Watching The World Change

Whilst listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 the other day, I was struck by an observation that was so straightforward that it had actually passed me by. The programme was 'Saving Species' and the article was about the recent demise of some British birds. It was reported that many species of birds are in decline in this country, and the experts were putting forward various theories about why that should be. One suspect is the decline in insect life which means, of course, that there is less food for the birds to eat - hence fewer birds. There were several ecological speculations as to why insect life should be in decline, but meanwhile one scientist made the observation that you don't need expensive technical equipment to measure the volume of insect life (although of course, they do), you just need to take a drive across the country.

It's true - I hadn't noticed this myself until it was pointed out to me, but whereas twenty years ago a journey from say, Nottingham to Coventry would have resulted in the bonnet and the windscreen of my car becoming coated with the flattened corpses of dozens of insects, these days such wholesale slaughter is almost minimal. I spent this summer batting up and down the M1 motorway at high speeds, daily - but it failed to come to my attention that the death toll that such journeys had often caused in the past, had been greatly reduced. Thinking about it, I now see that to be the case.

It is very strange when we are suddenly made aware of environmental changes by things that we can witness ourselves and without needing to absorb the details of the scientists' technical data. I saw something similar a couple of years ago while I was on a skiing holiday in Argentière, France. There is a glacier in the valley, the extent of which can easily be seen with the naked eye. In the foyer of the hotel where I was staying, there was a photograph of a group of skiers taken in the 1930s. In the background of the photograph, behind the skiers' grinning faces squinting into the sun, the glacier is clearly visible. Glaciers - as you may know from your geography lessons - either grow in length, or they retreat. Comparing the scene in the photograph with the scene I had viewed earlier from the piste, it didn't take any scientist's data to tell me that the glacier had receded up the valley by at least a kilometre - in just seventy years! Quite chilling (or not, as the case may be).

So perhaps we should be wary of the mass of scientific data that we are presented with by the boffins. We often hear contradicting reports in the news - global warming is on the increase due to mankind's carelessness of consumption; global warming is not happening at all, but temperatures are just naturally fluctuating. The sun is getting hotter which strangely, will cause the earth to cool; the sun is actually cooling, which will cause the earth's gases to heat up the globe until it is out of control. It's all very contradictory and confusing - so maybe we should look with our own eyes if we want to know exactly what is happening? Well, of course there is a problem with this - sometimes, without the guidance of the experts, we run the risk of mis-interpreting the results we see. For example, if I had even noticed that the number of flies on my windscreen had reduced over the years, I might have concluded that this was as a result of the presence of more birds which were therefore eating up the normal insect supplies. This would have been wrong, of course.

I have been standing on my balcony this morning observing, the three dozen or so pigeons sitting benignly on the opposite rooftop. What does this tell me? That foodstuff for pigeons (often the detritus so carelessly cast down by the riff-raff of Nottingham) is on the increase, thereby allowing the pigeon population correspondingly to increase? Or is it simply that there are no young boys around with air-rifles anymore? Or maybe it is neither of these - perhaps it's just that one of Nottingham's many film-makers is shooting a re-make of Hitchcok's 'The Birds'?

Perhaps I should just start studying environmental issues instead, and become an expert myself? Stranger things have happened.