In defence of pussy cats (not that they need it)

Writing in the Telegraph, Andrew Brown launches an attack on the pussy cat. Or more precisely on the owners of pussy cats.

What cats do, as everyone knows but some prefer not to think about, is kill wild birds – millions every year, according to the RSPB.

Here are these two birds bringing up their families in our garden, feeding their bleating chicks, and along comes the domestic cat, a ruthless hunter introduced by humans to mess up the natural order of things.

“Belling the cat” (that is, hanging a bell around the animal’s neck, as in Aesop’s fable) ought to be the minimum cat owners do.

At least that would warn birds of their presence. I would go further – cat owners should stop their pets reproducing indiscriminately. It would also be better if cats were kept indoors at night.

If you own a cat, what it gets up to it is your responsibility. If your pet goes out and slaughters millions of birds and chicks, it is your business.

This bloke has a serious problem with your pussy cat. And all because he's noticed that a couple of local cats have been stalking the long-tailed tits nesting in his garden. Our writer is terribly excited about the fact that these birds are nesting there but less excited about the other perfectly natural thing going on - the cat stalking the nesting birds.

Now one thing is true, domestic cats kill a lot of birds every year - about 55 million according to the RSPB. And in the scale of things this seems an awful lot of predation. However, the reality is that predation by cats isn't responsible for any decline in bird populations. Here's the RSPB again:

Despite the large numbers of birds killed, there is no scientific evidence that predation by cats in gardens is having any impact on bird populations UK-wide. This may be surprising, but many millions of birds die naturally every year, mainly through starvation, disease, or other forms of predation. There is evidence that cats tend to take weak or sickly birds.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season

We also know that of the millions of baby birds hatched each year, most will die before they reach breeding age. This is also quite natural, and each pair needs only to rear two young that survive to breeding age to replace themselves and maintain the population.

It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations. If their predation was additional to these other causes of mortality, this might have a serious impact on bird populations.

Yet this doesn't stop people like Andrew Brown writing their pig-ignorant rants about predation by cats. So here's a little more information. Firstly there have been significant declines in some bird species with farmland species the worst affected. However when we look at the main garden species - blackbirds, blues tits, great tits, wrens, robins and chaffinches - there hasn't been any decline in the period from 1970 to 2012. Indeed some species such as the long tailed tit (yes, the bird Andrew Brown is so agitated about) have seen what DEFRA describe as 'weak increase'. Put simply the birds that cats are most likely to predate aren't the species in decline.

There are about 7.9 million domestic cats in the UK (according to the Pet Food Manufacturers Association who I guess make a study of these things) which means that the average mog catches about seven birds a year. Just taking one species, the blackbird. There are about 5 million breeding pairs in the UK and, in a typical year, a pair of blackbirds with raise two or three broods - four if there's a mild autumn - with each brood comprising 3-5 chicks. That's around 60 million blackbird chicks every year. Repeat this calculation for blue tits, dunnocks, wrens, robins and that lovely long-tailed tit and we have literally hundreds of millions of chicks born every year.

Declines in bird populations are not down to cats. Mostly the declines are down to changes in habitat, modern farming practice and competition from other birds. Andrew Brown may, in his ever so urban and squeamish way, not like to see those little chicks munched up by next door's tom cat but it's a long step to get to blaming that cat for bird population declines that either aren't happening or else are down to fertilisers, hedge-removal and marshland drainage.

Cats have been part of human living for a very long time:

All domestic cats, the authors declared, descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris, which literally means "cat of the woods." Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and some of the study authors speculate that the process began up to 12,000 years ago.

And during that time those cats have done a sterling job of everyday pest control while also providing the playfulness and cuteness that makes them such an Internet sensation. It seems however that some people have a problem with cats. But instead of using their newspaper column to tell fibs about these wonderful creatures, such people should just come clean and say "I don't like cats". We understand this position (weird though it seems to us mog fans) and it's so much most honourable than trying to argue cat owners are bad people who don't care about wildlife.
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Counting birds - how we ask too much of our local plan system

Where the birds fly!

