at is compromised from the point of view of the natural world.
A secluded bay that becomes a promenade is no longer secluded. Either the birds that nested there before are forced to move on or stay and live in substandard conditions with increased disturbance and predator numbers, both the dogs and cats that the people bring with them deliberately and the rats, foxes and gulls that they attract inadvertently. Litter and pollution soon follow any development, at night light spills from the town alter the environment and provide light for predators to hunt by.
Coastal saltmarsh erosion
Saltmarshes provide a sponge to soak up tidal surges and storm floods. They naturally erode as the sea pounds them and as they retreat so the land behind them retreats changing the landscape in form if not structure. However sea walls and urbanisation prevent the saltmarsh from moving back into the land the result of that is the loss of saltmarsh and the sea reaching these unnatural barriers causing them damage.
Grasslands turned over to agriculture
Away from the acute crisis in the intertidal zone the change of land use for agriculture has, over the last few hundred years, had a more chronic effect; more like a death by a thousand cuts. The pace of this change has been accelerating at an alarming rate as nations become more developed, what were once pristine grassland habitats have been ploughed and converted to farmland and previously suitable wader habitats within farmed areas have been altered to allow greater yields.
Grasslands, such as the prairies and the Great Plains in North America, and the Pampas of South America were once important areas sustaining the huge flocks of Eskimo Curlews. The prairies also held healthy breeding populations of Mountain Plovers, which have been much depleted, and Long-billed Curlews which are retreating westwards. At least half of the Prairies are now under the plough and that which remains is seriously degraded by the lack of the great grazing herds of American Bison and the eradication of Prairie Dog towns. Likewise the Eurasian Steppes may have been crucial to the breeding success of the Slender-billed Curlew which too may well be extinct and the breeding Sociable Lapwings which are now Critically Endangered. The effects of their conversion to farmland have been devastating as it is breeding success that maintains a population, lack of success is the road to extinction.
Changes in agricultural practices
Where traditional agriculture had already existed, largely in harmony with wildlife, the great advances that technology and science has brought to the industry have caused great and often overwhelming changes.
Northern Lapwings have declined by eighty per cent across the UK in the last fifty years, particularly in southern England and Wales. This is not due to some horrific single piece of environmental vandalism like the Saemangeum project, nor over harvesting of their food supply as in the Delaware Bay Horseshoe Crab situation, no, the blame for the huge reduction in Northern Lapwing numbers in the UK recently can be placed firmly at the door of habitat loss due to changes in agricultural practices.
It is the lack of breeding success due to a paucity of suitable places and despoilment of those that remain, rendering them unsuitable and unsafe, that is undoubtedly driving the numbers down. The species needs a variety of habitats in which to rear its young. Among these are open ground for nesting and incubation and longer vegetation for hiding the young when they have hatched. These habitats were lost at an alarming rate due to cessation of rotation of crops and mixed farming practices.
It’s all about the maths, and logic will tell you that a stable population relies on each adult being able to replace itself in its lifetime. If a pair can bring off two fledglings a year and survive for the average four and a half years, and if just two of those nine chicks can outlive their parents, which doesn’t seem like too much of an ask even in the harsh natural world then, as a species, they have cracked it. Sad