophic stream which flows
out of the village. When in a column they may call, and call
frequently, contra what is said in most of the Afro-ornithological
literature that I've read.I should mention that, apart from seeing one southbound migrant flock
in December, Common Swifts have not been found here during the long
dry season, between October and April. At that season, Pallid Swifts are present,
foraging in exactly the same areas - that is between mid-October and mid-March.At eight o'clock, on the very clear morning of May 1st, the 'entire'
swift flock was feeding, and calling more noisily than usual, over the
crest of the ridge, west of the village. I had just sweated up to the
bald crown of a still largely wooded minor summit, where an Airtel
mobile phone telecommunications tower was erected early in 2011. And I
was busy taking "habo snaps".
overnight rain, more than likely they will be found foraging in a tall
wheeling column, sometimes high above the eutrophic stream which flows
out of the village. When in a column they may call, and call
frequently, contra what is said in most of the Afro-ornithological
literature that I've read.I should mention that, apart from seeing one southbound migrant flock
in December, Common Swifts have not been found here during the long
dry season, between October and April. At that season, Pallid Swifts are present,
foraging in exactly the same areas - that is between mid-October and mid-March.At eight o'clock, on the very clear morning of May 1st, the 'entire'
swift flock was feeding, and calling more noisily than usual, over the
crest of the ridge, west of the village. I had just sweated up to the
bald crown of a still largely wooded minor summit, where an Airtel
mobile phone telecommunications tower was erected early in 2011. And I
was busy taking "habo snaps".
Around about 9 a.m. the swift flock came
down to the tower, at first in ones and twos, or threes and fours,
then quickly in larger number. They converged to dash and circle close
about the top of the red-and-white scaffold of the metal tower. Often
they flickered past it tightly, or seemed minded to dash themselves
against it, just as if this tower were their "home in the Palearctic".
From time to time they would disperse, fanning out in a broad rush-
off, completely vacating the scene, to soar high for a minute or two
before descending to repeat what was for me an exhilarating
performance. Especially so, because I haven't been in their breeding
range since July 2009. I must say that listening to their full volume
nuptial season screaming party - their summer song - was one of those
unanticipated joys that keeps the pursuit of natural history so very
keen. They continued belting around the tower for about fifteen
minutes. Then, when seemingly they'd had enough, they dispersed to
feed, rising quickly, up to a couple of hundred metres, above the
forest canopy of the ridge line. And were still up there at 1300 hrs
when I left the area.Better yet, on the morning of May 3, at a similar time, under a sky which was
heavily overcast, I was four kilometres distant, as the swift flies,
in the lower Mawuru river valley. This is, or rather was, a very
beautiful area, a 'tranquil rural land' which has until very now
sustained fertile fields of rice, sweet potato and beans, surrounded
by high quality Guinea savanna spread across its rounded hills and
slopes. A valley threaded throughout by a few ribbons of riparian
evergreen woodland and clots of permanent valley swamp along the
Mawuru and its tributaries.In the welcome cool of overcast conditions I had walked (without much
sweat) to the top of a low hill, very recently clear-felled and burnt-
over, trees all gone, save for three tall palms. Here a hundred or so
Sahel-bound White-throated Bee-eaters were swirling noisily, they
appeared to be indulging themselves in all the trills of a major
confidence-building session, of 'zugunruhe', in English - pre-
migratory restlessness.At about 9.30 a group, or 'our group', of sixty to seventy Common
Swifts descended from the lead-grey sky and began to dash about the
blackened hill. Often birds were tearing past me, audibly slicing the
air with their wings, only a few metres from my head. Then, as on May
Day, this loose flock coalesced into a spectacularly snaking screaming
party and whirled all around the three palms who still stand proud on
the blackened skeletal hill top. For those few, like me, nostalgic in
our world, these sixty birds might have been dashing round an old
church tower. Against such a cloudy sky, entranced by the birds, I was
cast back through time, into distant memory drifts of swifts. In those
distant days such birds could have been called common swifts, yet
essential swifts more like, swifts all screaming, as they have been,
throughout the building of our common history in Europe. Shouting out
apparently for joy, in the clean and quiet air. Air filled with insects. Among trees
and buildings old, and riddled with holes. The air they can still find
in Africa. Ancient giant trees for roosting too - that's only my
conjecture - based on incidents seen here at dusk. They can find 'free' air
over poor villages, down in these "ignorant lands". Anyhow, in my attempt to embrace information technology, and so better
prepared this time, I managed to grab, or loose-off, a few short
videos of the "three palms screaming party". With my iPhone
indispensable of course!The footless party continued for some ten or twelve minutes more.
Unfortunately it seems that the best video, consuming 30-something
Megs, is far too heavy to upload from a non-military server in
impoverished Sierra Leone. Somehow though I will make it available
once I'm "far up north", in a safe house in broadband-land, near to
where these swifts likely 'make their home' at the end of this month.Phenologically, I'm thinking - Latitude Leningrad, or the spires of St
Petersburg, if you prefer that name.There should be a couple of habo-snaps on line here:http://afrotropical.posterous.com/the-behaviour-of-common-swifts-in-africa-a-thJames Wolstencroft
down to the tower, at first in ones and twos, or threes and fours,
then quickly in larger number. They converged to dash and circle close
about the top of the red-and-white scaffold of the metal tower. Often
they flickered past it tightly, or seemed minded to dash themselves
against it, just as if this tower were their "home in the Palearctic".