Out there in the world of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, planning is a thing you sometimes need to deal with in order to get your conservatory, dormer or little extension. On occasion you might rant and rail - even organise and campaign - against proposals for a major development on your doorstep. But the details and intricacies of the planning system pass most of us by - we don't touch the occult world of housing need models, biodiversity assessments, health impact assessments and a host of other expensively procured reviews and studies intended to inform the plans our local government might make.

Yesterday marked the first day of the 'Examination in Public' for Bradford's Local Plan Core Strategy - the Council describes this as:

The Core Strategy is a key planning document for the Bradford District. It translates aspirations from the Council’s Community Strategy, key technical evidence and outcomes from previous consultations into an overarching and strategic planning framework for the District, guiding where development is to be permitted, how much we should have, what land should be protected from developed and how places should change up to 2030.

Colossal grammatical error aside, this document is the daddy of what will be a suite of linked plans and strategies that, in the end, will tell you whether you can put a garage in your garden, whether the local farmer can build a hay store for his sheep and where the big housing developers will be allowed to build their little boxes for future families.  And the reality is that most people don't know much about this 'Local Plan Core Strategy' and even if they'd all been presented with a copy and asked for comment the answers wouldn't tell us whether or not the Council has a plan that makes sense.

And worse than this, there's a whole library of documentation that most of us simply haven't the time to read and understand - they're listed here and list some seventeen separate studies, reviews and assessments. This, dear reader, is the "evidence base" and once we've written and decided on the plan it will be forgotten about (until it is poured over by some planning lawyers in the search for a loophole permitting their client to do the development he wants). On top of this library of documents there are other important background documents - most notably on housing - as well as a set of assessments relating to sustainability, health and habitat regulations.

And this is where the matter of counting birds comes into the discussion. In order to prepare a 'Habitat Regulations Assessment' (HRA) for Bradford's 'Special Areas of Conservation' (SACs) and 'Special Protection Areas' (SPAs) the council appointed consultants who, among other things, went out and counted birds. Not every bird but certain types of bird so as to arrive at an idea of how many of them are nesting on the protected moorland and where those birds are getting to in their daily wanderings for food and fun.

The HRA screening assessment identified a range of likely significant effects on the North and South Pennine Moorlands that could result from the Core Strategy for Bradford district. This list has been reviewed and rationalised, with new impact categories added as part of the Appropriate Assessment procedure.

Now if you own land within the protected area or (and this is more important) on the fringes of that protected area then the chances are that the birds nesting there will, at some point in their foraging, look for food on your land. So the regulations (courtesy of the wonderful and caring European Union) require the people drawing up the plans to find out where those birds are scratting for seeds, worms or (in the case of Merlins and Peregrines) swooping for larger and juicier prey. So some ornithologist sorts are sent out with binoculars and a clipboard to count the birds.

The problem is that there are different views as to how you count birds and, just as importantly, how you work out from how many birds you see how many birds there actually are. So the EU provides a convenient cop out:

If a preliminary scientific evaluation shows that there are reasonable grounds for concern that a particular activity might lead to damaging effects on the environment, or on human, animal or plant health, which would be inconsistent with the protection normally afforded to these within the European Community, the Precautionary Principle is triggered.

“Decision-makers then have to determine what action to take. They should take account of the potential consequences of taking no action, the uncertainties inherent in the scientific evaluation, and they should consult interested parties on the possible ways of managing the risk. Measures should be proportionate to the level of risk, and to the desired level of protection.

Helpful eh? It's clear to me (as a result of the entirely circular argument in the regulations) that we're quite simply asking the planning system to do something that the system cannot do. Or rather something that can't be done at the level of the strategic plan. At the level of the individual scheme it is possible to establish whether the damage from development can be mitigated (or better still prevented) - we saw this recently in Denholme where the quarrying development at Buck Park was designed in such as way as not to disturb a peregrine nesting site or in Cullingworth where an orchid site was relocated.

