July 2014
It is now late June and mid-summer. Our part of the world seems full of flowers and buzzing insects. Butterflies by day and moths by night flutter around like angels. Soon we will hear stridulating male grasshoppers singing among the meadows trying to attract a mate. This flurry of insects is timely for the cornucopia of fledged birds that have left the nest. The numbers of insects available will ultimately control the numbers of insectivorous birds that survive. However, if you feed the birds consistently, more birds and more insects should survive because you are raising the carrying capacity of the environment.
Nature is generally balanced, with a bottom up pyramid of numbers, for example, many thousands of tons of leaves absorb nitrogen and carbon from the air and ground to cover our trees each year with a verdant green coat which absorbs energy from the sun. However many thousands of caterpillars will eat a proportion of those leaves. One family of blue tits (say 9 babies and 2 adults) requires between 700 and 1000 caterpillars each day to keep it fed. When those baby blue tits leave the nest at the same time (early June) as many other families of small birds, these provide food for the families of sparrowhawks which require about 400 grams of meat each day. That is about 40 blue tits. However, if all this did not happen we would be overwhelmed with caterpillars and blue tits as every animal only has to replace itself in its life-time to maintain a stable population. In the past, human mortality was higher, and regulated the population of people, but now we are regulated by health care and birth control. Our developing intelligence, technology and decision making is taking over from disease, war and famine. Although these things still exist in parts of the world. Human pressures on the world (7 billion people, and increasing) is the greatest threat to the survival of our natural world. Let us hope that our collective decision making can progressively ameliorate that threat.
Uckfield and district is very good at preserving nature. Trees are encouraged to exist with at least 2 Woodland Trust reserves (Lake Wood and Views Wood), 2 local Nature Reserves (West Park and Hempstead Meadows), one Site of Special Scientific Importance (Buxted Park). And several Sites of Nature Conservation Importance.