From time to time they would disperse, fanning out in a broad rush-
off, completely vacating the scene, to soar high for a minute or two
before descending to repeat what was for me an exhilarating
performance. Especially so, because I haven't been in their breeding
range since July 2009. I must say that listening to their full volume
nuptial season screaming party - their summer song - was one of those
unanticipated joys that keeps the pursuit of natural history so very
keen. They continued belting around the tower for about fifteen
minutes. Then, when seemingly they'd had enough, they dispersed to
feed, rising quickly, up to a couple of hundred metres, above the
forest canopy of the ridge line. And were still up there at 1300 hrs
when I left the area.Better yet, on the morning of May 3, at a similar time, under a sky which was
heavily overcast, I was four kilometres distant, as the swift flies,
in the lower Mawuru river valley. This is, or rather was, a very
beautiful area, a 'tranquil rural land' which has until very now
sustained fertile fields of rice, sweet potato and beans, surrounded
by high quality Guinea savanna spread across its rounded hills and
slopes. A valley threaded throughout by a few ribbons of riparian
evergreen woodland and clots of permanent valley swamp along the
Mawuru and its tributaries.In the welcome cool of overcast conditions I had walked (without much
sweat) to the top of a low hill, very recently clear-felled and burnt-
over, trees all gone, save for three tall palms. Here a hundred or so
Sahel-bound White-throated Bee-eaters were swirling noisily, they
appeared to be indulging themselves in all the trills of a major
confidence-building session, of 'zugunruhe', in English - pre-
migratory restlessness.At about 9.30 a group, or 'our group', of sixty to seventy Common
Swifts descended from the lead-grey sky and began to dash about the
blackened hill. Often birds were tearing past me, audibly slicing the
air with their wings, only a few metres from my head. Then, as on May
Day, this loose flock coalesced into a spectacularly snaking screaming
party and whirled all around the three palms who still stand proud on
the blackened skeletal hill top. For those few, like me, nostalgic in
our world, these sixty birds might have been dashing round an old
church tower. Against such a cloudy sky, entranced by the birds, I was
cast back through time, into distant memory drifts of swifts. In those
distant days such birds could have been called common swifts, yet
essential swifts more like, swifts all screaming, as they have been,
throughout the building of our common history in Europe. Shouting out
apparently for joy, in the clean and quiet air. Air filled with insects. Among trees
and buildings old, and riddled with holes. The air they can still find
in Africa. Ancient giant trees for roosting too - that's only my
conjecture - based on incidents seen here at dusk. They can find 'free' air
over poor villages, down in these "ignorant lands". Anyhow, in my attempt to embrace information technology, and so better
prepared this time, I managed to grab, or loose-off, a few short
videos of the "three palms screaming party". With my iPhone
indispensable of course!The footless party continued for some ten or twelve minutes more.
Unfortunately it seems that the best video, consuming 30-something
Megs, is far too heavy to upload from a non-military server in
impoverished Sierra Leone. Somehow though I will make it available
once I'm "far up north", in a safe house in broadband-land, near to
where these swifts likely 'make their home' at the end of this month.Phenologically, I'm thinking - Latitude Leningrad, or the spires of St
Petersburg, if you prefer that name.There should be a couple of habo-snaps on line here:http://afrotropical.posterous.com/the-behaviour-of-common-swifts-in-africa-a-thJames Wolstencroft
The behaviour of Common Swifts in Africa - "A Three Palms Screaming Party"
It's May Day parties for some - for the uncommonly swift ...
A view of the Kunsulma Ridge in early January 2011, before the erection of the Zain (now Bharti-Airtel) towerSince April 29, when my bird observations resumed in northern Sierra Leone (9*N by 12*W), until today I have been watching flocks of up to 80 "Common" Swifts. Quite possibly they are all members of the same 'meta-flock' as all my observations have been within a radius of 6 km of our Tonkolili study site.There were heavy evening showers earlier in the week, hopefully the beginning of the northbound ITCZ rains, after which there have been some substantial emergences of small black 'flying' ants and other insects.Each day, from about 8 a.m., often until late evening, the "A.a." swift flock can be found somewhere - busily feeding. They clearly prefer the hill evergreen forest, degraded, but a forest none the less. A sumptuous community in fact, a multi-storied living carpet that still clings to life, along the Kunsulma ridge-line, sabout 150 metres above the new 'village' of Tonkolili. If there is low cloud, when the forest canopy becomes misty, the swifts tend to feed individually. Or rather, flying very low over the canopy, each individual scything back and fore only a metre or so above the leafy crowns of the forest trees, yet all seek to remain part of one very loose, almost evenly-spaced, flock. If the sky is clear, or there have been recent insect emergences, or in the early morning hours after overnight rain, more than likely they will be found foraging in a tall wheeling column, sometimes high above the eutrophic stream which flows out of the village. When in a column they may call, and call frequently, contra what is said in most of the Afro-ornithological literature that I've read.
I should mention that, apart from seeing one southbound migrant flock in December, Common Swifts have not been found here during the long dry season, between October and April; when Pallid Swifts are present, foraging in exactly the same areas, between mid-October and mid-March.
At eight o'clock, on the very clear morning of May 1st, the 'entire' swift flock was feeding, and calling more noisily than usual, over the crest of the ridge, west of the village. I had just sweated up to the bald crown of a still largely wooded minor summit, where an Airtel mobile phone telecommunications tower was erected early in 2011. And I was busy taking "habo snaps". Around about 9 a.m. the swift flock came down to the tower, at first in ones and twos, or threes and fours, then quickly in larger number. They converged to dash and circle close about the top of the red-and-white scaffold of the metal tower. Often they flickered past it tightly, or seemed minded to dash themselves against it, just as if this tower were their "home in the Palearctic". From time to time they would disperse, fanning out in a broad rush-off, completely vacating the scene, to soar high for a minute or two before descending to repeat what was for me an exhilarating performance. Especially so, because I haven't been in their breeding range since July 2009. I must say that listening to their full volume nuptial season screaming party - their summer song - was one of those unanticipated joys that keeps the pursuit of natural history so very keen. They continued belting around the tower for about fifteen minutes. Then, when seemingly they'd had enough, they dispersed to feed, rising quickly, up to a couple of hundred metres, above the forest canopy of the ridge line. And were still up there at 1300 hrs when I left the area.Better yet, yesterday morning, at the same hour under a sky which was heavily overcast, I was four kilometres distant, as the swift flies, in the lower Mawuru river valley. This is, or rather was, a very beautiful area, a 'tranquil rural land' which has until now sustained fertile fields of rice, sweet potato and beans, surrounded by high quality Guinea savanna spread across its rounded hills and slopes. A valley threaded throughout by a few ribbons of riparian evergreen woodland and clots of permanent valley swamp along the Mawuru and its tributaries.In relatively cool and overcast conditions I had walked (without much sweat) to the top of a low hill, very recently clear-felled and burnt-over, trees all gone, save for three tall palms. Here a hundred or so Sahel-bound White-throated Bee-eaters were swirling noisily, they appeared to be indulging themselves in all the trills of a major confidence-building session, of 'zugunruhe', in English - pre-migratory restlessness.At about 9.30 a.m. a group or 'our group' of sixty to seventy Common Swifts descended from the lead-grey sky and began to dash about the blackened hill. Often birds were tearing past me, audibly slicing the air with their wings, only a few metres from my head. Then, as on May Day, this loose flock coalesced into a spectacularly snaking screaming party and whirled all around the three palms who still stand proud on the blackened skeletal hill top. For those few, like me, nostalgic in our world, these sixty birds might have been dashing round an old church tower. Against such a cloudy sky, entranced by the birds, I was cast back through time, into distant memory drifts of swifts. Yes, in those days they were common swifts, yet essential swifts more like, swifts all screaming, as they have been, throughout the building of our common history in Europe. Screaming for clean and quiet air. Air filled with insects. Trees and buildings old, and riddled with holes. The air they can still find in Africa. Ancient giant trees too. They can find free air over poor villages, down these ignorant lands. Down in "developing nations", not yet multi-laned with highways nor fully degraded lands. Nations not mauled or scarred, not choked by masses in motors, scurrying down rat runs, into-and-out-of town, on behalf of the GRIM - our Gross International Misery.