The Council is placed in something of a dilemma - after all the regulations require that the impact on SACs and SPAs is assessed and that this assessment will inform the decisions about future development in affected areas. The problem is that we cannot assess every possible development on every possible site - not just because it would be onerous but because it is, in effect, impossible. As a result the bird counters are sent out, they count birds and using this data an estimation is made about whether any development at all would result in that 'damaging effect'.

Clearly there's a long line from complete loss of habitat through to no change. The Council has to guess where on this line is the right point to set the degree of protection especially for sites that aren't within the actual boundary of the SAC or SPA. As ever with planning this judgement is much better done at the level of the individual application but unfortunately the love of grand strategy results in assessments that are, to all intents and purposes, meaningless. We commission expensive studies that can only tell us that there are protected species and a protected eco-system on the moors, that the birds concerned leave the moors to feed and that development might have a negative impact on their behaviour.

This is just one example of the problem with the local plan system - the same problems are repeated across the system. Matters that would be better left to the individual application are instead dealt with through complicated models and systems that don't get close to the true picture - not because the people creating the models and systems are stupid or wrong but because we're asking for something that can't really be appraised at the scale in question.

I am not a fan of strategic planning - we need a policy framework that is accessible locally but the process of second guessing the market or the development of the economy really doesn't work. This, of course doesn't stop planners wanting to try and square the circle - here's Andrew Lainton explaining why, in planning, black is white:

...more and better planning leads to more land for growth, and growth that benefits everyone rather than just the rentier elite that funds bodies like the Policy Exchange.  An elite that doesn’t want planning to succeed as its main income stream is through restricting access to land and charging everyone else for the privilege. 

Now Andrew is a planner so we might expect an argument for more planning. And that's an interesting debate. But planning is always and everywhere about control - about the "possibility of a planned and shaped market" as he puts it. This means that access to land is restricted to the uses determined in the plan - precisely the things that 'rentier' elite want. Andrew is right when he attacks the degree to which our economy is warped by property prices and accompanying speculation but this system is in large part a consequence of the very planning that he wants to promote.

There is an important debate going on here that isn't served by simply dismissing planning in its entirety or by saying that liberalisation is a bad route to allowing the "land for growth and growth that benefits everyone" to which Andrew alludes. Some want a strategic approach where the Whitehall planner's pen circles the places for expansion and a new generation of new towns - they'll call them "garden cities" of course - is born. Others want a more organic approach based on making it a little easier to develop on a small scale, to permit the negotiation of human scale extension to smaller communities and to use the value from those developments as capital for the re-use of now redundant land elsewhere.

The counting of birds tells us that the strategic planning approach doesn't work. We knew that, of course, as we saw the repeated failure of housing need assessments to recognise choice or the dynamics of human behaviour. But the little tale of Bradford's HRA reminds us again why the local plan system isn't fit for its purpose and why the result of strategic planning is a good living for planning consultants and a fine feast for lawyers. Nowhere in all of this are we really considering the birds or the humans who live in the same space as those birds.

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Away for a while...

Not only am I away for a few days but I am also suffering from some form of dread lurgy. So I leave you with a picture of the World's Gayest Bull.

I shall be on the marshes which means loads of bird life - some of which I might recognise although to be honest one sandpiper looks much like the next sandpiper - or is it a knot?

While I'm away please don't overthrow the government - I wouldn't want to miss my go on the barricades (or up against the wall depending on the precise circumstances).

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Symbiosis....

Gardeners know that, as you dig down comes the robin. For sure, that robin's mostly interested in the worms and grubs you're turning up - with the prospect of goodies from the earth. But he's also a friend - we feel joined in our labour by part of nature.

The robin lives in our garden because it's managed. We turn the soil unearthing food, we build sheds to nest in, we plant trees and bushes to roost in and, when the weather's bad we put down food. And that robin thrives - along with his brother, the blackbird and cousin, the wren. It's worth coping with the cat to live in a place of abundance.

This symbiosis - our pleasure for the robin's food and shelter - is central to our relationship with nature. It isn't the relationship of the 'bunny-hugger' - oo-ing and ah-ing at the pretty birds. The robin isn't an especially friendly chap but an aggressive, territorialist. Woe betide any other robin that wanders onto his patch!

