<yoink!> - I’m grabbing this quote from an article @GreyShuck posted: “There is a real need for us to inspire people to connect with nature and to make biodiversity a central part of their lives – particularly in urban areas and less affluent communities” Well I did just that the other day, in a l-o-n-g wait for a bus to turn up. There was a small raptor perching on the streetlights, avidly hunting just before sunset. One time he came over into the trees and dived off them into the undergrowth, but didn’t seem to catch anything. It was blunt-tailed, probably a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. This was right on the edge of the urban and less affluent community I live in, around a multi-laned highway. [Re the quote - why in “less affluent areas”?] 🪶
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My take would be:
Why in urban areas?
Well over 50% of the population of the UK lives in urban areas now. I was a warden for a remote nature reserve for some years. We would host various groups staying overnight in our hostel - some there for wildlife watching or similar and some because it was close to a nearby arts festival. A lot of the arts groups were mainly urban in background and I could very clearly see the difference. So many people in these groups simply didn’t understand what they were looking at around the reserve and didn’t place any value on it. I recall one jazz trumpeter who had never spent much time outside of London. 48 hours in to his stay he was climbing the walls. You could hear birds singing. According to him “It’s not natural!”.
Politicians make policies and allocate funding in light of what their constituents value. If people don’t value wildlife the little funding that we currently have is just going to be cut and cut.
Why less affuent areas?
If you are living in a less affluent area, chances are there will be fewer greenspaces around you - and there is plenty of research that shows that access to greenspace improves heath and welbeing in a whole range of ways. Chances are that those greenspaces won’t be as well looked after. And chances are that you are going to have less money and less time to spend on transport to take you further afield: to spend time in the countryside or nature reserves where you can connect to wildlife.
Yes, it really does all boil down to what people’s values are.
It’s great when you catch a little wildlife in an urban area. There are ravens near me, nesting in the cranes of the docks - there are quite a few crows around but I definitely saw one of the ravens once flying high in a straight line away from the docks with a kind of grim purpose.
Yes, it makes all the difference to any day. That reminded me of the raven (or jackdaw?) having a half-hearted peck at the raptor, at one point. It made zero impact. That fuzzy edge where the industrial world meets with the natural, fascinates me. It’s like a tide-line.
It’s magical.
Inside the dock complex is a kind of bird sanctuary that’s only accessible by ornithologists with passes (I know one of the leading amateurs in the region who does a lot of cataloguing who has been) and you’ll occasionally see a flock of more exotic migratory birds dive over the fence heading to the beach for a forage.
I dropped a friend off at his home which is on a side street off a busy road with pubs and restaurants, behind a tower block and right in front of me two foxes started running around playing with each other. I’d only ever seen individual urban foxes on two occasions before.
I assume the docks are still active. That’s the beauty of these large spaces where public access is limited. The creatures make the most of it while they can.
I’ve never seen more than one urban fox at a time, yet. My time will come, when I least expect it, like it did for you.
It’s the Seaforth Docks in Liverpool so it’s still very busy - it had large expansion for post-Panamax containers, so it’s got even taller cranes. Apparently ravens also roost in the Anglican cathedral.
I saw the two foxes a stones throw from the dock fence and my previous sighting of a large fox crossing the road to the beach was only a few tens if meters away on a parallel road. A friend informs me that there’s a large family of foxes that live in and around those docks and they are left alone by the dockers because they eat the rats.
So there is clearly quite a thriving ecology taking advantage of that interface between industrial, residential and beach environments. The Seaforth Nature Reserve is just on the other side of the fence and, despite being in a busy dock, there’s not much human interference.
Pop-up ecology!
