Modern analysis of a generation-old book about population, production, consumption and pollution seems to show that its nightmare scenario is winning the race to be the most accurate. Prepare for meltdown somwhere around 2050. Thankfully I should be dead by then.
Prepare also for the migration of this blog to WordPress on my main website and its transformation into a journal about transformation and birds, of course.
Well, do ya, punk? Clint’s immortal line in Dirty Harry could stand for our attitude to climate change. Asking if global warming is true or not is futile. Who knows? That question is a sideshow and begs the real question, which runs akin to Pascal's wager. Whether we believe climate change or not and the worst happens, we're fucked. If we don't believe and we're right, what have we lost? Relatively a little time, a little energy, a little prosperity. Maybe a lot but still nothing compared with everything.
So, our baleful effect on the planet needn't be true, just possible. A drunk after a fine old all-nighter in the pub could have come up with the concept and we’d still have to take notice of it. Or a bunch of old men compiling a book many centuries ago. How if the authors of the Bible had warned of worldwide destruction by not believing in global warming instead of personal damnation by not believing in God? Would climate change be a religion now, along with the same compelling reason to bet on it?
As it is a great many respected scientists and thinkers have devoted a great deal of observation and experiment to reach the same conclusion. Doesn't that make it more convincing? If not absolutely compelling. The nay-sayers insist at least on a debate. What a smokescreen this is, the old delaying tactic. When exactly does debate stop and action start? Again, who knows? It may be too late already. It may be time just to believe or not believe.
It is possible not to believe and yet still act. The wager allows this: we're not choosing a belief but a lifestyle. Do we feel lucky? I hope the environmentalists do. An article in the Telegraph suggests that learning to be lucky generates good fortune. Lucky people are more receptive, more aware, more apt to spot luck. We may need it.
For the sake of Blog Action Day, feel lucky, punk.
An interesting population countdown from LiveScience. I've actually seen one of these species in the wild - the condor, almost a dead cert (no pun intended) down the Big Sur coast of California. I wonder if any bookmakers are running bets on which will be the first species to go.
This sounds like poor taste but it could be the best publicity: get William Hill or someone to sponsor an endangered species and offer a price on its extinction. They'd have a strong motivation not to pay out on those bets.
Mind you it may also give criminals even more motivation to push them to extinction. I'd bet on the publicity winning out.
The conspiracy theorists and panic-mongers are having a fine time with NASA’s plan to crash a rocket into the Moon at 12:30 today. Will it be the end of the world as we know it? Hardly. That little world suffers a good dozen similar collisions every year and the craters we see from here show it survives impacts that dwarf one piddly rocket.
Coincidentally, I've just read about the meteorite that hit Chicxulub 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. That was a crash.
I can only get my head round it this way. Imagine taking a Redditch-size ice-cream scoop out of the planet, preferably Redditch itself. There's your meteorite, more like an asteroid, what? Now fire it out of a great big gun, let's say at South Wimbledon, another shite place where I’ve lived.
On a planetary scale hurling Redditch at a bit of London is pretty small beer – just a pinprick on the globe – but if you were anywhere near it... how near? Most of us have felt that satisfactory thump of something quite big going off, like a huge firework. Imagine a house going off then, or a plane (I’m sure we can all do this), or an office block, then a complete town. You’d get out of the immediate neighbourhood.
So now, how far? Well, the Chicxulub impact threw up instant Himalayas ninety miles away. Curiously, that's Redditch distance. That's Coventry too. See how I've got it in for some places? Actually that's the entire south-east of England done for and it doesn't end there. Wikipedia fills in the next few moments better than I could.
It also posits a tsunami because Chicxulub at that time was on a continental shelf. Look at the height of this wave though – half a mile to a mile. The recent ones in Samoa and more distantly Indonesia, terrible as they were, didn’t even crawl out of the cradle in comparison.
Not much to do with birds but, of the dinosaur family, they may be the only survivors from the mass extinction that followed. The meteorite might not have been the sole culprit: the ecosystem was already under stress from a vast series of volcanoes separating India from Madagascar. In any case the Tertiary Period and large mammals were on their way in. That was the K-T Boundary that was.
I don't think we'll get the same show from NASA’s rocket.
On the second day of my voluntary seabird-watching job the wind wrecked our sheltering umbrella construction and drove a spray up into our optics. Again, we needed the arrival of John who moved us further up the cliff to get us out of the weather’s worst. Still, visibility was bad with frequent showers and often the only object of interest was a rock just below our viewpoint.
The tide was such that an occasional wave would wash over the rock, leaving on its surface a pool which gradually disgorged back to the sea through a couple of waterfalls. One of the flows was quite robust but the other would sometimes dry up before the next replenishing wave. I fell into a reverie of imagining the falls in Yosemite and how they operated on the same principle, except with snow as their reservoir. A mild panic even began to set in when, rarity of rarities, the main waterfall threatened to falter.
