Tag: bat

Sparrow Street

Day for this, day for that. Social media is jammed with ‘world days’ for just about everything now, but World Sparrow Day on March 20th caught my eye – a bit like the real bird, busy and confident in our urban shadow as if it were a small feathered fox. 

Tree sparrow2

This is a tree sparrow, a rarity in England these days but abundant in the Philippines. The unevenness of nature is one of its marvels – some species paint the skies with a million silhouettes while others are known only to the most inquisitive scientists. That is not random; it reflects variation in whatever food and habitat is required, and in how wild things rise and fall on humans rhythms. This little bird, this sweet chirp in the warm grass, is perched firmly on human civilisation. Our crops feed it, our buildings house it, and our boats give it safe passage. In fact, it may have travelled to the Philippines with the Spanish fleet.

But tree sparrows tell us something else. So confident, so confiding, they unwittingly star in one of the bleakest parables of unintended consequences that we as a species have yet managed to write. Mao declared a brutally effective war on sparrows in 1950s China as part of the Four Pests campaign. It was to protect crops, of course, but without considering that sparrows actually eat crop-destroying insects. The destruction of sparrows contributed to a famine which killed up to 55 million people.

It is one lesson that should be told in every school and parliament in the world: think, from all angles, before doing. 

Tree sparrow

But sparrows are birds of the present, and squabble and flutter as if yesterday is in the past. They still link us to nature, building a noisy, unruled life alongside commence and cluttered streets. Like foxes, they are the flag-bearers of a much broader collection of mostly shy wildlife that threads its way past us. When not watching sparrows in the Philippines, I was wondering how to find those others. I set up my my trailcam on the off chance it would catch something unusual, and it happens, it did.

The large dark birds in the first part of this video are barred rail, a common but extremely reclusive species of open landscapes and farmland. The toads are probably Philippine toads Ingerophrynus philippinicus, and I’m not even going to hazard a guess at the bat. I might have got more species except that the trailcam was knocked over by a magnitude 6 earthquake three days into its adventure. Here is the water cooler reacting to the 5.9 magnitude aftershock.

Perhaps that is the final lesson from sparrows. They lean on us, and that is not particularly safe; but we in turn stand on an unstable planet, and no dustings of urban glory will ever quite hide our need to remember that.

Light and Dark

Ray of hope

The world is changing. Flowers are opening and birds are singing.

But no, the world is changing. Daily. The relative normality of my last post feels far away. I am certain that no one wants to hear more about coronavirus but I do have a thought and a challenge – then back to wildlife, I promise.

The thought: viruses spread fast, but information and disinformation have never spread faster. Science travels cautiously, but for certain sure, it tells us that this virus is not a laboratory product. Coronaviruses are typically hosted by bats, and SARS showed that they can jump into people via trade in wildlife; palm civets in that case, but there is some evidence that the critically endangered Malayan pangolin was the unwilling bridge for Covid-19. Or maybe it was turtles.

Truth matters. Whatever the origin of this particular virus – from the wildlife trade or not – there can be no more tolerance for criminals exploiting wildlife, anywhere in the world, for whatever motive. As this Chinese conservation group explains, ‘traditional medicine’ sometimes isn’t even traditional, not that market demand for pangolin scales and tiger bones is the only problem; the UK recently convicted an individual who illegally smuggled eels worth £53 million, and incredulously he didn’t even get a jail sentence.

Enough is enough. If novel diseases and a global extinction crisis aren’t sufficient for the entire planet to take wildlife trafficking seriously, perhaps we should at least remember the hundreds of brave rangers who have been murdered by the poachers who supply these criminal syndicates.

Let’s keep an eye on the science and keep informed.

The challenge: last week I was travelling in northern England, as I often do, or did before non-essential travel was stopped, when I woke up one morning to a window overlooking the Royal Border Bridge. It is hard enough to believe that the Victorians built this giddying viaduct with the technology available in the 1840s. But we have forgotten, perhaps, that the workers’ thoughts must have sometimes drifted to the global cholera pandemic then raging, not to mention smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis. Some may even have known that southern Europe had recently experienced several waves of plague.

IMG_1077

I’m not, of course, suggesting that we fight coronavirus with viaducts. For almost all of us, the heroic thing in this war is staying home, as I now am like millions of others. But I do like the idea that a pandemic cannot stop us doing amazing things.

This is the only version of 2020 that we’re getting, so let’s make the most of it even while we stay in our houses. Read books, write books, play music, learn a language, study history, look out the window and watch some birds. Learn the stars, listen to foxes and owls, watch butterflies visit a flower-filled windowbox. Find creative ways to protect and help the most vulnerable. Build links and friendships. Remember to pray and breathe.

The world is still there. Let’s use this time to learn how to appreciate it – and each other – more wisely.

And keep faith that the light will be given back to us.

Luna 29 Feb 20