I've lived in this place in SW Wales for 25 years and, as usual, put out food for the visiting #birds. At the start you'd see a couple of dozen species visiting each day. Just now I fed them and total visitors to table so far = zero. The magpies and wood-pigeons will eventually wander by and vac it all up. The changes are so noticeable and chilling.
The river has been blighted by agricultural pollution in recent years
🤔 ...some...kind of...connection... “Defra's announcement followed the Soil Association’s Stop Killing our Rivers campaign, which also identified 10 further rivers in England and Wales at risk from ** intensive poultry** pollution”.
A move in the right direction, though. 🥳 .
#RiverWye #PoultryLitter
Thanks for that link. A permanent ban, it says. Some part of this Government isn't so bad, then.
Isn't the sea a commons? (I checked and it's the high seas that are "Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction") Maybe the Govt doesn't require the water-company to keep the rivers and seas disease-free - they did reduce environmental standards, at least once. So legally they might be correct. But in reality, a shitty company doing the dirty work of a shitty government.
I've lived in this place on the South Wales coast, a little inland, for the past 20+ years. There's always been a large colony of the common type of gull living nearby. Someone maybe stopped feeding them recently (past 2 years) as they now perch on our house, and generally come a lot closer than they used to. There are many hundreds of them, which you can plainly see when they do their mass spiralling. I find their calls, especially when they're all at it at once, deeply affecting and lovely.
So something has changed, for sure, but I can't say what. The impression of there being more in my neck of the woods might be because colonies from elsewhere can't find food so have moved here 🤷♀️ .
Also, what was that in the video about sand-eels not being fished any more?
At the end of that article it says 30% of the two species tested had antibodies for the avian 'flu. I'm staying with that idea.
I don't see how monitoring the many kinds of damage caused by road traffic would do an ounce of good: everyone loves their cars, and our infrastructure - not just England's - relies on fossil-fuels use.
I haven't tried it. Trouble is my phone's on its last legs, but that'll be going on the new one.
Over the last couple of days I've heard a bird song I'm sure I've not heard before. Starts off melodious, like a thrush, then goes into a few staccato notes. Some kind of finch, I'm thinking.
William Gibson wrote "...she walked back...through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning..., when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in." I stepped outside this morning a couple of hours too late for that, and my lungs immediately sensed the heavy, choking quality of the air.
But checking on aqicn.org and DEFRA websites, I see they say air-quality here is good / air pollution level low.
Both of us cannot be wrong.
#AirQuality
I started reading this and thought of Wietse van der Werf, who I know of from his years of tackling illegal fishing. And yes, it's he who's behind this.
I assume the docks are still active. That's the beauty of these large spaces where public access is limited. The creatures make the most of it while they can.
I've never seen more than one urban fox at a time, yet. My time will come, when I least expect it, like it did for you.
Yes, it makes all the difference to any day. That reminded me of the raven (or jackdaw?) having a half-hearted peck at the raptor, at one point. It made zero impact. That fuzzy edge where the industrial world meets with the natural, fascinates me. It's like a tide-line.
<yoink!> - I'm grabbing this quote from an article @GreyShuck posted: “There is a real need for us to inspire people to connect with nature and to make biodiversity a central part of their lives – particularly in urban areas and less affluent communities” Well I did just that the other day, in a l-o-n-g wait for a bus to turn up. There was a small raptor perching on the streetlights, avidly hunting just before sunset. One time he came over into the trees and dived off them into the undergrowth, but didn't seem to catch anything. It was blunt-tailed, probably a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. This was right on the edge of the urban and less affluent community I live in, around a multi-laned highway. [Re the quote - why in "less affluent areas"?] 🪶
I hadn't thought of it that way. I'm sure that's part of it. And it's a similar story here, with reduced numbers of waste-bins. I was waitng at a bus-stop yesterday - for quite a long time 😒 - that is, unsurprisingly, a rubbish hot-spot. The council removed the bin a couple of years ago. Garbage is flung into the bushes here too. But yesterday there was a small bird of prey hunting there. Well that was a treat, but seeing him fishing about amongst all the trash irked me all the more. By the way, the company I emailed about the guff by their houses got back to me and denied having any connection to that street, so then I reported it to the council as fly-tipping. Neverending story.
I have just made myself very popular with a local social housing company: I've brought to their attention, for the second time in about the last ten years, the miserable condition of a tiny strip of land at the end of one of their roads. It's no more than 3m by 2, and has a grassy bank and small trees, all planted by Nature. In spring the bank has primroses all over it, except that's not been so obvious since people started using it as a rubbish tip. It used to be OK, and so pretty. I've come to realise there's some obscure psychological reason for people going out of their way to screw up bits of natural terrain, so what can the housing company do? I've asked them why they don't just check the surroundings of their properties every so often and give them a quick clean-up. 🌸 😢
Exclusive: Documents show shift in transport policy influenced by unfounded fears about loss of freedom of movement in ‘15-minute cities’
Gutted that this article did not contain the electrifying utterance by Sunak that driving at 20mph is against British standards. Plenty of other guff, though.
Shameless jockeying. I'm sure I signed a petition not long ago to stop this sort of thing.
Blacka Moor, South Yorkshire: Four hundred human generations have inhabited this corner of the English uplands; I bet every one has marvelled at these sights
I'd forgotten how short&sweet these country diary entries are. Hadn't read them for years. (scroll up, scroll up) 🧊
Sadly not. I have technical problems: the phone's on its last legs and doesn't want anything to do with graphics, and it and the laptop have stopped talking to each other anyway.
I'm feeling wistful when I see the two crimson sweet-pea buds still clinging on, in the garden. It's been around two weeks now. It doesn't look like they're going to bloom. I can't remember seeing them this late in the year before.
😮💨 Today, to keep things simple, I didn't even bother trying to catch a bus. I saw two the whole time I was out, going the other way. It's like a skeleton service since a month ago. I can't see how it's going to keep going. 🛣️
Research of timetables reveals ‘silent war’ on bus users outside London
"The data found urban areas outside the UK capital had an average of 14 buses an hour, whereas in London the hourly average was 120." - by 'urban areas', what size? Would have to look at their paper itself, but I can't find it so far.
Where I'm living, even 10 years ago we had about 8 buses within 5 mins walk from home, and now there are 3. And they aren't spread out evenly timewise, which would probably be impossible to attain along their entire routes. But it results in a poorer service overall.
Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth, said: “To reduce pollution and cut emissions, we need the government to invest in our crumbling public transport system to make it far easier for people to use their car less and switch to greener ways to travel, like buses, trains and cycling.” Well we know that, but...
🚏 🚌 😢
It's two weeks since our local bus-services were shredded. Routes were discontinued and frequency reduced. We thought that would consolidate the remaining services regarding reliability.
spoiler
_ But it's all gone crazy! __
I have just seen a few ladybirds hanging about on the branches of a fatsia shrub in my garden. They have been prolific this year. Wondering why they're not off hibernating somewhere.
AngstyPony @feddit.uk I'm in the SouthWest UK in SouthWest Wales . 🌱 .
public transport / green infrastructure / lo-tech . 🌱 .