It never did. Whoosh, wave. Pool, falls. Vigorous waters, slowing. One fall, drying, sometimes dried. Whoosh, wave...
That's what the hours can do to you. Again, it was a different pace of life, relaxing into the pulses of the natural world. And the day passed quickly. Before I knew it, I was back at the B&B and marking up the final totals for an email to Russell and BirdGuides. Yes, my day wasn't over until the paperwork was done and the paperwork showed 25 Balearics for the two days – bang on target thus far. ⇐ ⇒
Not quite a movie but a camera snapping away every thirty seconds has filled in some gaps in our albatross knowledge. These pictures have come from round about the saddle of three individuals and give a hypothetical rider's view. Clearly this is fascinating from the ornithological perspective but also provides a glimpse of what's really out there in the oceans - something still pretty much a mystery.
This time it's the poor old parakeets that people, mark you, introduced to this country. And here we are trying to tell Malta that the greater any list of legal targets, the more the wanton killers can cover up any illegal hunting.
This is brilliant: check out the map in particular from what I think is a photography blog in the US, but the words will make you laugh too.
And it's being built in the US of all places. Or not so surprisingly seeing as it's a legacy of the Bush era. Let's hope that Mr Obama can find time from fixing all the old fart's other fuck-ups to get round to this one. The poor chap has his work cut out! An excellent US nature blog reveals all.
This time it's in Saudi Arabia where a northern bald ibis has been shot and killed. The species has now been pretty much extirpated from the Middle East. BirdLife use the word 'extinction' in their headline and I wish they wouldn't: a small population does also cling on in Morocco. Extinction should have the emotional impact of murder or rape or paedophile. Instead it gets overused and diluted. The trouble is that extirpated is such an unwieldy term and few know what it means anyway.
At least in this case the Saudi government seems to be embarrassed by the activities of its hunters. Would that we could get the Maltese overlords even to admit to the existence of any killing in Malta.
After witnessing Malta’s war on birds, it is tempting to fight fire with fire: go into the shooters’ lairs and massacre the lot of ‘em. Take out their children and wives too, and by implication all succeeding generations. That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it? In the same vein I've listened to birders here talk of shooting dogs that run amok through flocks of birds, and driving over cats for being... well, being cats.
In a rational moment anyone could predict that these actions would escalate the problem. It is how wars get going. It’s interesting though to dissect why such a notion is tempting.
Number one has to be the motivation of being right where the other guy is so clearly wrong. We all love that and go out of our way to find ever more issues in which to put one over. There's nothing like the feeling of being right. From that standpoint we can totally invalidate the opposition and justify whatever action we take.
There is a problem. Right and wrong don't exist. You can't point at them. They have no weight. We invented the words without, unfortunately, a precise definition or field guide to aid in identifying them. By their tenuous nature right and wrong have become a barrier between people; we no longer connect across the words and neither side gets what it wants.
What's the solution?
We're bad at this. Thousands of years of disputes have come down to the same old answers: have a war; write a law; kill ‘em; bang ‘em up; boycott their goods; fine them; and so on. Each creates a new problem, sometimes a worse one, without even necessarily solving the old. Maybe, as a society we're simply not mature enough yet to be successful at handling problems. Maybe we need to recognise that they will always exist and we don't need to solve them, just turn them into problems we’d like to have.
Here's a nice one, inspired by a couple of incidents from my week on Malta.
On my one day off I caught the bus to Rabat from Dingli, where I waited at the stop with a couple of lads. I asked one when the bus was likely to turn up.
“It’s a bus,” he replied, showing that the universal experience of buses was at least one shared piece of humanity.
We went on to talk in the usual male lingua franca – football. He was a Pompey fan; I’m Saints – the biggest clash of right and wrong on the South Coast. But we connected and no-one came to blows and no birds got shot. He even spent the journey into Rabat pointing out his favourite landmarks.
The second scenario saw me throw an errant football back to a kid in Buskett Gardens. He very politely thanked me in perfect English before continuing his game.
No, I’m not suggesting football as a better problem, although it could have its part to play. But kids, yes. I doubt that either of these two nippers would be interested in blasting bundles of defenceless feathers out of the sky. In fact, wouldn’t a child be horrified by it? I mean actually seeing it and the bloody, broken mess that is the end result? I don't mean as some hypothetical, virtual computer game.
Wouldn’t a child be more in thrall to the beauty of a wild creature? Wouldn’t it be worth capturing that spirit before the murderous adult world begins to impose its twisted values? Win the hearts and minds of the youngsters and they will surely swamp their butchering parents. Then the next ten years will just be a damage limitation exercise.
