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Birdwatch: Long-billed dowitcher
Sun, 20 May 2012 21:30:02 GMT
It may sound like one of those silly names used to mock birders, but the long-billed dowitcher is a real bird as is its cousin, the short-billed dowitcher. The name derives from a word originally used by the Mohawk peoples of the north-eastern US and eastern Canada and, like so many bird names, probably comes from the bird's call. The bird itself looks like a cross between a godwit and a snipe: shaped rather like a rugby ball, with a long bill and oddly short legs. Long-billed dowitchers breed in the Arctic tundra of North America and Siberia, and winter in California and Central America. But sometimes, on their long migratory travels, they wander off course and end up on this side of the Atlantic. This explains why for over a month this spring not one, but two long-billed dowitchers delighted visitors to my local patch, Meare Heath on the Somerset Levels. Along with 40 or so black-tailed godwits they were frantically feeding on a muddy pool, and occasionally taking to the air on long, pointed wings. This particular pair of dowitchers first arrived in Britain last autumn, when they were seen at nearby Chew Valley Lake in the company of several other rare waders. Sometime during the winter they disappeared, probably heading south to mainland Europe to escape the cold weather. Then, towards the end of March, they reappeared here on the levels. Since then they have gradually moulted from their greyish-brown winter garb into a splendid orangey breeding plumage. Sadly they are unlikely to breed here, as normally they nest far to the north. On a chilly, damp afternoon towards the end of the wettest April on record, I took Bill Oddie to see the dowitchers, after which we continued to the aptly named Noah's Hide. Here, as the rain finally paused, a phalanx of house martins arrived, hawking low over the water to grab any insects foolhardy enough to be on the wing. A few swifts briefly joined them, for me always the true sign that summer is just around the corner. There was also a single hobby, eyeing up these tasty flying morsels, but not bothering to attack. It wasn't until May Day, when the skies finally cleared after a week of relentless rain, that the first swift flew over my garden. Far below, orange-tip and speckled wood butterflies also emerged, encouraged by the unfamiliar rays of sunshine. So far it has been a tough spring for wildlife – cool and wet weather may be good news for gardeners after one of the longest droughts on record, but it is bad news for breeding birds. But the weather won't bother the dowitchers. By now they will be far to the north, beyond the range of human eyes, and settling down to breed on the Arctic tundra. Whether they will return here again next autumn, or the following spring, it is too early to tell. If they do, though, they will get an enthusiastic welcome.
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Should we be worried about the weather?
Fri, 18 May 2012 21:00:02 GMT
Snow, hail, drought, frost, flood ... the weather is playing havoc not only with national morale, but our fragile wildlife. The ordinary vicissitudes of a British spring – or something more sinister? Snow in Teesdale, hail in Birmingham, floods in Essex, and what felt like a touch of frost on the first morning of the first test at Lords (admittedly, rarely a balmy occasion). With a miserable May following the wettest April for a century, it must be tempting to peer up at the gloom and wonder, whatever happened to global warming? Louise Mensch did just that this week and the Tory MP soon attracted criticism after tweeting: "Wow. We really do need more windfarms on land to combat all this dreadful global warming. #rain". There's a jolly Armstrong and Miller sketch in which Ben Miller's remark about global warming, while gazing out at the rain, precipitates a government warning that people will be jailed if they don't learn the difference between climate, a long-term trend over many years, and weather, which is what is going on outside the window right now. Suitably re-educated, Miller gazes at the downpour and notes: "Look at this weather, eh? Still, I'm sure it will all even out statistically to illustrate a long-term warming trend." Weather. There's a lot of it about. And it is tempting to look for deeper meaning in the very ordinary vicissitudes of spring. We may be settling into a typically rubbish British summer but the weather is about the media (where "blasts" are always "Arctic") and the Met Office (where a hurricane was infamously not on its way the night before "the Great Storm" of 1987) engaging in a ceaseless tango, the former desperate to wheedle an apocalyptic or optimistic pronouncement from the latter. Occasionally, the Met Office gets scorched, such as when they made their infamous long-term forecast of 2009 which was spun by the press into a guarantee of a "barbecue summer". (It was rained off.) Mostly, however, the forecasters stick closely to an understated script. "After one of the warmest Marches and the wettest Aprils, now we're back to normal," says Charlie Powell, forecaster at the Met Office. "It's just British spring-time weather. It's just all normal variability and that's what we've seen to textbook standards in the last couple of months." Hang on! What textbook features the driest March for 59 years followed by the wettest April in 101 years? At least Dr Barnaby Smith of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology calls this spring "remarkable" for its shift from nearly two years of dry weather. "What happened in April was definitely not normal," says Smith. