Dragons and Damsels

Male merlin perched on a mossy lump

I had a week off earlier this month much of which I dodged the rain showers but to little avail and I had to settle for the odd often unexpected sunspot and a bonus of a merlin clutching a meadow pipit desperately trying to get airborne, only to be robbed by a massive raven. Poor beast I thought as the diminutive falcon slunk off deprived of lunch only to turn sharply and snatch a late summer time beauty from mid air, a large dragon fly.

Late July can often be a dull time for nature as most birds have fledged and they are hidden either in the leafy canopy or have moved from breeding grounds to other areas. As we have had a warmer than normal year so far with some wonderful spring sunshine, it could possibly be the bumper year we need after two particularly hard winters. One thing that is certain is that smaller creatures, the beetles, bees, bugs and other insects are certainly making hay whilst the weather is good.

To many chemicals

To many people bugs are pests but in reality out of the millions of species world wide only a tiny handful are actually true pests, most that we complain about are merely irritants, as they buzz about our heads and make a bee line for the jam (sorry). This doesn’t however stop us from reaching for the swat or more harmfully the chemicals to control them.

I got a call recently asking whether there were more bugs around than normal at this time of the year and I had to say that in reality there probably wasn’t as there is always a flush of abundance in summer. But the other harsh reality is that overall there definitely isn’t as many species or numbers of bugs around as there were in the past.

Lady bugs by the thousand

Why should that be important and why should we care, after all insects are pests?

Well for one, many of the birds species we all know and love and which we all moan about as their numbers are declining are doing so because of either secondary pesticide poisoning or the lack of insect food available, especially at breeding time. Lets face it everytime we see a bug we don’t want we reach for the spray, transfer that to an agricultural scale and you get mass extinctions on the scale of the dinosaurs, but because many are tiny little inconspicuous creatures that we rarely see, we don’t notice or care? This is a fact, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. In addition, around 75% of all butterfly species in the UK have been shown to be in decline.

Now we all think this is a thing of the past and indeed we don’t use nearly as much chemicals as we used to; but the damage has been done and some cases unrepairable. Insects of all sorts play a massive role in our lives and indeed our survival yet we disregard them so easily.

Recent research has shown just how important many insects are to us least of which are those that are declining so much, bees and not just honey bees but all wild bees. Wild bees, ‘bumble bees’ are the unsung heroes of our food security and not as we once thought honey bees, it is these species we need to focus equally our conservation efforts, as insect pollinated crops are likely to become increasingly more important to UK agriculture in the immediate future.

Juvenile salmon parr

There is a long way to go as I saw when I was back in the Lake District for a few days recently. Reminiscing I stood on many of the same bridges I did as a kid around Uleswater looking down at the mysterious speckled inhabitants darting around the gin clear waters. Well, the streams still run gin clear but the speckled inhabitants are all but gone, no longer holding station sipping in a passing mayfly or dashing to snatch a falling grub. Taken not by the often quoted ‘too many predators syndrome’ but by insidious chemical poisons whose effects go on long gone after their initial use.

"It takes a long time to repopulate a stream from the tiniest inhabitant to the mightiest fish"

Notes from Sunny Portugal

Oooo the heat, the sun, the ladies!! Why cant this be sunny Sunderland. alass I was only here for a few days, but what a few days.

Soaring white stork

I stepped forth from the airport foyer to be greeted by over a dozen wheeling white storks directly overhead, what a sight; I was definitely in Portugal. The sun was shinning and on the way to the hotel, amidst the bouts of childish ‘lads’ humour I spotted numerous Mediterranean delights, hoopoes, a roller and several azure winged magpies and a host of small birds.

In the evening and quiet periods even in grog I noticed some lost UK prizes, things that were once just as common in the UK. Towards the end of the day, the sky above the town was filled with the screams of thousands of swifts and trills of martins and swallows. Walking the streets, the archways and eaves of new and old buildings alike had scores of nests beneath and nobody was batting and eyelid, nobody was knocing them down or denying them nesting opportunity.

Everywhere were ‘spuggies’ your common or garden house sparrow’, and the song of crickets and cicada’s, the real song of the ‘Med’, a wonderful evening chorus of bird and insect life.

Thinking back I remember, my granny used to have hearth crickets in her terraced cottage’s open hearth that would sing gently through the evenings whilst she poured scalding water over me in the tin bath in front of the fire.

What else did we used to have around our homes?

They were all here, in abundance too. Some slightly less welcome than others of course, like the many cockroaches cleaning the streets at night of abandoned junk food, but nevertheless now still largely absent from our sterile living environs. We never hear hearth crickets anymore and the sound of screaming swifts and chirping spuggies is no longer as apparent as it once was.