Anyhow, in my attempt to embrace information technology, and so better prepared this time, I managed to grab, or loose-off, a few short videos of the "three palms screaming party". With my iPhone indispensable of course!The footless party continued for some ten or twelve minutes more. Unfortunately it seems that the best video, consuming 30-something Megs, is far too heavy to upload from a non-military server in impoverished Sierra Leone. Somehow though I will make it available once I'm "far up north", in a safe house in broadband-land, near to where these swifts likely 'make their home' at the end of this month.Phenologically, I'm thinking - Latitude Leningrad, or the spires of St Petersburg, if you prefer that name!
The view from three palms hill top yesterday May 3, 2012
The WMO Status of the Global Climate in 2011
Via:
The WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2011 is the latest addition to a successful series.
Although global mean surface temperatures in 2011 did not reach the record-setting levels of 2010, they were nevertheless the highest observed in a La Niña year.
A number of climate extremes, in particular precipitation extremes, were recorded around the world. Many of the extremes associated with one of the strongest La Niña events of the past 60 years had
major impacts worldwide. Significant flooding was recorded in many places, the most severe in South-East Asia, which caused about one thousand human fatalities deaths, while a major drought in East
Africa led to a humanitarian disaster.
Arctic sea ice continued its declining trend with an extent falling to near-record-low levels. Despite below-average global tropical cyclone activity, the United States of America experienced one of its most destructive tornado seasons on record.
M Jarraud (the Secretary-General) expressed the appreciation of WMO to all the Centres and the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services of its 189 Members that collaborated with WMO and contributed to the key publication. And as with the previous editions, he would like to underscore the importance of anybody's feedback.
Therefore the WMO looks forward to comments on the Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2011 and welcomes suggestions for its further improvement.
Again
:- >
http://reliefweb.int/node/485142
Guidebirds - better birding cuckoos technology
Going for Gold - England's Olympic Birds - Oh My Gaia! - the Goldfinch takes gold.
Isn't that Charming?
With England being still a wintry kind of place, and August quite a way away, there'll be no mention here of some of our avian competitors from Africa - the African Golden Oriole, the Silverbird, let alone the Bronze-tipped Courser.
Whatever it seems from a perusal of English birdy websites that it's currently in vogue to delve into the causes of recent declines in Europe of those bird species which are obligate migrants to the Afrotropics in their non-breeding season. And to delve with extreme intrusiveness!
Please don't get me wrong. I am in favour of the limited satellite tracking of long distance bird migrants, probably better for them, for the species, and for "our image" here in Africa than shackling the poor birds with metal leg rings (bands) which, likely as not, nobody will ever see again. Even though some White Storks with satellite devices, for example, have been killed in Africa because they were believed to be working for the greater CIA guiding drones as they prepared an attack!
Better if we now know where the 'Nightingales', or 'Cuckoos', from lowland England are wintering. Then in theory we, well a very few of us, will be able study what is happening to them in the ecological landscape (any bird's habitat) in and around those areas far away from home.
Then we may be able to make some meaningful conservation recommendations on their behalf. Recommendations to ... to ... well to .. to whom exactly?
African leaders will then turn-down some of the millions, chiefly in soft loans from China, in order to maintain traditional land-use along the ecotone and help protect 'our' English nightingales, 'our' cuckoos,
Oh, come on!
Who's kidding who here?
If we really want to create some benefits - then I think we would all be better-off looking a bit deeper, with the greatest urgency, and with an open mind, look deep into what has happened, and is still happening now, to our own i.e. our home environment. The one we share with the breeding birds of England, summer friends, the migrants long and short and our residents, both.
Studying in detail the birdlife in the breeding areas of 'our' Nightingales; the changes in the nature which surrounds, or used to surround, our homes here in Europe. Places that were once so near to home, that such a study today might be too painful for comfort. The comfort we have come to expect from our environment. You know the soil which lies beyond those Easter strawberries for starters - a dead Iberian Lynx I'd say!
Where are all our life-rich hedges anyway? Sucked into the aisles of Tesco jungles far away!
Of one thing I am absolutely sure. We cannot 'blame' tropical Africa, specifically highly fecund sub-Saharan village folk, who live 'down there' wrapped only in evening darkness, for the loss of England's Mistle Thrushes, Willow Tits and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers, her Skylarks, Song Thrushes and Common Kestrels.
Just as we should not impugn the cash and policies being negotiated out of Shanghai or Shenzhen, into Brazzaville or Abuja, to Abidjan or Accra, in order to explain why Goldfinches, Carrion Crows and Wood Pigeons have gone right through the carbonised-roof of the NFU in Albion, these past thirty seven years! Neither should we fear that these negotiations have impacted our populations of Cuckoos and Nightingales.
Let's look instead to business-as-usual right here-at-home, and to what exactly, even closer to the bone, what or rather who lies behind all those actions at the mighty EU !
BigBureaucracy, BigManagement, BigOil, BigPharma, and yet Small Government, very small REAL government, a government of the people, for the people ... etc.
We may well find then that our CAP is well and truly in our mouth, if not quite yet in our hand!
