On 13 June 2009, the Poole birders could be heard belting out Jerusalem in Lytchett Minster Church in celebration of Ian and Margaret Lewis’s wedding. Ian was a widower, and his first wife Janet lay in the churchyard. Janet had died suddenly, plunging Ian into unanticipated circumstances, but renewal and adaptation is a human strength and as the couple walked down the aisle Ian radiated with newfound happiness.
The weather should be a safe conversational gambit to strike up at an English wedding reception in June, but not now. The birders talked intensely about conservation in Poole Harbour and the birds’ future, with the climate changing and the likelihood of all of nature being plunged into unanticipated circumstances.
The first Met Office regional weather forecast for southern England was made by Admiral Fitzroy (Darwin’s companion, the captain of the Beagle) and published in The Times on 1 August 1861, when it forecasted “Fresh Westerly; fine” for southern England. The forecast for 1 August 2009 at the time of writing is almost identical. Predicting the weather must have been even more contentious then than today, because Fitzroy was mauled badly by dissatisfied readers, and The Times dropped weather forecasts in 1864. The next year Fitzroy got up one morning, went into the bathroom and cut his throat.
With or without forecasting, extremes in the weather have been making the news for centuries. In 1862 it was so wet and cold here that a large number of Barn Swallows died in a very cold June for want of their usual supply of insect food, yet in 1868 there were eight months of extraordinary heat and so many flies that people complained. A hurricane in 1866 blew down the elms in Studland village churchyard, and the Rooks that are there today didn’t breed for nearly 40 years.
For Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch, merging along Poole Bay to create one big tourist destination, sunny weather is economically vital. Dorset has a billion pounds a year of tourist income, and in our conurbation a sunny weekend adds a million pounds to the local economy. Historically, Poole and Christchurch grew in the 1600s and then in the early 1800s, Bournemouth was built on the huge expanse of heath between them.
This Victorian new town grew as tuberculosis sufferers and others left smoggy London to take the air. Growth was fast. In 1826, James Harris was shooting ‘Blackcock’ on the heath where 40 years later invalids were being pushed in bath chairs along the lower pleasure gardens. Most of the tourists were sick, and good official figures for temperature and sunshine were essential for the resort’s success. This had an effect on the systematic weather recording in Bournemouth and Poole. According to a recent book, “the location of the metrological instruments changed during Bournemouth’s history in an attempt to maximise a favourable climate” (Sloane 2010).
Barn Swallows Hirundo rustica, at Nick’s garden, Nutcrack Lane, Stoborough, Dorset, 3 June 2011 (Nick Hopper)
Microclimates could influence where the invalids stayed, and different areas would spin the climate in their area to make it sound the most favourable. During the ‘60s, the official site for the sunshine recorder was Meyrick Park. Then a trial was run on Bournemouth pier, where any seawatcher could have told them that ‘sea fog’ was going to be a problem. The difference was 21.3 hours, far too great a variance in the annual competition between resorts for the sunniest seaside town. The recorder was duly moved to Poole at Wallisdown and then to King’s Park in Bournemouth.
Having made it this far you will know that climate change has always been with us, and that the birds we enjoy today are a reflection of the current climate. So on behalf of birds, we don’t have to consider whether the climate is changing but rather keep an eye on which way it’s going and try to work out how much it’s going to change.
At the time of the wedding, I read a desperate article in the RSPB’s Birds magazine, in which the present era was described as the “Anthropocene”, created by man with “vast emissions of carbon dioxide”. It told readers that mankind was facing “the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” and continued, “The Anthropocene threatens to be a truly terrible time for a person to be alive… unless we act very radically and very quickly to change things” (McCarthy 2009).
Allowing for a little local massaging of the figures that I mentioned, here are some data about how our temperature has changed over the years. At the beginning of the last century, the average annual temperature here was 10.36°C, and it slowly crept up to 10.58°C in the 1940s. It then cooled for several decades, dropping half a degree to 9.98°C and didn’t manage to climb again until 1995. In the last decade, we have seen a dramatic rise, as local temperatures increased on average by 1°C to 11.47°C. The increases in local air temperature in the last two decades have been measurably larger than those in sea temperature, and while unlikely to herald conquest, war, famine and death, this is known to create stronger onshore winds.
The way in which the ‘Anthropocene’ differs from past eras is that this time we are thought to be directly responsible and should, theoretically, be able to shape the way and the speed of how the changes happen. If the changes are too fast, the general thinking is that birds may not have the time to adapt.
With the weather becoming political, we expect the government to do something about it. Two of the guests at Ian and Margaret’s wedding were better informed than the rest of us as to what was happening. We’ve already met one of them, Ian Alexander. Keen birder James Phillips is another ecologist and Ian’s colleague at Natural England. On farmlands and in our woods, James is trying to recreate the kind of conservation success that has already been achieved with waterbirds. Unfortunately in these habitats, the frightening prediction in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) of a countryside without bird song is fast becoming a reality.
At the wedding reception, I took the opportunity to ask why Poole’s farmland wasn’t as good as it used to be for birds. Ian explained that since the mid-‘40s, when the UK was genuinely short of food and had been close to collapse, the government had stepped in to support increased productivity, and farm production had gone up.
