Plight of the Curlew

Having read the article on Curlew conservation in the June edition (not May - & received in April! Thank you for correcting me John!) of Birdwatching magazine, I'm left thinking... and the declines continue after 45 years of my adult lifetime, reading the same stories year after year & 45 years of increased conservation "industry" efforts to combat biodiversity losses.  It's simply not working. Efforts have only slowed down the process. Not enough people in the community are concerned enough, too few take it seriously enough or view it as important enough, even relevant enough for them to embrace the necessary changes required to reverse the continuing pattern of environmental destruction & depletion. Too many appear to me to be completely disengaged & disinterested in humanities negative impact upon the planet. Only when the whirlwind wipes out such folks' way of life, will they sit up & take notice. Even then, the response may be; as long as I can give the dog a run through the last remaining breeding Little Tern colony, I'll be OK. Legislation is required to unfortunately prescribe what needs to happen with the way we use the land. And building 300,000 new homes per year in the UK for 30 years, isn't part of the prescription, however badly the homes may be needed. What it does confirm, is the scale of the political unwillingness to address the central cause of our planetary woes. PJ

Curlew......  It is concerning as no developer (windfarm, forestry, etc) appears to accept that the loss of even one pair of breeding curlew will affect the general population, because it's just one pair.  Each application is considered in isolation from any other application which results in a slow decline in the overall population and the gradual loss of single pairs. They and the planners do not realise that one application loses just one pair but every other development also may lose only one pair without regard to the overall drop in breeding pairs.  Whatever happened to Strategic Environmental Assessment as was proposed some decades ago? Where applicants had to consider the effects of adjoining proposals and the wider effects of these developments on the natural environment. And forestry for example affects the breeding birds within approximately 200 metres of the edge of that forest.  But that isn't considered. The whole system is heavily biased towards developers at the expense of wildlife, of any form. David Hawker