What a contrast. This morning I enjoyed wood sandpiper, black-tailed godwit, green sandpipers and even an alien species, Egyptian goose, in the English peace of RSPB Pulborough Brooks. A sparrowhawk circled and climbed, and a kestrel flapped low over the wader scrapes. I didn't have to fear for them.
One week ago at the battlefield of Mizieb in Malta, almost certain death would have visited the two birds of prey. As it was, those woods were silent and empty, save for a handful of hostile gunners, looking like mama had just taken their favourite dolly from them. We also walked past a veritable ghetto of crudely constructed shooting hides. I had the impression of passing through a deserted concentration camp, but one that was ready to jackboot to attention in a moment.
Over-dramatic? Not given the latest grisly evidence from Malta’s war on birds. Just yesterday at Mizieb, BirdLife and CABS recovered 76 freshly killed birds supposedly protected from the shooters by the Maltese government. If you think our politicians are cynical, that lot are positively brazen. I don't know how the Maltese can bear them any longer.
Some chap at Sheffield Hallam University springs to the defence of alien species, like ruddy ducks. I guess he is at least examining the question of "should" although I doubt his new term of "eco-xenophobia" will really catch on - a bit of a mouthful, what? He recommends that we focus on problem species instead. Hmm... I can think of one big, big candidate - oh, but it's an alien species too.
(I mean homo sapiens of course.)
What you won't see in any travel brochure: “Watch magnificent birds of prey that have flown the length of Europe blasted out of the sky. See those that only have their legs blown away die slowly from being unable to land. Marvel at the rubbish-strewn, lunar landscape, stripped of vegetation by bird-trappers. Endure the dark, hostile scowls of the locals.”
Outside the thin veneer that is Valletta. Mdina and the tourist resorts, this describes a week in Malta.
And what about this side-note? Planes from Britain, the Emirates, Egypt, Spain and other Western nations land just yards from gun-toting hunters. Doesn't this seem crazy? Who can tell the difference between them and Al-Qaeda operatives? The latter could position a whole arsenal by the airport without raising a single eyebrow. Imagine allowing that at Heathrow.
The raptor slaughter is but a pinprick in the hundreds and thousands of other birds who also fall prey to hunters’ guns and traps. Want to see a finch on the island? Go look in a cage. Go look in a British cage. Seriously, you’re more likely see one there.
The finches are more of a local problem. The international scandal is that Europe now invests time, space and money for migrant birds to come and breed in safety. They're our birds, born in our lands. We don't want them gunned down by Mediterranean savages, never to return again. In any other war – and this is a war, declared against birds by Maltese hunters and ruthlessly promoted by them – we would send the army to protect our citizens. As it is, a few dozen brave, dedicated birdwatchers from all over the continent can really only monitor the situation, as helpless as UN observers.
In case the Maltese government hadn’t noticed, the environment is top bill these days, right up there with terrorism. Birds are the environment, in fact one of its best gauges. To slaughter them on such an industrial scale must be the biggest act of vandalism in Europe. It’s time for the country to drag itself into the 20th century. Only then should we even consider allowing them to participate in the 21st century Union.
It's been a strange raptor-watching holiday when you've been urging the birds to "Just go. Fly away. It's not safe here." This picture shows, if you can pick them out, a few of the killers' hides, dotting the departure coast of Malta. The gunners will even shoot birds down over the sea, which gives the lie to any claim of hunting for food.
Yesterday saw the start of the 3 o'clock hunting ban, so we enjoyed peace at the Mtahleb killing fields. So did a flock of bee-eaters, without fear of their gorgeous plumage being ripped to shreds by assassins' shot. Even a much later young honey buzzard seemed safe and we admired cracking views as it sought evening refuge. It had almost dropped over the horizon when it appeared to stoop. A second later, "crack, crack, crack" told a different story.
We were struck dumb. The first flouting of the law in hours and some cunt had slaughtered yet another of our birds.
Malta has decades yet to go to catch up with the 21st century.
Sunday afternoon our raptor-surveying team met a plane-spotter at the airport and heard a normal Maltese's reaction to the gun-toting hooligans. He and several friends had watched a "large bird" fusilladed down at their watchpoint. "Grown men, we wanted to cry," he said. Everywhere the teams go, the same message from the majority but too intimidated by the bully boys. That's why we're here.
You can do it with binoculars or guns. Sadly, guns are more prominent, especially this morning when rain promises to bring birds in. A nice welcome for them. Again, a minority makes life a misery for everyone else. It seems that the Maltese are scared out of their own backyard by the gun louts. How often does this pattern repeat itself?
The first ever film of buff-faced pygmy parrots has just shown on BBC1 in the Lost Land of the Volcano series. Apart from these the expedition team has been finding oodles of new creatures and some other pretty elusive birds.
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