Here’s a guest blog from Sue Royal – the RSPB’s Communications Officer in our Brighton Office, with a final plea to add your voice to ask for the proposal to build 5000 houses at Lodge Hill to be called in.
Here is a graphic showing the places nightingales can be found at Lodge Hill, the site in North Kent which Medway Council has approved for building 5,000 houses.
At the moment nightingales are heading south, caught up in the natural phenomenon of autumn migration. They leave the woods and copses of Southern England as their food supply diminishes. Their survival depends on finding the right conditions here, when they return in the spring, as well as on their journey and in the places they depend on in Africa.
So Lodge Hill plays a crucial role in an epic story. And the nightingales will return in April next year -Lodge Hill is home to 1.3 percent of the nightingales that raise their families in the UK. It is probably the most important single location for this iconic bird, with its beautiful fluting song which lets us know that spring has really arrived for another year.
The RSPB, alongside many others, has been putting the case that Lodge Hill is the wrong location for this housing proposal – you can catch up here.
Nightingales flies thousands of miles from Africa to the south of England every spring, and then raise their voices as part of their mating ritual, stay to raise their young and then depart again in late summer for Africa again. Lodge Hill is currently home to 85 singing males.
The nightingale population has contracted over the last 20 years, 4 out 10 have been lost. The decline over a longer period is even more worrying caused by a variety of factors. They are shy birds more often heard than seen, and they like coppiced woodland, thick hedges and scrub to build their nests.
Even if the protection of special places which should be guaranteed by an SSSI were not a major issue with Lodge Hill, you can’t just pick up a species and put it somewhere broadly similar so that development can occur, there are no guarantees that nightingales will take up an alternative habitat. And that means we risk losing them altogether.
The 25 September deadline is tomorrow for contacting Eric Pickles (Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government) to ask him to call in Medway Council’s decision. If you care about nature, this is your last chance to add your voice. So far a fantastic 10,000 people have already contacted the Secretary of State - thanks to each and every one.
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I've added a couple of edits as it was pointed out our 'fairy lights' graphic could show the current distribution of nightingales as they are well on their way to Africa!