The following passage has been amended and transcribed by my 'insurgent uncle' Jomo Ndege (a self-proclaimed Neo-Luddite Bantu) from the undoubtedly arousing "better birding through technology" of the excellent - Birdguides:
The annual results of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Garden BirdWatch UK survey have just been published, revealing nearly five times as many gardens with Goldfinch but half the number of gardens with Song Thrush. How things have changed in 16 years!
" Highs: The number of Goldfinches in gardens has reached an all-time high. This meteoric rise has seen Goldfinches rocket from number 20 in the garden bird 'league table' to number 10. England topped the podium for Goldfinches in 2011, with 58% of gardens visited during a typical week, compared with 53% in Wales and 49% in Scotland. Meanwhile, Welsh gardens boasted the highest reporting rate for the handsome Bullfinch, which is coming into gardens increasingly.
Scottish gardens were best for both Starling and Greenfinch, although numbers of these species in gardens across the UK last year were at their lowest in almost a decade.
Lows: After a succession of cold winters, numbers of the diminutive Wren visiting gardens have dropped. Compared with the long-term Garden BirdWatch average, as calculated from 1995–2010, around one in three householders have now lost this beautiful songster. Another cherished voice that is ebbing away is that of the Song Thrush, with half as many gardens visited during a typical week last year compared with 1995.
Through the year-round recording of BTO Garden BirdWatchers, fascinating seasonal patterns have emerged. These volunteers keep simple weekly records of the birds in their gardens. During late winter in 2011, Brambling numbers soared, up by almost 250% on the same period in 2009 and 2010. Spring 2011 saw numbers of Goldfinch and Bullfinch in gardens rise well above the average of the previous two years, while numbers of Siskins spotted in gardens during last summer were up by a quarter. Gardens were relatively quiet during autumn and early winter last year, with thrushes particularly notable by their absence: Blackbird numbers, for example, were down by 41% compared with the same period in 2009 and 2010. "
Dr Tim Harrison of BTO Garden BirdWatch has commented thus:
"With the Olympics just around the corner, it is appropriate that Goldfinches are leading the race into gardens.
Improved foods and feeder designs, coupled with feeding pressures in the wider countryside, appear to be driving this and other farmland species, such as Bullfinch, Reed Bunting and Lesser Redpoll, into gardens. Every season and every region has its garden bird highlights. The size of the influx of Brambling last winter, for instance, exceeded all previous Garden BirdWatch records. "
English gardens are said to be the better place in which to find Blackcap and Long-tailed Tit, in Welsh gardens its Blue Tit and Robin, and Scottish gardens Coal Tit and surprisingly Tree Sparrow.
For every 'garden bird' whose visits have increased — such as Goldfinch and Bullfinch — there are species that appear to be "faring less well".
Mistle Thrush, for example, seems to be dying out. During 2011 the percentage of gardens visited by Mistle Thrush was at its lowest point in the 16-year history of BTO Garden BirdWatch, and it is now largely absent from gardens in Greater London.
What do we infer from all these figures?
If done properly, no matter whether to a Blindman, or a silly old Birdman, one's "countryside", if you are lucky enough to still have one, should be filled in 'spring' with singing birds, and hence may feel beautiful and boundless!
* countryside i.e an area of land worked by farmers, who know and love their land, whether or not they think or believe they own it!
In no way should this archaic term "countryside" be confused with "agricultural production surface" e.g. well, I am sure you know the kind of place I mean, nowadays it's visible from major highways and byways - all over Earth ! Full of ... oh I had better not say it here. It wouldn't be healthy, not organic manure, that's for sure!
Avian Outlook for 'European' migrant birds crossing the Sahel in March/April 2012
Two big, wandering cyclones off Madagascar, Giovanna and Irina, should be given all the credit for that; rainfall which many here hoped or believed was the premature arrival of "God's Long Rains" of Easter time.
With the temperatures of surface currents in the western Indian Ocean some 3 - 4 degrees higher than they were in 1970 we can certainly 'hope for' one or two more cyclones across Madagascar and Mozambique to 'deliver' some far-flung heavy showers far inland in Tanzania as our austral summer swings into autumn.
Today, predictably, my concern lies with all those northbound migrant birds as they venture across the Sahel.
I am finding it rather hard to discriminate remotely:
in which areas in the Sahel is this crisis essentially a human-induced famine - albeit one caused by culminate factors, factors other than relevant seasonal rainfall i.e. since June 2011?
and in which
is it a background 'ecological drought', one affecting the entire 'natural system'; and hence likely to impact the productivity of all habitats and of the migrants passing through the 'western' Sahel at least!?
Thanks to Joost Brouwer for the following note (sent last week for Niger) concerning millet crop yields versus yields of other vegetation in 2011 - does anyone have any thoughts about other areas in the Sahel?
"I think that there is little doubt that in Niger at least the millet harvest was very poor over most of the country in 2011. What those poor rains will mean for birds will indeed be interesting to see. I'd also like to know if total rainfall was low or if the rains were 'just' poorly distributed in time as far as growing millet was concerned. 'Poorly distributed in time was far as millet is concerned' does not necessarily mean a poor season for local grasses and shrubs and trees, or a poor season for the key insect species that different migratory birds forage on."
Very best birding wishes as always,
James
PS: our garden 'Eastern' Nightingale (L. (m) golzi who has been present since late February) has fallen silent, has died, or has hopefully moved-on, because I've not heard 'him' singing at all today!
Plenty of Tree Pipits going through at this latitude/longitude now.
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2012/world/drought-food-crisis-plague-africas-sahel/
by Codi Yeager
Gambia has become the latest African nation to appeal for food aid after the government announced last week that 70 percent of food crops in the country had failed due to poor rains.
In asking for $US 23 million in seeds, fertilisers and food aid, Gambia joined a string of other countries in Africa’s sub-Saharan Sahel region, where about 10 million people are facing a food crisis this year on the back of poor crops and high food prices. Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Mauritania and Niger have already declared emergencies and appealed for international assistance.
Droughts have failed many of the harvests of rice, groundnuts, millets, maize, sorghum and other staple crops, and have left little food to be stored in granaries in the region. Aid agencies and governments are now bracing to reach remote communities before the situation deteriorates into a famine.
