Nightingale under catastrophic threat

There is no other bird that sings so deeply, so full of ecstasy as the nightingale. The melody is endlessly varied. Nightingales are best known for their singing talent. In the spring, they sing during the day as well as at night. As a youngster growing up in East Kent, to hear the nightingale sing in Spring was almost as commonplace as hearing blackbird, song thrush or robin. No longer.

Over the years the geographical range of the nightingale has shrunk. Habitat loss, changes in farming practices, climate change and hunters have contributed to the decline of this beautiful song bird. In the United Kingdom this migrant from Africa will no longer be found anywhere north of a line drawn from the Humber to the Severn estuary. Hotspots for the nightingale are still to be found in the south of England and it is now more important than ever to ensure that these sites are protected, lest we are to see the ultimate extinction of this bird from our territory.

Lodge Hill on the Hoo Peninsula of the North Kent coast is a nationally protected wildlife site and is home to a nationally-important population of nightingales. And yet, Medway Council’s Planning Committee has approved an Outline Planning Application by Land Securities on behalf of the Ministry of Defence for the development of 5,000 homes on the 330 hectare Chattenden Woods and Lodge Hill Special Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI). This decision, announced on the 4th of September, will directly destroy 144 hectares of the SSSI, one of the largest losses of a SSSI since the Wildlife and Countryside Act came into force in 1981. The decision is in direct conflict with the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

Lodge Hill is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), designated by the Government’s statutory authority for the natural environment - Natural England. It was designated for the dense breeding population of nightingales that comprise more than one per cent of the entire UK population. Between 1995 and 2008, the numbers of UK nightingale population more than halved (53 per cent).

For Medway Council to approve this proposal is both arrogant and contemptible and shows a complete disregard for Natural England’s site designation. It puts greed and truculence before any consideration for conservation, before any consideration for the preservation of a song bird, that should be paramount.

If this development goes ahead it will be a crime of magnitude that would lead to irretrievable loss. It must not be allowed to happen. 

A Review on Martha

The Passenger Pigeon was once the most numerous bird on the planet, probably by a huge margin. The statistics that Mark Avery recounts on population size, breeding colonies, roosts and migrating flocks are simply mind-boggling, completely dwarfing anything we can see today. There were almost certainly somewhere between five and ten billion Passenger Pigeons in North America early in the nineteenth century.

Mark Avery provides a very useful digest of the vast literature on this species and comments on various aspects of Passenger Pigeon ecology, its dependence on native broadland forest and its mast production and statistics on population dynamics. He discusses habitat loss and the unbelievable slaughter of the birds (for food) in the 2nd half of the 19th century.

The story is a tragic one and well told, the story of a man-made extinction. Martha was the last surviving Passenger Pigeon and died 100 years ago in captivity, in Cincinatti zoo. Martha's message to us, so well reinforced by Avery, is that we should do our utmost to make sure that such an event cannot happen again.

Essential reading for anyone concerned with conservation, habitat change, loss of important food plants, modern farming methods and indiscriminate shooting. It is easy to say that the Turtle Dove will not become the new Passenger Pigeon - but can we be sure?