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that extreme weather events will become more frequent with global warming, but abnormal British weather is no such thing. For all our fickle skies, Britain (hottest day ever: 38.5C, Faversham, Kent, 2003; coldest -15.9C, Fyvie Castle, Aberdeenshire, 1995) doesn't do extremes. The IPCC is predicting an increase in the frequency and magnitude of warm temperature extremes – and, possibly, patterns of precipitation – but climate scientists admit they have no idea whether events such as floods and even cyclones and hurricanes will become more or less frequent. And a chilly spell isn't the start of an ice age. (For the whatever-happened-to-global-warming brigade, April was the fifth warmest on record worldwide; for precipitation pessimists, Britain has basked in 22 out of 24 months of below average rainfall.) "When you talk about climate change or global warming you don't link it to a small area or a small space of time," chides Powell when I ask if our weird spring is linked to climate change. Snow in May, as the Met Office points out, is nothing special. The last time we saw it was way back in 2011, and again in 2010. On 2 May 1979, snow was reported at 342 weather stations across Britain. As the naturalist Richard Mabey writes in A Brush With Nature, "Our climatic folk memory is notoriously short and erratic, and full of gloomy mythology whose only silver lining is a vague belief in ancient Golden Summers. It is as if, living in a part of the world where the weather will always be capricious, we daren't allow ourselves the luxury of remembering particular weather instances for fear of developing foolhardy expectations." Mabey challenges his readers to remember the summer of 1983 (the hottest July for 300 years) and the great summer of 1975 (no, not 1976, which everyone remembers because it led to drought) which started on 6 June after snowfalls on the 2nd. Mabey recalls rather more precisely than most of us because he kept a weather diary for 20 years (although he's given it up now because it got too repetitive). Most people who might be devastated by our weird weather are surprisingly phlegmatic. Visit England must worry that their expensive ad campaign – featuring Stephen Fry, Rupert Grint and Julie Walters – will be washed out by the weather. "You don't go to the Peak District to sunbathe," says Sarah Long of Visit England. Forced by the financial squeeze into staycations back in 2009, we keep masochistically coming back for more, apparently. "We're fairly resilient," says Long. "Although it's great when the sun comes out, England is an all-weather destination." Farmers, too, known to grumble about the weather now and again, are still thankful for the downpours after two dry winters. Drought status has been lifted in 19 areas of south-west England, the Midlands and parts of Yorkshire, although groundwater levels in much of the south and east, where hosepipe bans remain, are still low. "It's possibly surprised some people that groundwater levels have recharged as much as they have," says Smith at the Centre for Hydrology & Ecology. But there still needs to be at least a summer of average rainfall before aquifers in the south and east return to a healthier level. "The rainfall has bought us some time but we're not back to normal," says Smith. "Whatever normal is." Worried about the drought in March, farmers now face a new challenge, according to Luke Ryder, dairy adviser for the National Farmers Union – getting out on to their waterlogged land. It is too wet for many farmers to put their cattle out, or get the first crop of silage in. "In no way are farmers complaining," says Ryder. "We were praying to the rain gods." The hidden cost of this miserable May, however, may be on our wildlife. "It's bloody awful," says Matthew Oates of the National Trust. "It's disastrous." The weather is hammering bird life and anything that lives in a burrow. Four thousand puffins – birds who live in burrows – have been washed out of their nests on the Farne Islands. Coots, moorhens and great-crested grebes, which make nests close to the water, have been swamped by rising waterlines, according to Dave Leech of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). Birds that nest on the ground or live close to wetland habitat, such as meadow pipits and reed buntings, have also fallen victim to the rains. Secret World, the animal rescue centre in Somerset, reports a 50% increase in admissions of baby badgers, foxes and rabbits this spring, flooded out of homes. The centre has also seen an increase in admissions of adult barn owls, tawny owls and buzzards, which have become too bedraggled to fly in the wet, or seen their hunting grounds completely submerged. There haven't been many baby birds because, says founder Pauline Kidner, all the nests were abandoned or failed in the April monsoon. As Oates points out, garden birds at least are able to have a second attempt at nest-building and could still successfully rear young. And while blocking weather systems delayed the arrival of long-distance migrants such as swifts and reed warblers by as much as two weeks, these birds should still be able to make up time and breed successfully. May, says Leech, head of the nest records