The Sahel strip, which runs along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, is no stranger to droughts. But the dry spells here have occurred more frequently in the last decade, leaving communities little time to refill their food stocks before the next poor harvest hits.
“We do see that there are more and more climate-related disasters, with numerous years of drought becoming more and more frequent,” Rene McGuffin, a senior spokesperson for the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), told Circle of Blue. “Because of the increasing frequency of droughts, communities have very little time to recover. Many families have not recovered from the food crisis in 2010 — maybe they lost assets, had to sell livestock — but they haven’t been able to rebuild.”
“We can do a lot, but the time to act is now in order to avoid a real crisis.”
–Rene McGuffin,
World Food Programme
USAID’s Famine Early Warning System predicts that crisis-level acute food insecurity will persist in regions of the Sahel until September, with the effects becoming most evident by April. Crisis-level food shortage, the so-called phase three on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), means that households might experience short-term instability, significant food consumption gaps and high malnutrition, and may cope by selling assets and diverting money from essential non-food items.
“Selling assets that will enable them in the future to be self-sustainable is what we don’t want them to do,” McGuffin said.
Food Prices
But selling livestock and other assets is often the only way families can scrape by when droughts destroy subsistence crops and send regional food prices soaring.
“Food prices have risen dramatically for staple foods like cereals,” McGuffin said. “Food prices normally fall after the harvest because there is more supply, but because of the drought, they have actually risen during this time.”
In Niger, one of the hardest-hit countries, millet prices are 36 percent higher than last year and well above their 20-year average. Sorghum prices are up 34 percent, and maize prices have increased 24 percent from 2011 and will continue to rise, according to McGuffin. Food prices remain high but stable in Mali and Burkina Faso.
Reaching Communities in Time
The situation echoes back to last year’s humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa, when despite early warning forecasts going back to 2010, the international community did not scale up its relief efforts until three areas of Somalia were declared famine zones in July 2011.
This year, governments and aid agencies have mobilized early to try to mitigate the food shortages before the situation deteriorates into a famine. The United Nations called a meeting of aid organizations in mid-February to organize a response to the crisis, and the WFP has been collecting donations with the hopes of raising $US 650 to 700 million. Last Friday, the charity Oxfam International also launched a $US 36.3 million emergency appeal for west Africa.
Famine conditions developed in Somalia last year in large part because the Islamist militant group the Shabab was blocking most aid agencies from accessing the regions it controlled. “In the Horn of Africa, it was the worst drought in decades, but we only had famine in an area where aid organizations couldn’t reach,” McGuffin said.
She added that the poor infrastructure across the Sahel region could hinder efforts to reach remote communities in the next weeks and months. “We can do a lot, but the time to act is now in order to avoid a real crisis,” McGuffin said. “It will take time to respond, but we know what needs to be done.”
Sources: Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Reuters
Sahel 2012
Identifying the 'chief drivers', or are they the 'chief stakeholders', in our ever more frequent famines is not so very hard.
"The United Nations? They can't see the wood - for the lack of trees"
Sahel 2012 - a further unfolding of the Global Ecological Debt
We hear the grumblings of wise-man, and see spluttering spikes of concern, watch rattlings out of USAIDs. They course back and fore, through the blue sky vastness of our mother Africa.
Wave disturbances of increasing frequency issue from the air-conditioned offices of national and UN relief agencies. They are transmitted by the usual engines of in-country NGOs.
News is spreading slowly, quite unlike that punchy video, for lost soul Joseph Kony, across the ether of the world.
http://reliefweb.int/node/481298
There's:
"great alarm about the coming Sahel famine. A serious food and nutrition crisis threatening the Sahel region, over ten million people already facing food insecurity, over one million children at risk of severe acute malnutrition."
After over half a century, almost resting, great death begins his march, a long march of mass recruitment.
He's starting out from the nations that constitute Africa's Sahel. A huge seasonally-arid region that lies between thronging Guinea life (humid) and the emptiness of Sahara's barrens (dry).
" Alarming food security statistics in the Sahel are pushing humanitarian stakeholders to launch an urgent appeal to donors. A crisis is expected to hit the region in March 2012 if the international community and local actors do not take further action."
Old news?
"Decades passed and the regional ecological fabric began to fray, for this was the Sahel zone. Unbeloved of Man. Unblessed by God. And thus it suffered immeasurably. Then surging increases, throughout the late twentieth century, in its human population. Ecologically dependent people, utterly dependent people. Dependent upon local resources. Then in time, with foreign donor's cash, and bore hole technologies, they improvised an explosive increase among their flocks of goats and sheep. And between them they all but cleared the land of trees. Understandable enough, because they needed to cook their daily meal on wood. And it was only one meal. Millions more families, billions of folk in all, each household cooking on wood - not just in the Sahel of Africa. It was a huge pan tropical problem, one that was ignored, in effect it was a monster appeased, and for far too long."
In the words of Fidel Lantana.
Now I am here in Africa as an ecological observer. With each successive "dry year", as it afflicts one zone or another, it becomes harder and harder to avoid bringing into consideration all the issues - becomes harder not to assign some proportional human responsibility for yet another spiralling ecological crisis. Whether a crisis in the Sahel, or in the Greater Horn, or elsewhere in the Saharo-Sindian semi-arid lands that now stretch from the Atlantic at Banjul almost to the Bay of Bengal.
Identifying the 'chief drivers', or are they the 'chief stakeholders', in this year's famine Sahel 2012 is not so very hard. Despite so many apparently complex trends of interconnection and of competing socio-ecological concern. It's just that most people just can't see the wood for the lack of trees. Anyway, sitting quietly looking at trees was not something that 'traditionally-minded NGO folk' or main stream journalists appeared keen to do.
And as for our global birders? Twitch-on!
How very different this looming famine - when compared with that 'nice and wet' situation which held sway across the Sahel this time last year? Whilst the Greater Horn was spun inside out by the winds of drought.
Some of my UK birding colleagues may recall much email correspondence, and blogging-on, even by yours truly, about a "Sahelian rainfall rebound" and its potential long term effects on birds. For example, an increase in the number of northbound Great Snipe occurring in western Europe, as in spring 2011. Or by the unprecedented late-ness of migrants heading out of East Africa, a vast area afflicted by drought, in the same spring period.
