Welcome back Marsh Harriers

[Guest guest]

An excerpt from an article in the Times: INTOXICATING fact. Extraordinary fact. Unbelievable fact. There are more marsh harriers in this country now than there have been for 200 years. The RSPB announced the news this week with a roll of drums and deep and justifiable satisfaction. There was just one pair of marsh harriers left in the country in 1971. But the birds had been struggling for a long time before that: drainage of the Fens and the general habit of blasting birds of prey out of the sky had been clobbering marsh harriers for years. They dwindled to extinction in this country by 1900, began to recover from 1920, and then in the 1950s we found a new way of wiping them out. Pesticides in the system built up in the creatures that ate the pests: and so the creatures that ate the creatures that ate the pests (the marsh harriers) got the whole lot, time after time. This, bizarrely, caused the birds’ eggshells to thin, and so they failed

to breed. The pesticides were banned in 1982. A year later, I saw my first marsh harrier. It was, I think I can say without giving offence, one of the highlights of my honeymoon. Work on the recreation of reedbeds has continued, with the result that last year there were 350 nesting females — you don’t count marsh harriers in pairs, because some of the males have more than one nesting female, the dogs. WE TEND to think of extinction as a modern invention. Most people accept that the real destruction began in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, we lived in harmony with nature, a rural idyll in which humans and wildlife dwelt in peace. Alas, that’s a myth. It’s always been war. The story of the harrier shows us that, 200 years ago, the war was already full on and the harrier was in a worse state than it is today. In truth, humans have never lived in harmony with nature. We have always been destructive, have always moved from

extinction to extinction. In continent after continent, episodes of mass extinction follow the arrival of human beings: and across the world, the full-on destruction continues. This is not gloom’n’dooming, it’s just fact. That is why the marsh harrier story is so cheering: because it cuts against the grain of history. The inevitable destructiveness of humankind has been put into reverse. And you say to yourself: is this an exception? A small moment in which history is defied? Or is it one of the first indications that the direction of the wind is changing? Can it possibly be that the weathercock is turning and will eventually be pointing in the exact opposite direction? The story of the marsh harriers says quite clearly that such a thing can be done. Does it really indicate that it is being done?Peter H

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.