scheme at the BTO, is "a pivotal month". Unless it gets warmer and sunnier, there won't be much bird food about. "We've moved from habitat drought stress to habitat saturation, but the cold weather is really having a huge impact on the food chain," adds Oates. "It's been a disastrous time for winged insects – hoverflies, bees, moths and butterflies." This weekend marks the start of Save Our Butterflies Week – and they need it: two of the most endangered butterflies in Britain, the Duke of Burgundy and the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary, only fly in early spring; after enjoying a revival in the glories of April 2011, it's back to square one this year. "Square one being the lowest point ever in their recorded history," says Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation. In the rain and cold, adult butterflies cannot find mates or lay eggs to create caterpillars. And the role of most caterpillars? Bird food. "Insects are generally very heavily reliant on temperature and climate," says Fox. The lack of winged insects will have "knock-on effects for predators further up the food chain and for plants as well, which rely on pollinators such as bees." Nevertheless, even fragile-looking winged creatures are surprisingly robust. Many butterflies will sit out a week of rain under a leaf. Mabey was wondering about this year's swifts – a notable absence screaming around our villages and towns – but when he visited Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk this week he found thousands of this dynamic summer migrant whizzing low over the reeds. "Needs must is the rule in bad weather, not surrender," says Mabey. As Fox points out, the whole ecosystem is not going to fall apart. "Wildlife is used to weather," he says, "but the real concern is over the rarer species that have already been much reduced by human activity and can ill-afford too many bad seasons." Butterflies are useful bellwethers; because they are so well studied, and so sensitive to the changing climate, they provide strong clues as to how other insects are adapting to weird weather. Over recent, warmer decades, many winged creatures have moved north through Europe. But a fascinating study published in Nature Climate Change this year showed that birds and butterflies are not keeping pace with their natural climatic zone. Birds and butterflies are sensitive to small changes in average temperatures and so reside in a "climate space" where they can find food, breed and thrive. But with shifting climatic patterns, butterflies are lagging an average of 135km behind their natural climatic zone; birds are 212km behind. Our flora and fauna may heave a collective sigh of relief if the Met Office is correct and we really are heading for a "distinctly average" 30 days. The south and east are likely to get a bit more rainfall than average, the north a bit less and the Met is really sticking its neck out to predict temperatures "around or a little bit below average" for June. We are only human, however, and the weather gods love to mock us. Just after the Met forecast a drier than average April/May/June, the deluge began. Apart from a hosepipe ban, there is no better rain dance than the prediction of a barbecue summer. And so "distinctly average" can only be a good thing, can't it?
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Country diary: Sandy, Bedfordshire: The shifting mass of a mallard and her sizeable brood
Fri, 18 May 2012 19:59:01 GMT
Sandy, Bedfordshire: They spilled along as if on the verge of toppling, each raising its little wings and tail as if bearing a great Victorian bustle A chorus of shrieks summoned me to a window overlooking the wood. Waddling out from under the trees on to the lawn was a mother mallard, her sizeable brood streaming beside, behind and too far behind her, all fluff and no feet. My friends fretted that we should somehow lead the ducks back to water, not knowing that the ducklings had probably never touched a drop of the stuff. Most likely, this duck had laid and hatched her eggs among dead leaves within the wood and this was their first family outing Though they were some distance from a pond or a river, it was best to let nature take its meandering course. We counted the shifting mass and concurred on a dozen ducklings. Forsaking the short turf, the mallard chose a path of greater resistance through longer grass alongside a yew hedge and, where mother led, her babies followed. Pressed against glass and effectively screened from view, we were granted an unusually close view of the ducklings. They spilled along as if on the verge of toppling, each raising its little wings and tail as if bearing a great Victorian bustle. But they had sharp eyes for their surroundings and their pointy black pegs for beaks probed high and low. These were born foragers. One almost passed, then took a backwards glance, stretched up and nipped off the top of a grass stem. How did it know, at barely a day old, to pick the seed instead of the stalk? The mother mallard halted at a gap in the hedge, looked back, and gave a vigorous shake of her tail. Then she ducked under and began picking her way along the base of the hedge where the stoats like to go. The lead ducklings, alerted to the change of direction, rode over some tussocks and slipped under the yew portal, and soon the whole family was lost from sight. I wondered to myself – how many babies could one mother keep under her watchful eye that night?
