Letters to the Editors
Magpies "aren't very nice"
Dear Eds
If anyone thinks managing the magpie population (See last month's Crier) ie
- keeping numbers down by shooting some of them - is cruel, against nature and
unnecessary they don't understand that the countryside we live in has not
been left to its own devices since before the stone age. It has been a managed
landscape since then and whenever anything in the food chain expands out of
proportion to the balance of numbers it threatens the whole. (There's an
argument for saying mankind is the worst in this respect, but I don't think
as a species we're particularly keen on facing up to that one). The best
part of a century ago farmers would pay for dead sparrows and rats per head to
encourage keeping the numbers of these species from becoming disproportionate
to the whole. Rats we have never conquered, probably never will; no-one would
consider trying to eradicate completely the massively dwindling stocks of
sparrows that once threatened crops when they were seeded in a way that would
allow birds to consume the planted crop. Why? We no longer see them as a threat
because the balance has shifted so far against the sparrow that when I saw some
in my garden last week it was worthy of note. I see then in other parts of the
village but rarely here; and also, we know the attempts of the Chinese last
century to destroy sparrows completely led to ecological disaster as the insect
population formerly kept in check by the sparrows ruined crops instead once the
sparrows had been destroyed..
So the magpie, then. A predator and scavenger with no major predator above to keep its numbers down, the expansion of numbers in recent years means competition for food put pressure on its food sources. If you want to keep the numbers of magpies up while not losing the small bird populations whose nests are robbed by the black and white menace, the alternative has to be for you to go round country roads at speed trying to kill anything wild you can see. Magpies love road kills. Food it doesn't have to make much effort to find.
But if that doesn't appeal, the alternative is to accept that once the agricultural ecology and economy were once but no longer all part of the same process; a farmer would then have no more need to explain to you why a magpie might need shooting than why the sun comes up and goes down again. But now it's different. In simple words: Magpies aren't very nice to other smaller wildlife. Nobody wants to get rid of them completely but nobody wants only magpies, jackdaws and rooks to be the main feathered wildlife (have you noticed the other two species have expanded considerably round here in the last few years? Not as predatory but not managed any more either) so the management of the landscape still needs to happen. (Yes, that does include Wicken fen. That's man-managed too.)
And I'm not a member or a supporter of the countryside alliance, either. Regards to all country and townsfolk who like their wildlife alive, well-fed and thriving, not being shot for anyone's personal pleasure and not going extinct.
Eds'Note: The article was complaining about the use of the Larsen Trap, which is banned in Denmark. But interestingly the RSPB recently concluded a wide-ranging survey of the relationship between magpies and song-bird depletion and found none whatsoever. The ways of nature are mysterious, but it may be that man and his management schemes have a lot to learn from ecology's "prudent predator" , who never seems to forget about next years dinner! Perhaps this doesn't work out so well for carefully reared game-birds though, and Mark might be interested to know how much of magpie and bird-of-prey "black propaganda" originates from such as the "SongBird Survival Trust" , an organisation coincidentally founded shortly after the gamekeeper of its principle trustee and spokesman (heir to Norfolk's Holkham Estate) was convicted for shooting and poisoning kestrels he blamed for pinching his partridges.
But shoots vary widely in the way they are conducted and their respect for the indigenous wild-life, and there must be other solutions. There are a great many expert countrymen hereabouts, what do they think?
Doggies
Dear Editors,
An item in a recent issue of 'The Lady' magazine (my wife's, you
understand) reminded me of a verse I wrote about 1994, as below. There is a
gentle reminder of the unfortunately ever present street problem, but the last
stanza made the connection, as follows:- "New research shows that it is
possible to match a dog to its owner by looking at photographs. A group of
people who did not own dogs were invited to relate images of 41 dog owners to 3
possible breeds. The group made correct associations above the level of
chance" .
The conclusion was that, 'any shared qualities are only skin deep'!