Fox Activity

 Fox cubs are usually born from March. Lots of fox prints first footing on Blacka overnight.

Liking Lichen

Not so much as to make a study of it and get to learn the Latin names and work out whether this one which looks a bit like that one is actually the same at a different stage or something quite different. Put it down to laziness. With more patience and time we might start here.

 

But we need something to cheer us on these mornings that chill to the bone just when we're most in need of sun and comfort and promise. So we'll just enjoy the variety and strangeness.

Lichens are thriving in these conditions on the stone walls and on the birch trees among the mosses and bark crevices and reaching out into the saturated air around them.

But setting out to like and enjoy the natural world without wishing to label and identify everything is a quite worthy and defensible position, although easier to slip into if the subject is daunting to start with.

There is a process in human relations with nature that leads inexorably to something questionable. We start off by observing and enjoying. That leads on to identifying, labelling and classifying. Others take this up by managing, controlling and exploiting. Before long some of us are exerting a right to change and modify. From there much of the wonder and love of nature that was evident in the innocent days of first discovery have evaporated and been replaced by a strictly utilitarian view that’s not a long way from the Peak Park’s vision of a ‘working landscape’.

That’s not intended to be anti-scholarship. Many enthusiasts are very wise and balanced. One rather nice piece on lichens can be read here.

The Culling List

Here is a start on my list of ten things in and connected with the countryside which should be culled, well before deer and other wildlife are taken out.

It constitutes some of the pre-conditions for the establishment of a countryside and a national park which is truly inspiring and serves not 'the economy' (i.e. powerful vested interests) but that part of people's lives that needs a break from the economy.

So here's the draft culling list.

1 The bloated wildlife conservation and landscape management industries
2 The shooting lobby
3 Press releases from the above
4 Those who cry out "All must be managed"
5 Those who run sham public consultations or take on the role of facilitators
6 Sheep, cattle and their conservation grazing
7 Agri-environment grants and their target culture
8 Stock Fences, Farm hurdles, Plastic feed bags, Farm machinery on public land claimed to be 'wilderness'!!!
9 Chain saws and their itchy fingered operatives.
10 Powered vehicles and their drivers with no respect for the tranquility that true countryside needs if it is to be different to urban living.
11 Lobbyists and public relations advisers for such as the NFU who seek to skew any debate on the future of our landscape towards vested interests.

Woops! Can't count.

Plans and Money

Some people seem to be able to find money for projects that are worse than useless. As I've often said the land around Blacka would benefit immeasurably if the managers would just go away and let nature get on with it. There have to be places free from farming - the industry responsible for the greatest degrading of our wildlife and landscape.   It's not clear if this is something else or the early launch of the SMP Master Plan that the partners and their website tell us will be launched in late spring? Whatever it is there seems no shortage of management money for this area just a massive shortage of judgement and imagination. If Sheffield's council tax money is going into this when libraries and children's centres are threatened with closure I'm wondering whether those who live in the Town Hall have any idea of priorities. Looking at the picture it's possible that all is achieved through a kind of old pals act. Certainly Sheffield should make the very best of its countryside but not through intrusive management. Protect it from being exploited by all means. But creating habitats? Has anyone ever considered that some habitats can be not worth creating? Or that some create themselves? Or that wildlife is not well served by subsidy funded meddlers?

Alarum! Don't Panic! Life on Earth Threatened by Bambi!

Cervidaeophobia?! ... (I may have invented a word)

Nothing says more about the sad state of the debate about our countryside than the current news mania about deer. Dumbing down comes no dumber.

A combination of academics anxious to get their names into the news, conservation industry public relations officers and 24 hour news purveyors needing a story try desperately to create an alarmist avalanche in the minds of a confused public. In this they feed into the control and command mentality of the farming industry. The consequence is that millions of people who’ve never or hardly ever seen deer become convinced there’s some kind of super-plague of wild creatures about to destroy all that’s best about our country and create pile-ups on the roads.

To get closer to the truth consider:

1 Deer are among the few mammals that have survived the relentless wildlife persecution of many centuries by man who has himself recklessly killed off all their natural predators apart from man himself (and he's had a pretty good try at that). Those persecutions have been fed by just such alarmist distortions as the present one.

2 The deer that are the subject of this paper are around Thetford Forest in Norfolk where the ‘problem’ species are such as the introduced muntjac.

3 When people ask me to show them the deer in the hills and woods around Sheffield it’s hard to find them and they are often disappointed. We do however see many people often in cars or on mountain bikes sometimes behaving irresponsibly but never any suggestion they should be culled.

4 There are far too many farm livestock in these parts who do far more damage than the deer to habitats having been selectively bred to have compulsive and insatiable appetites. See many posts on this blog.