Is there a "Class A" drought in the current Sahel stop-over zones of many northbound Palearctic birds? One that will hit birds heading north to breed, breed in the 'un-comfort zones' of western Europe.
Well, we must wait and see. Will there be any discernible effect upon the numbers of those 'catholic' migrant bird species returning to western Europe?
Here the word "catholic" is meant only to show that they are versatile in their habitat requirements.
"Not-choosy" especially when breeding, such is the case with the Common Whitethroat.
This is one very interesting species for I remember well when its population virtually collapsed, in 1969, during a previous Sahelian drought.
By contrast in our part of the East African plateau - northern Tanzania - we have received a very welcome watering by significant recent rainfall from the outskirts of two highly energetic cyclones.
Tropical Storms Giovanna and Irina. One after the other, these two storms swirled around in the Malagasy region, over the southwest Indian Ocean. Here in Arusha-Moshi-Kilimanjaro the rain commenced on midday February 18. Because of these two 'lively ladies' our short dry season this year from January to March was cut short. The dry period caused much wilting, and widespread desiccation of exposed surfaces, starting from the third week of January, but lasted for one month only, up until mid-February. So, we who move around these parts examining trees, like the migrant Phylloscopus we love, we feel we have benefitted from such unseasonal rains during the past three weeks.
Now however the rains appear to have stopped; dried-up, under the Full Moon of March. And so I must ask you.
The influence of Giovanna and Irina was it a God-send or was it not?
Today the sky over Mount Meru has become scarily dry once again.
Only the by-now familiar drifts of a fine and milky, very modern afro-urban-smog, lurk above us. Once again the nasties impinge upon that celestial blue, arresting life with an insolent and highly anthropogenic mein.
Nevertheless the rains temporarily replenished soil moisture across much of central northern Tanzania.
And this has been sufficient to encourage breeding attempts by bird species as disparate as Hadada Ibis, in the African Tulip Tree in our garden, Pied Crow, in a Norfolk Island Pine in the neighbour's garden, and Arrow-marked Babbler, in one of the boundary Kei-Apple hedges. Although I think the babblers had at least starting building before the rains arrived.
Palearctic Migrants too - for example Eastern Nightingale, Olivaceous Warbler (elaeica), Eastern Blackcap (dammholzi) and Garden Warbler (woodwardi) are singing of a morning in our garden - there's only one male of each mind, and all four 'boys' are very skulky indeed, as European males increasingly are apt to be!
People too, have responded to the welcome wet, they have prepared their land and planted their seed.
And now they wait for their chosen God to make the next move.
Of course such folk do not yet feel cursed - unlike the LRA.
Nevertheless I hear the dreaded local branch of TAG* starting-up now, it's Friday - 1442 EAT.
There's a Joseph somebody for sure, he's cranking up those loud-speakers, ready for a long week-end of fund-raising and hell-fire condemnation.
It's an aural intimidation of the soul, as is usual with the "Battle Axe Ministry" the supposed ranting of a vengeful, unrepentant god.
* TAG = Tanzanian Assemblies of God
Hallelujah! He is coming! We are not responsible for the state of the Earth! So you can burn those blasphemous ecology books!
FEWS.net:
Latest Outlook: Intense convective activities embedded in the Intertropical Convergence Zone could lead to the development of a cyclonic motion over the Mozambique Channel. This could bring heavy rainfall across portions of northern Mozambique and bordering southern Tanzania during the next week. Following two consecutive weeks of above-average rainfall here, the forecast heavy rains could trigger serious flooding, especially of over-grazed areas, across this region.
Who killed our Cuckoos? A personal view
Many of the bird species that migrate each spring from tropical Africa to the European peninsula have been declining at an alarming rate.
Once familiar species have been disappearing, not only from large swathes of the British Isles, but from across much of the European Union also.
This suggests the following options:
1) the cause of these declines was 'changes' in Europe
2) the cause of these declines was 'changes' in Africa
3) the cause of these declines was 'something bad' happening in both continents
Unlike resident birds, and short-distance migrants, intercontinental migratory bird populations are prey to ecological degradation in many locations and across vast areas. They are vulnerable to changes in their breeding range, across their winter quarters, and at their chosen stop-over sites everywhere between. They are particularly vulnerable to environmental change brought about by human activity because their health is dependent upon finding land of "high environmental quality" in so many widely separated areas. In lands under the control ['socioeconomic jurisdiction'] of widely differing peoples.
Because of such a great geographical spread of vulnerability ascertaining "the exact causes" of any change in one population has been considered very difficult. Although nowadays I am not so sure it is! Having said that even those most circumspect of 'bird enthusiasts', the staff at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) in England for example, will acknowledge that:
" The rapid and widespread intensification of agricultural systems and habitat loss in Europe has undoubtedly driven the declines of some species and global climate change is implicated in the declines of others.''
In Africa, the outspoken Jomo Ndege, ex Mau-Mau, naturally votes for the above Option 3, being himself a long-time (ecological) refugee from much that is English.
He and I would like to examine the reasoning behind the following BTO suggestion:
" A recent review has suggested the importance of a number of changes on the African wintering grounds, particularly those relating to the nature and intensity of land use, as potential factors underlying these declines. "
Let us take a case that appears to concern many of us - the case of 'the English Cuckoo'.
This coming spring (May 2012) the British Trust for Ornithology will satellite-tag half a dozen Scottish calling Cuckoos.
Further UK research into cuckoo migrations, cuckoos from north of the border, is considered necessary after the BTO caught and began satellite-monitoring five English calling cuckoos, in Norfolk, in May last year.
The Scottish experiment will form part of a very interesting, yet to me somewhat sad, attempt by the BTO to test a suggestion that the Scottish birds might be wintering in different parts of Africa from their Norfolk calling cuckoo counterparts.
Why are the BTO conducting this 'Scottish experiment'?
Because Scottish cuckoos, like individuals of some other trans-Saharan migrant birds that return to nest in the British Isles each year (e.g. Willow Warblers), appear to be doing much better than those that attempt to breed south of the border in England. Refining the analysis I should imagine that western mainland Scottish birds (e.g. in Argyll) are faring markedly better than those that attempt to breed within what in my youth used to be called the "coffin belt" (e.g. in Buckinghamshire) of south-central lowland England.