“Even when we had sufficient food, farmers strove to become more and more ‘efficient’, especially labour efficient. We stripped the countryside of most of the labour that historically cared for it and replaced it with oil-consuming machinery until we reached the point where some of our meals use more fossil fuel calories to produce than the food calories we consume.” I ate my vegetarian quiche and my eyes widened. With a sweeping gesture towards the buffet, he went on, “We are effectively eating oil. And it is fossil fuel derived inputs, the fertilisers and pesticides, that create the ecological damage.”
Ian was preaching to the converted of course. For many years I’ve been looking forward to us all consuming less oil, wasting less food, creating less air pollution and throwing less away. The prospect of less noise both from planes and car tyres, and listening to bird songs free of both is tantalising. Now with everyone worried about climate change, the society I’ve always dreamt of is so much closer. Major change in our climate could be 50 years away or 50 weeks, depending on which information you read. Still dreaming, I’m transported back to Ben Pond’s countryside with heath untouched and Black Grouse, Corn Crake, Stone-curlew, Yellow Wagtail, Red-backed Shrike, Chough,Tree Sparrow and Cirl Bunting still present, all to be lost over the intervening 60 years.
I’ve never seen or heard a Quail or Grey Partridge in Poole Harbour, and I asked Ian why we didn’t find them anymore. He reminded me that at the beginning of the silent spring, pesticides were directly and very visibly toxic to wildlife, killing individuals or disrupting their breeding so that populations plummeted.
Ian explained that nowadays we are better at designing and screening chemicals for direct toxicity, but the problems have shifted to the disruption that the chemicals cause in the ecosystem. “Basically, partridge chicks need insects for the first couple of weeks after they hatch and this invertebrate prey, in turn, needs a range of host plants on which to feed, by and large the very plants that the herbicides have removed from the farmland. No ‘weeds’, no invertebrates feeding on the weeds, no food for partridge chicks, no partridges.”
A lot of James’s work involves encouraging local landowners and farmers to try wildlife-friendly farming. He chipped in,“On top of that there just hasn’t been the nesting habitat or food through the late winter and early spring for farmland birds. The loss of spring-sown crops and weedy stubble hedges and the little margins mean that birds have fewer places to nest, produce fewer offspring and can’t survive the winter.”
Ian and James know that we can reverse these effects in years not decades. Part of their job is to help our farmers to do just that, and in 2010 in Dorset alone, the government distributed £19 million of grants to farmers, especially to look after our wildlife. They are part of the effort to reverse the silent spring effect. After 70 years of indoctrination, however, asking farmers to love their ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’ must be tough.
James pointed out that the species disappearing most rapidly in Poole were Lapwing, Skylark, Linnet, Yellowhammer and Reed Bunting, and that all could be brought back from the brink. A birder’s gleam lit up his eye. “We have the grants available to encourage farmers to replicate the key habitats with wild bird mixtures or pollen and nectar mixes, beetle banks, conservation headlands, weedy over-winter stubbles, skylark plots, summer fallow and flower rich margins.”
Ian went on: “While I agree that we need to be taking action to defend what we still have, we could and should aspire to regain the birds and plants we have lost.” James added, “In Poole that could be Corn Buntings and Yellow Wagtails.”
I find it hard to understand how farmers have been allowed to lay bare the countryside. In the 1930s, my Grandad owned a grocer’s on South Street in Dorchester, the county town of Dorset, and he made his living servicing the farmers’ needs, staying open until 23:00 and opening on Sundays. Nowadays the farmers service the grocers. If you add up the incomes of all Britain’s farms, in 2008 this amounted to £8.7 billion while just one of the supermarkets with a branch in Poole, Tesco’s, turned over £68 billion, making nearly a £1 billion of profit in a quarter. It is demand from supermarkets like Tesco’s that encourages farmers to rely on techniques that are unfriendly to birds.
Theoretically, Poole Harbour shouldn’t be suffering as many problems with birds and farmland as other parts of Britain, as a large part of the farmland on the shores is owned by nature conservation groups and leased to farmers.
Shaun, who has been keeping account around the farm at Lytchett for 20 years, reminded us all that the pair of Little Owls that bred from the early ‘70s had disappeared by 2001. Not only have there been none since, but the pattern has been replicated around Poole Harbour, where the species no longer breeds. He suggested that ‘cleaning up’ of the farms and their surroundings had been responsible. Another farmland bird lost from Lytchett is Yellowhammer, which last bred there in 1993. In this case it still breeds at Lytchett Minster just round the corner, so it really should have returned under RSPB’s stewardship but hasn’t.
While we do have one organic farm at Rempstone, The National Trust and the RSPB have allowed their tenants to farm conventionally, using pesticides and producing crops with a big appetite for fertiliser. So even the nature reserves aren’t organic. Most of what we consider natural is kept that way through a lot of management, and while not as widespread as in farming, ‘weed killers’ are used to maintain heathlands, killing plants like rhododendrons, Gaultheria and bracken. Ian explained how few insects there are now in comparison to the ‘40s and ‘50s. “You’ll know when we’ve got it right, Mark. You wont be able to cycle across Hartland without getting flies in your teeth and eyes.”