Mid summer birders- hang in there

Flaming June already and the sun is out! Even the ducks are taking the plunge to get out of the heat.

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Diving duck

Though traditionally a very quiet month for bird rarities, sheepwash turned up a little egret again last week on the wader scrape.

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Unfortunately the weather also brings out the crowds and wretched 2.4 children and wet dog in the droves, making visiting such West Midlands  “wildlife havens” a fairly miserable experience. Sandwell Valley- now a poor man’s theme park come bike racing track and Chasewater – destructive water sports R us are two examples of how local authorities are now obsessed with pulling in human crowds. It takes a full day for the poor rangers just to clear up the litter left behind from a weekend- but the councillors and higher managers don’t really see that in “the vision” do they?

It is a strange thing however that with the former site a local dogging Mecca, that the powers that be have never decided to lock up the car parks at night to stop it. “It will just send the problem somewhere else” is the usual excuse for apathy- well  good it will send it away from a wildlife reserve. I prefer to see badgers than a load of perplexed singular blokes stepping out of the undergrowth “looking” for them. If I choose to examine a leaf on a tree I want to know that the slime underneath it has been made by a slug and not something else. Sometimes one has to wonder if the people making the decisions including the police are daytime apathetic observers or really nightime active participants. There’s plenty of room on the council house car parks at night after chucking out time!

Wildlife has always been the poor relation in the local authority leisure department budget- no money to be made there, now with even more of an excuse to do less in this so called recession that we have supposed to have been living in, and so the politician cares more about the Jeremy Kyle crew, so long as they get to their food bank on time and know how to apply for benefits- especially the many available for shagging like rats – that’s where the money goes. In fact how perverse that animals that live amongst us are treated in the same category but lower down the pecking order than libraries and crown green bowling.

But hang in there wildlife lovers, half way there and come mid September the hordes will go back to watching Jezza on ITV2+1 after going to the shops for vodka and fags in their pyjamas, and nature will have to buckle down again to recover in the shivering  grip of Winter.

With corrupt housing developers and their political well paid fixers building on every available patch of green left in the towns as a direct result of politically approved mass immigration without mandate,  this in a perverse way does indeed leave hazardous waste sites as “safe havens.” Some comfort.

Hoorah for Rattlechain lagoon! I might just get my pied pipe out.

 

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Peace and quiet at last.

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