Intervention

It’s been an interesting few days. We have watched as the terrifying events in Machynlleth as the river burst its banks and flooded the area. My thoughts go out to all those affected.

You may or may not be aware that the RSPB Ynys-hir reserve is in that area, and of course Springwatch is coming from that reserve again this year. Those of you who follow the Springwatch twitter feed will have seen that the whole production village has been flooded. The damage to the wildlife in the area is unclear at this time. It seems the Lapwing colony may have been worse hit, but plenty of other nests survived, including the most fragile looking Goldcrest one.

What did become clear over the weekend were the dramatic events happening at the Dyfi Osprey Project. Those of you who have been watching this story develop on Twitter, Facebook or indeed on Springwatch will know that the two Ospreys had three chicks, which hatched, but sadly one died. The unprecedented storms hit at just the wrong moment for the remaining chicks. One of the chicks succumbed and the remaining one was clearly too weak to feed. The team there made the difficult decision to intervene and chose to feed the chick themselves. The chick soon recovered and was placed back in the nest, where it has been fed by the parents since and continued to pick up strength. This started a discussion on whether the intervention should have happened. The project received a lot of praise, but also some criticism that nature should have been allowed to take its course.

At the same time as this story was developing I was receiving tweets from a Twitter friend who had Magpies raiding a House Sparrow nest in his garden, he was desperate to try and stop it and asked me what he could do. The sad answer I gave him was not a lot. Magpies are intelligent birds; they have found a food source and would continue returning until they had exploited it fully. To his credit he defended the nest for most of the day, and as far as I am aware, stopped the nest being robbed completely. They were at two completely different ends of the scale of stories in the public eye, but this was of course another intervention in the natural course of things.

It is a very emotive subject. Where does intervention start? Conservation by its very nature is an intervention, and intervention is required to protect endangered birds or animals, the Spoon Billed Sandpiper Project is another example of this. These birds have been removed from their natural habitat and moved to WWT Slimbridge to ensure the continued existence of the species.

 It could be argued that continuing to feed your birds through the breeding period is another intervention or even feeding them at all! Most seed and insect eating birds have had thousands of years of evolution to hone their foraging skills, are we changing that by providing an easy food for them? The truth is, no one really knows. Mankind has been changing the patterns of the wildlife around it for such a long time those boundaries have become blurred. House Sparrows make a very good example of this. They were farmland and meadow birds first, and followed their human compatriots into the towns and villages as we turned from being agricultural and rural dwellers into the urban denizens we have become today. The rich pickings from spilt seed and grain used to feed the horses suspected to be one of the contributory factors. Would you class this as intervention or was this just the birds adapting to our change of lifestyle as the industrial revolution begun? Direct intervention or not, the birds behaviour changed.

Those working at the Dyfi Osprey Project had to make a judgement call, and in the most horrendous of weather intervened directly with the Osprey nest. The chick was clearly not going to survive without their help. From their own blog it was clear they agonised over the decision for some time before “going in”. This is the position conservationists’ face all over the world, when to make that decision to help and step in and change the course of events. There is one thing for certain; there is currently a small tufty bundle of downy feathers sat on a nest in Dyfi that owes it continued existence to a team of volunteers.

Of course, Dyfi is not the only Osprey project in the area, there is the RSPB’s own Glaslyn Osprey Project, with it's own breeding pair and three chicks. They were subject to the same extreme weather conditions as the Dyfi Ospreys, so how did they fair? From initial reports it seems they have coped better with the storm. I wanted to know why, so I caught up with Geraint Williams, the project officer there to find out, and that will be the subject of my next blog …

Glaslyn Osprey Images © Andy Rouse