No, this is a symbiosis of appreciation and recognition, of impermanence, of interdependency and, at the bottom, self-interest.

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Severn Estuary - a quiet victory dance

The Severn Estuary is one of the most important estuarine environments in Europe. Home to a vast range of migratory and local birds as well as the insects and sea life that maintain those flocks geese, clusters of waders and assorted great wanderers of the seas and skies. It is also home to one of the most famous bores in the world - not a unique feature but still one of the wonders of Britains Rivers.

Slimbridge - at the heart of the estuary - is the birthplace of modern wildlife conservation as the brainchild of naturalist, Sir Peter Scott:

Slimbridge is home to an astounding array of wildlife including the world's largest collection of swans, geese, and ducks.

Yet, the emerging green industry lobby wished to destroy all this - to flood Slimbridge meaning it's purpose would be no more, to wash over the mudflats at Weston damaging important ecosystems and to make it so the great bore will never be seen again. This rape of natural England is being done in the name of 'climate change' and 'green energy' - an entire and unique natural environment destroyed so people can have cheap electricity.

Fortunately - at least for now - the Government has decided not to proceed with proposals for a 'Severn Barrier'. At present the reason is the lack of investment finance but I hope that, in time, we'll come to realise that it's no improvement if 'green' energy sources involve the destruction of unique habitats, the pillage of an entire ecosystem and unknown collateral damage to the wider environment.

We can perhaps start now to realise the need for an energy policy founded on commonsense, practicality and respect for the environment rather than one driven by 'green' fundamentalism. And that means nuclear power as well as wind, tide and water. Oh yes and some of that terrible oil and coal too!

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Can't work out whether or not this is parody?

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Taken from the comments on this post from Alex Tabarrock (a mighty fine blogger for those who like their economics 'in your face'):

Humans are trashing the planet. Who's allowing us to do that? Why is being allowing to happen, and who is benefitting from the destruction? One specific environmental disaster is bad enough, especially if you're the bird who is drenched in oil and dies a painful death. But it is the accumulated affects of human actions that will ultimately lead to ecological collapse (such as Global Warming), and nuclear war fought over resources. George Mason University will be destroyed in the blast and you will die. No cat will be needed to put you out of your misery.

Mind you the bizarre debate about how many birds are kiled by cars that runs through these comments makes me wonder whether the whole thing might be an elaborate construct created to provide me with pleasure. Either that or eco-obsessives are a bunch of loons. Make your choice?

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Why you shouldn't drop litter...

This photograph was taken by @birdblogger and his comments (with some other photos are on his blog). A truly awful reminder why we shouldn't drop litter.

The souls of dead civil servants....

There they are, dressed in their dapper pin stripes. Great flocks of them commuting every day from suburbs into the city. If you have ever wondered where the souls of dead civil servants go, look no further than the starling.

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Wednesday Whimsy: Jackdaws and Red Wine

I tried to take some pictures of jackdaws playing round the towers in Volterra. I say play because - despite the anthropomorphism - I can think of no better word. Swooping, diving and soaring - chasing eachother, making patterns and showing off. Sadly my little camera wasn't up to the job so you get this slightly wonky picture of red wine in a glass!

Sometimes I wish I could slow down a little - stop trying to trim five minutes off the journey home, worry less about cramming in a couple more meetings into a day and just relax. But it ain't like that - life is crazy. We run ourselves ragged with squeezing the last ounce of sweat from the day. Why do we chase around rather than watch the jackdaws playing, sit back in our chair and drink red wine (and, if you wish, smoke a fine cigar or a comforting pipe)?

Perhaps I can see the darkness at the end of our tunnel of light? Maybe changing the world palls a little with realising that it's none of my business? Whatever's going on we do need - sometimes - to step outside, see the sun, the rain and the magic of nature's glory. We need to lift our eyes from grey tarmac, shiny shopfront and showy celebrity. To look on the world and say - this is a fine place, a wonder of beauty, magnificence and splendour. The snowy mountain, the green meadow, the blue lake, the yellow corn, the red flash of a bird or butterfly.

...and watch the jackdaws. They understand the world!