Are environment groups doing the government’s dirty work?

I was interested to read the article by Nicholas Milton in the Guardian here about how the wildlife organisations who are part of the umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link, are, by implication, doing the governments dirty work by looking for ‘efficiencies’ (aka cuts) in the environment budget.

I declare an interest here: I’m a Trustee of  Wildlife and Countryside Link, Pond Conservation is a Link member and, as part of the process Nicholas complains about, I’ve made suggestions about some things that could be done differently, and better.

Actually our ideas are one of 9 suggestions that the wildlife movement has put together to do things differently or better. I’ll reproduce the watery suggestion in full here which is under the heading of Focus on upstream solutions (warning – this stuff is often in impenetrable language!).

So our proposal is:

“Increase the focus of water management policies and agri-environment spend on upper catchments and smaller waters (headwater streams, ponds, ditches) to deliver freshwater ecosystem services, biodiversity and statutory gains. Inclusion of smaller waters offers the potential to re-establish clean, unpolluted water as a common feature across many landscapes.”

Translated, what this means is: make a lot of new high quality ponds – 80% of those still existing being degraded – and do something to protect little streams which are in a similarly parlous condition. And the resons for doing this? It’s an easy win compared to fixing huge rivers and big lakes, both little ponds and little streams are very important habitats (ponds support more species than rivers or lakes) and above all, its do-able.

Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but it’s cheap too. For the cost of one desalination plant in London we could make 100,000 clean water, unpolluted, ponds – roughly what England has lost over the last 50 years.

Getting a lot of  high quality watery habitat back into the countryside would be a great thing, and a remarkable achievement - especially given that we’re not likely to see much change in the quality of bigger rivers or lakes in the near future. If a lot of new top notch ponds and more clean headwater streams are an outcome of the cuts, I’d be quite happy.

Are Large Red Damselflies rare?

If you saw the Sunday Telegraph article on ponds this weekend you might be wondering whether Large Red Damseflies are rare, or at least creatures that are pretty uncommon (like the other animals shown: Water Voles, Natterjack Toads and Great Crested Newts).

Well, the answer is: of course not. Large Reds are found in about 1 in 5 of all ponds in the countryside, and in lots of garden ponds too – in fact in Abingdon we had them in half the ponds.

But there is a more interesting story here too. In high quality unpolluted ponds we find Large Red Damseflies in two-thirds of all ponds – so they should be almost everywhere. The fact that they aren’t is probably something to do with the terrible state of most ponds.

And in case you’re wondering, like the people who came up to me at the Game Fair at the weekend brandishing copies of the Sunday Telegraph and rather irately saying ‘I thought this was your project!, the article is indeed referring to the Million Ponds Project. Though you might not realise this from the press release issued by the Environment Agency!

So just to remind them: here’s a gardener and some other bloke in a suit launching the project!