Birds

Keeping their promises Sir: Matt Ridley is right to assert the conservation role of gamekeepers (‘Ruffled feathers’, 30 May). They, like farmers and crofters, know wading birds are integral to Britain’s rich cultural landscapes. All ground-nesting birds benefit from culling generalist predators. I do this on my croft at my own expense because I love waders and passerines. Where costs cannot be borne by individual goodwill or taxpayer-funded grants, shooting provides a sound economic case for funding the vital combination of predator control and habitat management. A keeper’s livelihood depends on his ability to prove consistent competence in these two skills.

Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great spring for them. Last week, wherever I walked, anxious curlew parents were whinnying above me like aerial ponies. At one point I stepped carefully aside as a day-old chick, clumsy on its oversized blue legs, tried to hide in the cotton grass. The Pennines, North York moors and eastern Scotland are the world stronghold of the curlew, or ‘whaup’, a bird whose bubbling aria fills the sky over these moors in spring so fully that you cannot find a one-minute gap of silence between their songs in a typical April dawn (I’ve tried).

Balls to that Why are elections called ‘ballots’?  — The word ballot comes from the Italian, pallotta, meaning a small ball. In Venice in the 16th century voters deposited a pallotta in a pot. The same system was used in an election in Barnstaple, Devon, in 1689, where voters were given a ball and asked to deposit it in one of two pots. The system allowed people to vote secretly by concealing the ball in one of their fists. They would hold each fist over a pot and discreetly drop it. No one watching could tell which fist had contained the ball. Heavy vetting How many people undergo security vetting?

The theory of evolution is dominated by the utilitarian logic of natural selection: adapt or die, survival of the fittest. But consider that ‘fit’ has two meanings these days: ‘healthy’ but also ‘hot’. There is another evolutionary mechanism that scientists have taken a longer time to appreciate – seduction by the hottest, rather than survival of the fittest. It generates very different and much stranger outcomes. Perhaps even the big brains of human beings evolved as seduction devices more than survival aids. When an animal selects a mate, it can shape the future of its species just like breeders of dogs shape different breeds. Sexual selection through mate choice is the ‘fun’ version of evolution, able to generate random, arbitrary and bizarre innovations.

The last straw Farmers are threatening to strike over the government’s changes to inheritance tax in what is being described as a first in Britain. Besides France, where farmers regularly protest, India witnessed a farmers’ strike in 2020, which was eventually settled after the government dropped proposed new laws. But one of the earliest farmers’ strikes was conducted by the Farmers’ Holiday Association in Iowa in 1932, by farmers protesting at consistently low prices for their products. The idea was that farmers would go on ‘holiday’, refusing to sell any of their produce. Few, however, joined, leading to pickets blocking rural roads with telegraph poles. One policeman was killed, but in an accidental discharge of his gun. The action died down after a few months.

I own a grass farm in the Chilterns which provides grazing for horses and haymaking. It also provides habitat for hares, skylarks, lapwings and field voles (the staple diet of my resident pair of barn owls) – which is why I am so set against the red kites. Between 1989 and 1994, red kites from Spain were imported and released into the Chilterns by the RSPB and Natural England. The population here had dwindled and the RSPB describes the reintroduction programme as ‘one of the UK’s biggest conservation success stories’. But it’s only a success story if you ignore the devastating effect red kites have had on other wildlife. The RSPB assures us that red kites feed mainly on carrion and earthworms and, as opportunists, the occasional small mammal.