One suspects that if the BTO can show that Scottish cuckoos do indeed winter in a different part of Africa then conservationists in middle England can buy a little time for more research, and that their funding bodies can continue to cling to what appears to me to be a very English myth.
An English myth?
The implicit suggestion, oft repeated, that a rapid, widespread and ongoing decline in once common farmland and woodland creatures: plants, invertebrates, amphibians and birds, across lowland England is not being caused by the 'daily life-style choices' made by the people living in lowland England.
No! Of course not.
It's not that we English have almost totally ruined the living fabric of what survived until very recently as a relatively healthy and beautiful countryside?
Not at all by our having, as a nation, acquiesced 'for profit' in the assumption of an increasingly sterile, toxic and ecologically moribund mode of agricultural production.
No, surely it's another of those bad things caused by foreigners? By people with dubious un-English ways of life, by events happening somewhere else, at the very least across the English Channel.
This really does upset Jomo, having lived in tropical Africa for the past seven years.
To think that the BTO, and even the wonderful RSPB, appear to be insinuating that 'the driver' of such appalling declines, among England's once common and therefore much-loved birds, is, well, 'driving' around over here. Are they suggesting that peasant farmers living here in Africa are having a bigger impact on English cuckoo numbers than all the might and wealth of Big-Eu-Agro?
Most families in Africa are kept very busy just trying to scrape-together the scantiest of traditional subsistence livelihoods. In a world whose order is changing, changing more rapidly here than ever before, they remain the smallest of players. True, African populations are increasing rapidly in many regions, yet there remain huge areas across many sub-Saharan nations where 'ecological pressure' is slight, at least when compared with Europe today.
Many Palearctic breeding species 'winter' in anthropogenically modified environments in Africa, usually in fallow agricultural land. In several West African countries such areas have expanded in recent decades, typically at the expense of forests and woodland-savanna. Furthermore in Africa birds like cuckoos, of which the Common Cuckoo is but one species among several, must follow the seasonal rains, to feed on caterpillars, chiefly in acacia woodland and scrub, and are not therefore particularly susceptible to the pressures of site-fidelity which affect some other 'European' migrants.
Why should the environmental behaviour of African farmers have been more damaging to English cuckoos than that of members of the NFU, and their corporate backers, the petro-chemical addicted giants who dominate the European agribusiness field? "Farming" in England had all but become an absentee industry by the end of the last century. Very few farmers today can claim to walk their land. It's an industry that has almost literally resurfaced huge stretches of Europe in the last fifty years, aided and abetted by extremely powerful industry lobbyists in Brussels, and all the other centres of global political power.
Of course it could be argued that climate chaos alone is 'driving' declines in these birds. It does appear that many of their breeding distributions are shifting rapidly northward, and of course we hear so much about climate change, even in the mainstream UK media. But climate change is another thorny, double-edged issue, because it raises all those unwanted mirrors to the industrialised world, issues of responsibility and greed yet again.
Some would argue that maybe some of the decline is the fault of those bird-hunting macho-men, out there blasting off their rifles across the birds' migration routes. Hunters in France, those debt-ridden Mediterranean countries and the dreadfully dodgy Maghreb; by the way isn't Al-Quaeda there? However surely this would affect many 'migrant populations' - Dutch, Scottish, English, Irish, Danish, Norwegian, of a species like the cuckoo, in a broadly similar way. Others may blame the magpies and the crows, some say it's the sparrowhawks and a bolshy few point a finger at the hordes of domestic cats out hunting of an evening. A very few dare to suggest that the surge of the car may have something to do with it!
2: "rapidly improving agricultural landscape" in Ayrshire, Scotland - no bush, all stream-lined, high inputs - only one calling cuckoo here
Whatever the individual reality, for British cuckoo populations, and many others, looked at on a species by species basis, we need much more action on the ground.
Action for birds and humans. Stepping-up and speaking-out for Nature in England, just as the RSPB slogans exhort us to! We - the converted - I guess that's you and me.
Unfortunately we, and some other NGOs, particularly those headquartered in England's "Emerald Triangle of Conservation" (bound by three lines drawn between Peterborough, Norwich and Cambridge), all too often prefer to speak very cautiously to the powers that be. All too easily we resort to mild euphemisms and nearly always we choose that infuriating passive voice. For this is the language one needs in order to appease the big men with big power (and it is, of course, nearly always men).
It's also necessary for such talk to pussy-foot around, in fact it's essential. Necessary if we are to encourage, rather than alienate, our mostly plump and well-to-do constituency; that aged and conservative member-class who, it's hoped, will continue, from their comfortable couch or care home, to cough-up for the ever growing society bill. That way, as long as they are able, they'll stay members, just so long as we don't upset them! It seems to me the last thing any UK conservation body would want to do is openly challenge the powers and assumptions of our ruling elite. Mindful that the English elite has, down the years, successfully contrived to command and control a powerful 'force for good', albeit a force 'nested' in so many shades of cosmetic green. They are NIMBYs in the main, currently battling hard to sell, but not yet to sell-off completely, the shires of middle-England.
For nature conservationists to speak their mind and tell the truth as we see it, would demand that we confront the new international elite. It would entail denouncing a public ethos of complacency, whose charity has sustained (until recently) not only the RSPB, but others too, and restricted us to taking only 'soft acceptable action' within our supermarket scene, on a predominantly suburban-minded stage.
Since the Second World War, with diminishing respect for Nature in our hearts, I think we have imported, or 'bought-into', an unwillingness to truly care for nature; should that caring entail an effort akin to personal or national discomfort. And in so doing we have widely sacrificed most of the natural fabric of our homeland. In my honest opinion, it has been this, our apparent requirement of 'a comfortable lifestyle' that has done the greatest damage to the nature of rural England. It seems plausible, to me, that our pursuit of a tidy, comfortable, self-contained existence - filled with gadgets, toys and toxins - is what has 'killed-off' most of 'our' breeding cuckoos, and twenty other afro-tropical migrant birds to boot.
For I have seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted the alterations in our land, almost everyday I've been there, during these past fifty five years.