5 Not so long ago I sent in a Freedom of Information request to local constabularies asking for the numbers of incidents and reports concerning deer on the roads (mentioned in today’s news item). Reports of sheep and cattle on the roads were frequent. Only one mention was made of deer. I myself have driven regularly on these roads and never seen deer on the highway but have many times had to brake sharply because of sheep. For that reason and others I've lobbied for speed reductions - with little effect. Have we really got to have a sanitised countryside just so that people can do 100 mph on the motorway?

6 There are those in the land managing and farming industries whose command and control mentality is akin to the health and safety lobby warning children from climbing trees. They will always spread alarms about road accidents, disease, ticks, environmental harm (from farmers!!), and potential damage to people’s rose beds.
7 Dim and uncritical people in the media who care little for accuracy but a lot more for a good story with striking pictures insist on showing scenes with red deer stags in relation to this item relating more to smaller and mostly non native deer. Don't ever trust anything you see or hear about on the media. If it's about wildlife or countryside matters it's almost certainly originated in a press release from an interested party.

Some interesting comments below the article on this in The Guardian.

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/21792340
http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/21792906
http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/21794723

Yet another issue where so-called experts need to be made accountable for their often dubious claims.

Unfortunately you can't just dismiss this kind of nonsense however silly it is because the kind of discourse it sets up in the minds of some semi rural and urban lowlife leads to incidents of poaching egged on by a feeling in the minds of the perpetrators that they are only doing what needs to be done. That's why these small minded blinkered academics are being irresponsible.

Coming soon on this blog: Ten Things That Should Be Culled. (suggestions welcome).

"Blacka Moor has been damaged by grazing with cattle", says expert.

Ian Rotherham is “an ‘expert’ on a range of environmental issues” according to the website of Sheffield Hallam University where he is Reader in Tourism and Environmental Change.

In a new book he is damning about SWT’s management of Blacka Moor.

According to Professor Rotherham,
“On Blackamoor, an upland local nature reserve[1] owned by Sheffield City Council but managed by Sheffield Wildlife Trust, the site has been damaged by grazing with cattle at inappropriate times of the year.” ....“One locally rare grassland plant, in part a reason the site was established as a reserve originally, has been virtually eradicated by summer grazing and the associated neutral grassland including several orchid species has been very badly degraded. The rare peat-bog flora, again a major reason for designation as a SSSI, has also been damaged and driven to localized extinction.”[2]

This all comes a bit late to my way of thinking. How long does it take for 'experts' to realise that putting farm livestock on land will turn it into farmland exploiting and ravaging its natural vegetation not to mention its essential character? And we should all know that it was farm-style exploitation that devastated our wildlife over several centuries but especially the last one.

The trouble is that academics in this field, of whom Prof Rotherham is just one, have encouraged students and others over the years to believe places like Blacka must be managed. They have sent these newly qualified and ill-educated young people out into the world believing it’s their mission to intervene here there and everywhere. Even our remote places which deserve to be allowed a break from the mad managing, gardening and farming tendencies have to take more punishment, leading to a miserably degraded vegetation where only those things thrive which serve the often indulgent interests of man.

Rotherham is one of the academics who’s obsessed with the idea of ‘cultural landscapes’, a committee concept if ever there was one, and something I've never seen satisfactorily defined. It comes down to a subjective decision about which landscape types you think are worth keeping and which not. Have grouse moors an absolute right to continue in perpetuity any more than the equally artificial 19th century slum housing or 1930s suburban gardens? All are products of man’s intervention and have their characteristic but limited range of wildlife. What other features qualify to be included in the ‘cultural’ definition? Is herbicide spraying considered to be a feature of cultural landscapes? Are plastic ruminant feed bags blowing about? Barbed wire fences? Mountain bikes and quad bikes? Poaching and fly tipping? Where do you start and where do you finish once you determine that cultural landscapes are the order of the day? An off roader might justifiably claim he is just pursuing his cultural preference. That is the kind of nonsensical position you get into when you devise these phoney concepts, sell your soul to the economy and abandon faith in the integrity of natural processes.

But his concern about poor management at Blacka Moor is unlikely to signal abandonment of his pet subject which is management using grazing. Like all managers he will claim that management going wrong simply means there should be more management. But guess what, this time it will be ‘the right’ kind. That’s why there are so many management theory books on the station bookstall.

[1] A bit misleading: Blacka Moor is a local 'nature reserve’, declared so by SWT, but not a Local Nature Reserve an official designation by Natural England.

[2] Ian D. Rotherham (2013) Summary & Conclusions. In Ian D. Rotherham (Ed.) Trees, Forested Landscapes and Grazing Animals: A European Perspective on Woodlands and Grazed Treescapes

Soft Views

Song thrushes calling out and promise of Spring. All who are up here before 7 am are even more smug than usual. We are bathed in gentle sunlight while all below are shivering in fog and likely to remain chilled until midday. This is one time when we are happy with a softer focus and no hard lines and contrasts. The birch branches have their pre-Spring red tips and there's a general alertness about all living things.