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Arthur Jacobs obituary
Fri, 18 May 2012 16:52:02 GMT
For nearly 50 years, Arthur Jacobs, who has died aged 83, was closely involved with birdwatching at Upton Warren Nature Reserve, Worcestershire, from its beginnings in the 1960s – when the freshwater Moors pool was still a shallow wetland in a grassy field – right up to the present day and the modern reserve, with its complex of lakes, reed beds, wet woodlands and shallow saline pools. In the early days, if work needed doing, Arthur did it himself – erecting fences, digging ditches, operating sluices to control water levels, and recording birds and, later, dragonflies and butterflies. He was closely involved when saltwater flash pools, fed from underground brine seepage, were added to the reserve, and he loved their muddy saline unusualness, their rare plants and, of course, the bird surprises. Upton Warren has become famous for its rare birds, often short-stay migrants, and in earlier times it was usually Arthur who found them. Then, there were no hordes of birders armed with expensive binoculars, telescopes and smart phones: just Arthur and friends with notebooks and binoculars. Even in old age and infirmity, he was often there, still enjoying it all and passing on his excitement to others. Born in Birmingham, he studied chemistry at the city's university and became a chemist in the paint industry. As a student, he used to cycle from his family home to birdwatch at Belvide reservoir, Chasewater and Cannock Chase. Arthur became a member of the West Midland Bird Club, and in the 1960s was the club's meetings secretary. The Moors pool was discovered by members of the WMBC (among them the future broadcaster Bill Oddie) around 1964. The conservationist Christopher Cadbury bought the pool and the adjoining farm, selling on most of the land and buildings. Through his generosity, the pool became a reserve of the new Worcestershire Nature Conservation Trust (founded in 1968, and now known as the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust). Arthur was one of four volunteers in the group that was set up to look after it. He was soon elected to the trust's council, but his real passion was field work and the birds of Upton Warren; a passion that sustained him to the end of his life. Through birdwatching he met his future wife, Joyce, and they married in 1975. For many years Arthur and Joyce worked together at Upton Warren, and the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust gave them a joint Wild Service award in 2002. Earlier this year, Arthur was given the trust's Centenary award. To mark the occasion, trust members planted plum trees in the new orchard at Tiddesley Wood nature reserve. We planted a tree for Arthur, who was too ill to attend, and one for Joyce, who died in February.
