refore they were the defenders of the environment. However what was emerging was a forestry industry that planted exotic Eucalyptus trees and not native rain forest trees rendering them almost useless for all but the most adaptable of local fauna. Those areas grew quickly but then of course inevitably they too were clear felled. Whilst this did not, with the possible exception of Southern Lapwing, cause a great problem for waders, it shows that afforestation needs to be viewed with some scepticism when it comes to environmental improvement.
Worse still are the schemes where exotic forests are cultivated to the detriment of natural habitats. In the North York Moors of England for example the scars of dark green plantations stood out like acne on the face of a fresh young teenager, somehow menacing in their march across the more open landscapes desired and required by the moorland birds. The ribbons of dry stone walls and heather being engulfed by the advancing army.
In Iceland too forests have replaced heathland. These Icelandic heathlands are a veritable goldmine for those in search of breeding waders. Eurasian Golden Plovers, Eurasian Whimbrel and Common Snipe are dominant and in the more humid areas they will be joined or replaced by Black-tailed Godwits, Dunlins and Common Redshanks. The common thread that links all these birds is of course that they are not forest birds so replacing their natural habitat with trees has a devastating effect on their local population eventually wiping it out completely.
In the same way afforestation occurs in Africa where large areas of scrub and savannah are covered with trees. These trees have an entirely negative impact on grassland bird diversity even in relatively small projects. Studies have shown that if you compare the diversity of bird species that benefit or otherwise from afforestation, grassland communities possess more species and are richer in both endemics and threatened species than those to be found in plantations. The species that depend on these grasslands in terms of waders are many Lapwings particularly Blacksmith and Crowned, and Coursers such as Temminck’s, Burchell’s and Double-banded.
‘Ah! Those Autumn mornings and evenings! How I love them! What stirring scenes among the birds I can recall; what stores of notes I made! How vividly some of them return; incidents of twenty years ago, among what were peaceful fields and wooded valleys then, but now, alas, the busy centre of a score industries. All those mighty trees, where the Rooks and Ring Doves bred, have bowed their noble heads before the axe; all the brushwood and the thickets and the close-set hedgerows, where the Warblers and Finches nested, are gone; all the tangled ditches and hollows, sacred to the Grasshopper Lark, and the Jack Snipe, Levelled away! … No longer does the air resound with song at morn and even; all the feathered hosts are gone; the trout-stream is little more than an open drain; and one of the fairest sylvan scenes that ever eye of man gazed upon is now a desolation of bricks and mortar, and a wilderness of tall chimney shafts, factories and workshops! My ruined Aviary!’
This passage was written by Charles Dixon in his book The Annals of Bird life – a year book of British Ornithology in 1890 and it just goes to show that nothing changes. It could have been written by any one of a countless number of people who can remember places that they frequented, as a younger person, full of birds and song that now are gone; replaced by urban sprawl.
Human Population Expansion
Stand on any motorway bridge at rush hour, spend an hour or so in any international airport lounge, or take a look at one of those live population counters on the internet, and you will soon realise there is an awful lot of people in the world and that the number is getting bigger every minute.
This seemingly unstoppable growth is probably the single biggest problem the world faces as it generates a need for ever growing, ever stronger, and ever more stable economies to support all those people. In addition these economies bec