Peering over garden walls into secluded corners often brought a glimpse of a scurrying reptile, maybe a wall lizard or even, once I saw a large snake, probably a Montpellier. None of which would be allowed within a hundred miles of our safe urban homes but here all are tolerated as natural pest controllers. We were all in trigued and even through the beer goggles saw entertainment around the pool one day as a spuggie caught a very large cockroach and proceeded to bash the hell out of it before dismantling it and carting the bits off, “and you thought sparrows were seed eaters”. Well this one showed one of the reasons why they are declining so much ,they need protein, insects, bugs to feed their young. Little wonder our fields and gardens are so impoverished, as everytime we see an insect we reach for the poison spray

Stork nesting on street lights Faro, Portugal

Down on the golf courses and new apartments where you might expect northing they were going to extraordinary lengths to accommodate nesting white storks, other wildlife and a host of amphibians of all shapes and sizes. This view ,from someone who has worked in conservation for many years and dealt with developers ‘nightmares’ in the UK over and over
again was very refreshing but even more ironic given Portugal’s present economic plight.

Despite this, the key words that were obvious were, ‘tolerance’ and ‘acceptance’.

In the foyer of the hotel I picked up a local magazine where an article on the Iberian lynx stood out. Almost certainly extinct in Portugal it is now subject to a captive breeding initiative for future re-establishment, again against the country’s economic background they are determined to make this project succeed.

You just want to live in a country that has these in, well I do anyway, stunning!

The main factor for the decline in the Iberian lynx has been the disappearance of its main prey item, the humble rabbit, a result of human introduced diseases. The knock on consequence of no lynx has been an increase in smaller predators which in turn has seen impacts on prey species so the whole system is now out of balance because one link in the chain is missing.

The crux of this Iberian waffle is that predators are essential, especially top predators as it is these that create balance in the system. The UK is blessed with so few creatures that fulfil this roll, all have given way to ‘UK man’s’ intolerance.

Just to demonstrate this point as I alighted back in sunny (not) Newcastle my phone informed me of an incident in Northumberland; where hot on the heels of last weeks report, an otter had actually been killed by dogs ‘accidentally’. As I drove from this airport, depressed by weather and news, the fields were not lifting with small brown birds or multi coloured ones for that matter they were sterile agricultural spaces inhabited by nothing but pigeons and pheasants.

Somewhere out there we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our priorities and give our heads a shake.

Fishermans tale’s

A mate of mine called the other day to say at long last after years of patiently fishing on many riverbanks and beaches, catching absolutely nothing but hypothermia he had just seen his first wild otter. The inevitable fisherman’s tales followed, “it was this lang”, he said (with arms spread wider than the room) “and that was just the hook I used to catch it”. To be fair he is a good angler and not as prone to exaggeration as many are and having been one for over thirty years I know quite a few.

He reckoned it stole his flatfish off his hook of which he was ecstatic about, the whole experience had been a wonderful once in a life time chance encounter where the otter showed exactly who was the better fisherman. I have fished for many years in wide circles and know many anglers whose feelings toward the king of the flood are just as reverential but my mate also pointed out a recent TV and press article that he was very concerned with, a very well know TV angling personality was calling for a cull of otters.

My mate rightly asked me questions about an otters life, me being ‘otterly mad’ (sorry!) and he went away happy, as most do with his ‘otter encounter’, but I could not stop thinking about the article. Watching it and reading the so called evidence really got me going and for someone so well known to publically state such things was beyond me.

The alleged angling presenter

So for the record Mr Wilson, I can put an equal amount of experience with otters as I have with angling, together that’s somewhere near a combined total of eighty years (god I makes me sound old), so I might make a little sense.


Otters eat fish! Mostly anyway, supplemented by rodents, rabbits, birds, frogs, anything really they can catch. Most of the otters in Britain originated from wild stock, dispersing naturally through careful habitat management and enhancement, plus huge improvements in water quality which incidently also improved fish stocks. Just over one hundred otters were ‘reintroduced’ into south eastern England up until 1999, No otters have been ‘reintroduced in the northeast of England, ever! The otters here in the northeast got there by themselves because of four legs, good habitat, water quality and fish numbers. Of this we should be justly proud and I am too for having my small part to play in this success.

Now much of this storey centres on southern England and commercial fisheries where, yes I can see there being an issue, but even here the mistruths are rife. If I opened a shop in Sunderland with no front door on I would expect there to be no goods there the following day, similarly if you dig a hole fill it full of fish and do nothing to protect them is asking for trouble, the same thing is often true for garden ponds you can protect them to from herons etc. yet when an otter turns up it is someone else’s fault.

I have fished the region’s rivers and mant more across the country for nearly 40 years and in that time my experiences and enrichment like the quality of the fishing has increased along with the presence of otter. It is no coincidence that what is good for us and fishing is good for otters too. I want to share my life and river with a creature as beautiful as an otter, I’m not sure about the latter with me mind.

A barbaric practice well lost in the mists of time

It was quite ironic that I also received a timely reminder of days gone by this week when someone sent me some photos of otter hunting in Northumberland at the turn of the last century. They are wonderful images of a bygone era and a pursuit that has long since pasted into the realms of history, which is where it should rightly stay.

There is no place in our modern society for a cull of any of our native creatures despite the length of some fisherman’s tales.