At the current time 26% of the UK is designated as a national park, area of outstanding beauty or other form of protected area. However, to claim that this whole area is set aside for nature, is absurd. British national parks, unlike African ones still have human habitation within them.
Continue reading “The British government claims that 30% of of UK land is set aside for nature; what rubbish”Will Cop26 over shadow Kunming?
Cop26 is essential, there is no doubt, however there is a similarly important threat that the world is facing, and if we are not careful we wont start fighting it until it is too late.
What is Kunming there to fight? It is there to fight loss of biodiversity. Biodiversity is essential for the well running of ecosystems around the world which can often collapse without enough biodiversity.
Indeed, it is actually a problem that Kunming and Cop26 have been split. What we need is for the two fights to be fought side by side.
I have written in the past, about the problems for the Congo rainforest that have been caused by the local extinction of forest elephants. Without many of the wild animals that exist in these landscapes the forests and peat lands and grass lands will fail, releasing their huge carbon stocks back into the air.
These two must be tied together
Rhino poaching in the Kruger continues, decimating the population
When my wife and I spent 3 months on the edge of the Kruger in 2007, there was thought to be over 10,000 white rhino left in the park – around 90% of the worlds wild population.
Unfortunately, the poaching started in earnest in the following years, and now this population is thought to be 3,529, with about 268 black rhino.
Are we once again going to see the white rhino recover, or will this be its last few years?
It is absurd, as the horn doesnt have any of the medical benefits that it is claimed to have. The rhino is in danger of going extinct due to superstition.
Could mammoth help us fight climate change
Roughly speaking, there is 3000 billion tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere. This is a huge number, but then we have to remember that this is higher than at any other time in human history. Before humans were on the planet, there were time periods where carbon concentrations in the atmosphere were dramatically higher.
However, the problem is that there is thought to be roughly 1600 billion tonnes locked in the permafrost around the world. If global warming continues, this permafrost will melt and release its carbon stores – increasing the carbon concentration by around 50%.
This is obviously a point at which a significant amount of planet warming will be inescapable.
So what needs to happen?
In the past great mammals behaved in such ways that it largely kept this carbon locked in the soil. There were far fewer trees, vast grasslands often covering bogs.
If mammoths were to return, perhaps alongside woolly rhinoceros and bison the same processes could return allowing a far greater quantity of carbon to remain in the permafrost soil.
Will this happen? Who knows, though with the increasing quantity of carbon known to be locked in the Siberian soil, it seems worth giving it a go.
Should bears be returned to the wilds of the UK?
If you follow this blog regularly, you will have read yesterday and the day before on the reasoning for reintroducing Lynx and Wolves.
As I wrote, Lynx should be a simple choice. I believe that Wolves follow a similar logical route, that suggests that the reintroduction would either save or make far more money that any negatives might cost.
Bears are also locally extinct in the UK, how does the arguments about reintroducing them go? Well, I would argue that actually the cost of bear reintroduction would be significantly lower.
Continue reading “Should bears be returned to the wilds of the UK?”Should the wolf return to the wild in the UK
Yesterday, I wrote an article on whether the Lynx should be returned to the UK (returning to the home page will allow you to read it). As a medium sized cat, that hunts by ambush and restricts itself to forests, reintroducing it should be a relatively simple decision. The wolf does not fit into this framework. I do however believe that it too should return to its rightful place as part of the fauna of the wild Britain.
How are wolves similar to Lynx? Well they are predators. Indeed, like Lynx they are at the top of the food chain. So why do we need more than one predator?
Continue reading “Should the wolf return to the wild in the UK”Should the lynx return to the wild in the UK?
I am always interested when one of the biggest newspapers in the country, echo a sentiment that I have been talking about in this blog. Do not worry, I have no thoughts of grandeur – there news has not been prompted by this blog. However, it is highly encouraging when someone else is saying the same thing.
This blog is devoted to encouraging the protection and rejuvenation of wild ecosystems – through helping recognize the benefits and (obviously still a work in progress) hopefully creating a way to advertise you wilderness and have people visit (while you offer some service, from access to your land, to food or accommodation (tent or other)) thereby making the wildlife that people share their land with a financial benefit to the rest of the business.
However, one of the big issue that ecosystems have throughout the world, is holes as a result of human caused extinctions.
In the UK we have no predators larger than foxes and badgers. While these animals might take a tiny abandoned deer fawn, they are incapable of taking much more than this.
In the past we had wolves, bears and lynx.
I will talk about wolves and bears in other articles, but the lynx is different. This is an in depth look at some of the issues that are at play here. As such, this article is perhaps a bit longer that this blogs articles normally are.
Lynx are virtually exclusively forest animals, which means that for the most part they did not prey on our livestock. Indeed it has been shown that far more often than not, a Lynx walking the edge of a woodland will not attack sheep 10m outside. This idea is confirmed by what happens in Romania; there is a population of around 1300-2800 lynx (I realize that this population range is wide, this is the problem with dealing with a species rarely seen), and it is estimated that in the worst areas of the world lynx might kill a sheep once every 2 years – or an annual loss of perhaps 2000 out of 9 million that live in Romania.
Continue reading “Should the lynx return to the wild in the UK?”Third Sumatran rhino sanctuary moving forwards
The Sumatran rhino is critically endangered. Just a few years ago, the last of the mainland Sumatran rhino died, leaving only the population on Sumatra itself.
This new sanctuary will be in the Leucer ecosystem, close to where the remaining wild rhinos live.
Much help is needed to reverse the enormous declines in this population which humans have caused – and if this help is not forthcoming in the next few years this ancient species will be lost for good.
It is a good move, but time will tell if it will be good for the Sumatran rhino and its future
New youtube video! Beavers of Devon
Although we set up a seeanimalswild youtube website a few years ago, due to Covid and a few other reasons we havent been able to travel and so havent had any videos to put up.
That changed today.
During half term we took our children to east Devon and managed to see the beavers a few times. Here is the video amalgamation of those sightings.
Please do like and subscribe if you like them.
The youtube channel is meant to work with this website.
The video in question is hopefully the first in a long list for the website section “in the shadow of mankind”
Just 3% of worlds ecosystems classed as prestine!
Apart fro areas of the Congo and Amazon rainforests, and areas of Siberia canada and the Sahara, virtually all other ecosystems have been adversely affected.
Many ecosystems look intact, until we realize that important members from these ecosystems are missing. It is unfortunately true that humans are almost always responsible for these holes in the food web.
Continue reading “Just 3% of worlds ecosystems classed as prestine!”
English
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