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Veteran anti-whaling activist Paul Watson to be released on bail
Fri, 18 May 2012 16:11:05 GMT
Sea Shepherd group vows to fight founder's possible extradition from Germany to Costa Rica over 2002 incident at sea A veteran anti-whaling activist arrested in Germany on a decade-old charge will be released from jail on bail next week. Paul Watson, president of the radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, had gained notoriety for his direct action tactics against the Japanese whaling industry. However, his current legal difficulties relate to a confrontation with illegal shark fin poachers in Central America back in 2002. He has been told he must remain in the country pending a decision on whether or not to extradite him to Costa Rica. Frankfurt's higher regional court announced on Friday that it had put him under preliminary arrest after deciding that an extradition would be permissible under German law. The authorities in Costa Rica now have three months to send the necessary extradition papers to Germany. However, the court said it was ultimately up to the federal justice ministry to decide whether or not to send him to Costa Rica. Sea Shepherd's spokesman, Peter Hammarstedt, told the Guardian that Watson would spend the weekend in jail and be released once the €250,000 bail funds were available on Monday. The group has vowed to continue to campaign to have the extradition blocked, saying the charges are politically motivated and that Watson would not get a fair trial in Costa Rica. They are also trying to convince the German authorities that his life would be in danger if he were sent there. "I am confident that they will understand our plea for his human rights and recognise that if Captain Paul Watson were to be extradited to Costa Rica that would be the same as a death sentence," Hammerstedt said. "We know that the shark fin mafia put a hit on Captain Paul Watson a couple of years ago," he claimed, adding that Taiwanese poacher gangs had a "long reach in the penal system in Costa Rica". The 61-year-old Canadian, who was one of the original founders of Greenpeace, was arrested last Sunday at Frankfurt airport at the request of Costa Rica, which wants to see him extradited over a 10-year-old charge of "violating ships traffic". The incident at the heart of the extradition request occurred back in 2002 when Watson and his crew had a confrontation with a Costa Rican ship in Guatemalan waters. Sea Shepherd says that Watson came across the Varadero I as it was engaging in illegal "shark finning", the practice whereby sharks are caught and their fins – a delicacy in Asia – cut off. They are then thrown back into the ocean to die. According to the WWF, about 73 million sharks are killed each year, primarily for their fins. Sea Shepherd says it had been instructed by the Guatemalan authorities to arrest and detain the crew. When they reached port in Costa Rica, however, Watson was accused of trying to ram the other ship and kill its captain. When a prosecutor saw a film of the incident, shot by a documentary team that happened to be on board Watson's boat, the charges were dropped. Yet, in another twist, the maritime violation charges were reinstated by another prosecutor and were then re-activated in October last year, resulting in an Interpol arrest warrant. Sea Shepherd claims this is due to pressure being exerted by the Japanese whaling industry, which is currently filing a civil suit against the organisation in the US. "Ten years later they have decided to reissue the warrant at exactly the same time as we are really battling it out with the Japanese whaling industry," Peter Hammarstedt told the Guardian. Critics have accused Watson of being a pirate or even eco-terrorist because of his aggressive exploits and he has run afoul of the powers that be before. In 1993 he was arrested by Canadian authorities for chasing trawlers off the coast of Newfoundland. Watson successfully defended his actions on the basis of the United Nations World Charter for Nature, which says that an organisation or individual has the authority to intervene to uphold international conservation rules.
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Scottish trawlerman has £1m seized for role in fisheries scandal
Fri, 18 May 2012 13:20:49 GMT
Ian Buchan, of Peterhead, pleaded guilty to illegally landing and selling £4.5m worth of mackerel in 'black landing' scam A Scottish trawler skipper has had £1m seized by the courts after pleading guilty to a major role in one of Europe's largest illegal fisheries scandals. Ian Buchan, 55, from Peterhead, was given the £1m confiscation order after he admitted illegally landing and then selling nearly £4.5m worth of mackerel in a highly sophisticated "black landing" scam to evade European fishing quotas. The confiscation order, made at the high court in Edinburgh on Friday under legislation introduced to combat organised crime, is one of the largest ever made against an individual by the Scottish courts. The record remains a £1.3m fine against Michael Voudouri, for a £3m VAT evasion in 2006, while the engineering firm Weir Group was fined £3m and had £13.9m of profits confiscated for evading sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Buchan was among four skippers given confiscation orders for their part in landing over-quota fish at two processing factories in Peterhead, which have also been convicted and fined for handling tens of millions of pounds worth of illegally caught mackerel and herring. By March this year, 27 skippers and three processing factories, including Shetland Catch outside Lerwick, Shetland, pleaded guilty to illegally landing £63m worth fish over a five-year period. By that point, the largest single confiscation order was £425,900. The master of the vessel Quantus, Buchan landed at Fresh Catch in Peterhead, which had fitted an underground pipe and switching valves, operated from an anonymous and clandestine hut known as the Wendy House, which was disguised with fake "Danger: high voltage" signs on its door. The confiscation orders issued on Friday against the other three skippers totalled £187,281.
