When we don't hear the whole story

I have received two worrying posts via Facebook in the last 24 hours.

The first was a link from an acquaintance of mine who traps and does everything he can to promote that activity. He was interested by an article Biodiversity benefits from new snaring scheme - National Park agrees about how black grouse conservation in Scotland is being aided by trapping predators such as foxes and weasels. Which is no doubt true, but if one looks a bit deeper into the story, the RSPB are the other lead body working on black grouse conservation. Their emphasis is very much on habitat management, and "reducing fox and crow predation where essential". Notice the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust never mentioned crows. By cherry-picking at bits of the whole story, they have come up with an article that shows how wonderful snaring is.

Perhaps more worrying, because it is about something I agree with, is this video made by Hellmans in support of food security.



The problem here are the numbers they quoted for blueberry production in NS: "NS production in 2007 was half what it was in 2003". Now, this is actually true, 13500 tons, down from 29300. And if this were a trend, yes, we should be worried, but it is not born out by the statistics. One could equally have compared 2008 with 2007 and said that harvest is up 54%.

Take a look and you will see that 2003 saw an abnormally high production, with an unprecedented yield of 0.77 tons/acre, while 2007 was low at 0.34 tons/acre. The ten year average was 0.49 tons/acre (my maths). No doubt yields vary considerably according to the weather and other factors.

What should be noted from these figures is that the acreage under production has risen fairly steadily in the past 10 years. Totally counter to the argument that the video is making, and however much one wants to support a cause like food security, one has to wonder just how reliable all their other numbers are.

Enlightened thinking on coyote control

Broomfield, Colorado, has just launched their draft Coexistence with Wildlife Policy, which uses two levels of hazing of coyotes to discourage them from coming into contact with humans, in an effort to avoid the use of lethal control.

Full story. A shame the Nova Scotia government is not so enlightened.

Fisheries waste insufficient for gannet chicks

A new report from the Royal Society says that gannets who feed their chicks on waste from fishing boats are giving them junk food.

The problem they discovered in the western cape of South Africa was that waste from the hake fisheries was too low in fat to sustain chicks. The gannet's natural food is high fat species like anchovies and sardines, but these species have become seriously depleted. While the waste from the hake helps maintain adult birds, chicks reared on this diet suffer much higher mortality rates than normal and far fewer chicks are fledged.

The full report concludes that

marine management policies should not assume that fishery waste is
generally beneficial to scavenging seabirds and that abundance of this artificial resource will automatically inflate seabird populations.

Dolphins at play

The content of this blog has been getting a bit depressing lately, so something a little lighter today:



Blowing ring bubbles
Dolphins