GIVING NATURE ROOM by Maggie Langlands
Image by Si Cunneen /Wild By Nature
Birders don’t just watch birds – they read about birding, they watch birding videos, they play recorded bird calls. They (we) are pretty much obsessed. Every day, I read that day’s newsletter by a KZN birder, Adam Cruickshank – The Daily Birder – and his Tuesday newsletter struck a particular chord.
He lives near Hillcrest in an area of rolling countryside and horse farms, and he says it’s easy to think of it as being in nature. But of course it is, as he says, a transformed landscape. He muses about the species that were once part of that landscape but are there no more.
The similarities to our district are striking. This part of the Eastern Cape is a beautiful part of the world just as Adam’s is, and it too is now a transformed landscape, with dairy farms instead of horse farms.
Adam started wondering how many species have quietly disappeared from places that we now think of as natural. He asked, “What birds no longer occur here? What mammals? What insects? What plants? How different did this landscape once look before it became paddocks, roads, gardens and houses?”
Clearly there is no question of reversing the transformation, not in KZN nor here in Kouga. But Adam started wondering whether there are small things we could do to let nature back in. He asked, “Could we create more pockets of indigenous habitat? Could unused corners, road verges, small wetlands and strips of natural grassland be managed in ways that allow more wildlife to thrive? Could these small spaces become stepping stones that help birds, insects, reptiles and mammals move through the landscape once again?”
As birders, we see the effect of preserving stretches or even just pockets of natural vegetation as we traverse the district. There, we find species we never see in our gardens. There, we watch raptors still-hunting or soaring. There, we discover nests of threatened bird species. We cannot express enough gratitude to land-owners who protect those last remnants of the original landscape.
We can’t recreate the past. But we can preserve some of it – and preserve species in doing it. And as a member of the birder sub-species, I for one will be eternally grateful.
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