I certainly do not believe that it was the masses of Africans working the land, with digging hoes in hand, who killed our cuckoos. If you look at it simply, environmentally, soft lives at home inevitably depend upon the creation of hard edges farther afield. By contrast hard lives 'down here', in Africa, tend to make for far softer ecological edges. Africans have tended to leave a trail of indistinct footprints through the bush, rather than improving access for a GoogleMap to the nearest WallMart.
Tragically even African biodiversity is eroding fast nowadays - as foreign resource corporations swarm all over, grabbing land for intensive cropping, for bio-fuels and food (for the exclusive use of people far away, of course), drilling for oil and blasting for hard minerals - natural Africa is collapsing too, and at a truly shocking speed.
3: see EU! the new silage dairy-lands of Scotland - no banks of wild plants, no big moths, no pipits, no cuckoos call at all, not here
If we in England want to survive what's coming we must recognise that "biodiversity begins at home". We have to recall that living with biodiversity, with Nature, will seldom be cozy and convenient and rarely what we've been trained to see as clean and healthy. It'll never be done and dusted. A lot of our easy living will have to be abandoned if we are to rediscover some of the joy of the back-step garden naturalists of old.
If we really do want to hear cuckoos from our gardens then we'll have to do more than simply unplug the iPod and get out of the car. We'll have to welcome wild lives right back into our living space. We'll have to start digging for diversity, gardening for others, not just for our eyes only. Most of all we'll have to bring the bugs back into our lives. We'll have learn to cultivate crops with caterpillars once again.
To have cuckoos we will need to recreate an England that 'delivers' lots of woolly bears, hairs and all.
"For cuckoos, for children, for life!"
Funding, and fancy high-tech, fun research, simple slogans and earnest exhortations will never return unto us an ecological healthy land; the land which was our birthright and remains a big part of our national identity.
Anyway, for now, that's enough of a diatribe from Jomo and me!
Paul Bowyer of the British Trust for Ornithology has informed us, African birders too, that one of the five satellite-tracked European Cuckoos, dubbed Kasper, who was caught whilst calling in Norfolk last May has, with his colleagues, survived the horrors of a highly organic Congo (the DRC is ranked by the World Bankers as the world's second worst country - only just above Afghanistan) and has already moved far north-west out of the largely forested 'basin', through Nigeria and into central Ghana.
Good luck dear Kasper!
"Psst! Go here" >
4: The Oa-zone, RSPB Islay: highland cattle, feral goats, few pharmaceuticals; Meadow and Rock Pipits, big moorland moths so plenty of cuckoos here
One can 'watch' the perilous progress of the Norfolk five here:http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking
Iron birds downed in flooding Tibet
1: iron birds downed in flooding Tibet
A short contribution via my Tibetan mentor from early in the '80s
- Yeshe Tsogyal
Tibetans used to say something, which might be translated thus,
" When iron birds fly in the sky it will be up to each of us to carry the teachings in our hearts through the dark age "
I don't think that what little I have gleaned since 1959, in fifty years of birding, through those times before this flood, ever appeared to me as teachings.
It was something more simple than that, it was an evolving common sense.
Becoming aware of the obvious.
Ecological insight, inspired whilst wandering around seeking something perennial and finding it, in the embrace of our Mother,
and for me at least that's - Nature.
Fast forward fifty years exceptional tornados rip through middle America and floods separate thousands of Australians from their fridges, it's farcical.
The determination with which so many kindly God-fearing folk, demand to root their beliefs in a bankrupt madness.
Ignoring always our indebtedness to our only home the Earth.
Preferring the slick propaganda of the venal, of the less than one percent.
And trying ever harder to ignore the evidence swirling or a-bobbing right past their very noses.
Why do we refuse to face the ecological truth ... ?
Why indeed?
Does it matter whether one sees what is happening, here on Earth, all around as his message from, well where exactly?
Or hers from here, or nobody's from nowhere?
This should be of no consequence
* In 1969 fortunate people might have read the following simple American sentence:
We must find the courage to take upon ourselves as individuals
responsibility for the welfare of the whole environment,
treating our own back yards as if they were the world
and the world as if it were our own back yard
written by Dr. Roderick Nash when Professor Emeritus of History and Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.
2: consequences
When coastal cities sink
one world capitalism
will have driven father
right over the brink.
Useless iron birds
will lie obscured, silently corroding,
mechanisms defunct.
Scattered among spiny bushes
in deserts we have made.
Drone-birds, spy-birds
reaper birds and cargo birds
Iron birds will lie where they fall.
High and dry
far from the sea.
Drowned city towers,
of coast and lowland zones
poke out only around low tide.
Broken spiky dead heads
Easter Island tributes.
Tributes - to our stupidity
for not heeding
the teachings
- we'll have failed.
" Ic healde, we healdeth "
"Good riddance to all that "
unsaid - in the silence of a healing Earth,
a whole world
once again
a world without the word.
3: Acinonyx jubatus - "Adios amigos" - literally taken!
and as for Yeshe Tsogyal see for example:
The emotional triggering process belongs as the central tenet of Tibetan Buddhism. It is precisely our attachment to hopes and fears, desires and aversions, that causes our perpetual suffering.
Many thanks to James Fisher, three Cheetah brothers, Samantha Trewhella, and of course to Martin for the Not-so?, a lovely, Scilly picture!
Dust storm envelopes KIA Lodge & JRO Airport
Dust storm envelopes KIA Lodge & JRO Airport
As I sit waiting for my wageni (guests) a dust storm, the first for two weeks at this location, obliterates the view at KIA a very birdy lodge, located right beside the ungrazed international airport, itself close below Mount Kilimanjaro.
Minutes prior to this duizzard a flock of 100+ European Bee-eaters, on their way north, swung vigorously east to avoid the great wall of gritty brown particles.
With much excited calling these magical Merops swooped and looped away toward the greatest free-standing mountain on 'our' planet.
I imagine they were exchanging ecological insights. Perspicacity way beyond that which our oh so-corporate-friendly politicians are capable of, in these dismal-outlook days, days of gathering dust clouds.
Singing in the moment, birds migrating with hope in their outlook.Never to care whether or not there's going to be "an oil war with everyone", The Big War, followed by a mightily disappointing "no show" especially for rapturists, no celebrity, nor any off-planet messiah shafting down to save our skin or soul.So:
Watch the birds
For they know which way to turn their little minds; while other biped fools look-on.
