One of the bees in my second best bonnet was set buzzing this week on hearing that the RSPB had installed plastic ospreys at a site in Dorset. I discovered this by reading my copy of Plastics and Rubber Weekly. No joke - the link is here. The aim apparently is to lure back these birds to somewhere they've not visited for several hundred years. Well, it all fits well with the attempts to bring the nightjar and black grouse to Blacka and manage the northern moorlands as a thoroughly artificial landscape with no trees just a careful selction of favoured birds and miles of boring heather. I'm thinking of writing to the RSPB with a suggestion of my own. Why stop at plastic ospreys? Couldn't we have plastic darftord warblers, nightjars, and all the other species they so love at the expense of a more natural landscape ? Garden Gnomes have nothing on this. Why not a wholly plasticised landscape?
It's important to realise when you read and hear the uncritical coverage given to this kind of project in the media, that universities turn out thousands of graduates in soft courses connected with 'wildlife', ecology and landscape management and they've got to have something to do. It certainly would not do for the idea to get around that just leaving places to naturally change might be all that's needed. ( descends from soapbox)
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