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Fishing observers 'intimidated and bribed by EU crews'
Fri, 18 May 2012 06:00:01 GMT
Quota checks allegedly being compromised aboard Northwest Atlantic Fishery boats, as observers report surveillance and theft Observers monitoring European fish quotas are being regularly intimidated, offered bribes and undermined by the fishing crews they are observing, a Guardian investigation has discovered. More than 20 former and current observers on Portuguese and Spanish ships said that they had experienced tactics such as beingput under surveillance, deprived of sleep, or threatened with being thrown overboard, or having their official documentation stolen by fishing crews to conceal a culture of overfishing. Independent observers are deployed on board every fishing vessel operating in the Northwest Atlantic Fishery Organisation (NAFO), working on boats for five months at a time to monitor compliance with quotas shared between countries, which are designed to protect certain overfished species. Until 2004, they were provided by the EU, but are now provided by member states. If the observer witnesses infringements, they must inform a fisheries inspector, who will board the vessel, although the observer is not allowed to provide the inspector with any details about what infringements may have occurred. Fishing crews on some vessels are believed to have tried numerous ploys to deter observers from carrying out their work. Training material for observers, written several years ago but still understood to be taken as guidance, warns them of "common infringements [that] may include timing hauls to coincide with [observer] meal times", forcing observers to choose between eating and conducting their duties. The more observers investigate, the more likely they are subjected to this behaviour. Andrew Watson, an experienced observer who co-ordinated the observer programme in 2000, said that "[the crew] would go through my cabin routinely to check the figures I was recording. Attitudes towards an observer change very quickly if they find [an observer recording infringements]." One observer described how during his deployment in 2010 "the crew didn't let me sleep, always kicking on the door". Several observers recall being warned to back off because "accidents happen at sea". The behaviour is designed to prevent observers from reporting serious infringements of regulations. The Guardian has seen observer reports detailing illegal catches of hundreds of tonnes of cod, American plaice and Greenland halibut. Henrique Ramos, whose company, seaExpert, has run the Portugese observer programme since 2006, explained: "The simplest way [to get past inspection] is to store illegal catches underneath legitimate ones in the freezer trays, but sometimes fish are moved from one boat to another at sea." Observers are required by the company "not [to] show … log sheets or give any information about the catch" to inspectors and so these activities are very rarely detected. In some cases, if crews know that observers are aware of these ruses they either attempt to obscure their operations or destroy the observer's records. Peter Mackelworth, a marine biologist and former observer, described "a bell system on the boat, so whenever I passed a crew member they pressed the bell [and] everyone knew where I was". The crew would slow down their work on his approach. Another observer with more than 10 years' experience in the industry said: "I had my pockets picked. I had box tags [catch data] in my pockets, and the only time I shared a cabin, I woke up and they were gone. I had to go and get the skipper's tickets and he was smiling at me. He knew." Nearly all the observers have been offered encouragement, often whisky, to stay in their cabin during their deployment, but some have been given substantial sums exceeding £400, enough to pay for nights in a hotel and then a flight home. An observer with experience in four other fisheries explained that "When you get off a boat, sometimes you'll ask the [fishing] company for money, to get home. One time they never asked for the money back because they thought I was giving them a nudge and a wink." Ramos thinks that the key problem is that observers feel isolated and disempowered by the European Commission and the national authorities, and should get better backup from inspectors. A spokesman for the European Commission said: "While the legal framework regulating fisheries is improving, we are aware that there are shortcomings in the culture of compliance among fishermen. We welcome scrutiny of fishing practices to help improve compliance with conservation measures through the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy." A Spanish Fishing Association spokesman said: "This comes as a great surprise to us. There may well be isolated incidents, but this does not represent the vast majority of fishermen. NAFO is one of the most toughly regulated fishing grounds in the world. You have to keep this in perspective, in 2011 out of 56 inspections carried out at sea, only one possible infringement was found. We have reduced our fishing effort in the area by 88.8% in the past decade and feel that the culture of compliance has improved significantly in that time." Willie Mackenzie, representing Greenpeace, said: "It has long been known that the monitoring and enforcement of fishing at sea is woefully inadequate, but this investigation shows the stark reality of just how far some will go to avoid playing by the rules."
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