There is always something risible about birds. You only have to mention a bar-tailed godwit, a ferruginous duck or anything lesser spotted, to set a table roaring. Mention that you saw a ring-necked parakeet near Staines, and that the bird is on the British List to boot, and you will have them begging for mercy.
But there is a web that links the life of the most bizarrely named bird - say, the lompobattang flycatcher - to the very future of the planet. Or, if you prefer a narrower view, the future of the human race. To quote the foreword of the newly published Rare Birds of the World: "Conservation is far from a luxury, for its central tenets are ecological stability and the sustainability of resource exploitation, and hence real economic balance."
Our lives and those of our grandchildren are inextricably bound up with the future of the solitary tinamou, a bird from the forests of Brazil. Or to be more parochial, with the lives of such birds as the peregrine falcon, red kite, corncrake and roseate tern: four British birds that are now under global threat.
One thousand species of birds, or 10 per cent of all species, are threatened with extinction. These are listed in the Red Data Book of the International Council for Bird Preservation. About 100 species have been wiped out in the last 600 years.
Three of the four British birds mentioned are in the Red Data Book, or are listed by the ICBP as candidates for it. The fourth, the roseate tern, is declining rapidly.
The peregrine is Britain's only full member of the Red Data Book. The bird is under threat through most of its range, even though the population is now returning to healthier levels in Britain. The birds were long the target of gamekeepers; during the Second World War they were destroyed to protect message-carrying pigeons, and after the war they were decimated by pesticide.
Such poisons as DDT and Dieldrin are particularly dangerous to birds of prey, which are at the top of the food chain the birds that eat the birds that eat the poisoned insects. Now the use of DDT is banned in Britain and restricted in much of Europe. Such conservation organizations as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds rightly count this a major success.
Does this mean that Britain is leading the way in conservation? We still make enormous quantities of DDT and sales of it to the Third World have doubled in eight years. Rare Birds of the World says that the manufacturers make ú13 billion a year by providing substances that "poison their freshwater sources, their people and their wildlife╔ The extent of this is demonstrated by a recent report that 70 per cent of all the freshwater sources throughout India are now polluted by a combination of pesticides, factory effluent and sewage." Britain is still killing peregrines.
The recklessness of agriculture, an industry which should think in centuries, is an ever-present nightmare for conservationists. Though in fact, the corncrake once did rather well out of agriculture. It is a bird that likes grassland, and has a delightful onomatopoeic scientific name: Crex crex. The sound was a familiar one across British hayfields before the last war.
But agricultural changes have done for it. Farmers no longer cut hay late in the year: they make several cuts for silage. When one of those cuts coincides with the nesting time of the corncrake - so much the worse for the corncrake. Also, there may have been some subtle climatic change that has affected the population of the birds.
There are still a few corncrakes left in western Ireland and the Hebrides, although there are fears that even these could be threatened by an EEC-sponsored trend towards intensified farming. The RSPB is running a research project on the birds and one of the suggestions it has come up with is that the crofters be asked to mow their fields, not from hedge to centre, but the other way round: in ever increasing circles. That way the birds are not driven to the centre and obliteration at the final turn of the blade instead, they are driven outwards, to safety. Farmers are also being asked not to destroy nettle and iris beds. Intense "green desert" farming is inimical to all birds.
The red kite is very rare. Only 47 pairs laid eggs this summer in Britain, all in Wales. They reared 38 young. This is still an improvement on the beginning of the century, when there were only half a dozen pairs recorded. Shotguns and the leaving of poisoned bait for foxes and crows - now illegal - were to blame.
Pressure on the birds continues. "Attitudes have changed," says Graham Elliott, species protection officer at the RSPB. "Red kites are still restricted by poison and persecution, but we hope that our efforts, and those of the Nature Conservancy Council, are bringing a more enlightened approach."
The final threatened species, the roseate tern, is a pretty bird with a dashing flight and a tinge of rose in spring. The reasons for its decline are not obvious.
Climatic shifts and small alterations in sea temperature have been put forward. There is also a horrible form of direct persecution. In Ghana, where the birds winter, small boys catch them on fishing lines with a hook baited with a fish, drawn through the sea. They play with the birds until they are dead, and then catch another. This goes on despite efforts to stop it.
There is no simple explanation for a bird's problems, and no simple answer. As with everything to do with conservation, it is all linked, all part of the web. But the greatest problem is habitat destruction.
According to the RSPB those areas under the most serious threat in Britain are estuaries, uplands, and lowland heath. Because Britain has a lot of estuaries, it is internationally important as a wintering ground for estuary birds mostly waders living on invertebrates in the estuarine mud. If the estuary is developed (for example, the splendid Hayle estuary, Cornwall, is under threat for development as a leisure resort) then the birds are destroyed. They cannot go to the next estuary along the coast and stand closer together. Estuaries are at capacity already.
Uplands are being systematically destroyed through over-grazing and afforestation. Overgrazed upland is virtually birdless - meadow pipit and skylark are all you find. The breeding waders, the merlin, and the short-eared owl will be absent. EEC subsidies, which are linked to the number of sheep grazed, lead to an inevitable tendency to overgraze, and thus to degrade the environment. Pressure of human population is threatening the southern heathlands, particularly around Bournemouth. The argument runs that, since heath is no use agriculturally, you might as well build on it. Nightjar, stonechat and the spectacular Dartford warbler are all wiped out as a result.
The solution is statutory protection: to have a place declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and better still, a Special Protection Area. With enough clout (perhaps money would be the right word) it is not impossible to build on an SSI. The Government is reluctant to declare SPAs. "I don't say, 'don't develop at all'," Elliott says. "But develop on low-quality agricultural land instead. That's no great loss."
With the emergence of Tory ecology, and the new phenomenon of turquoise politics, one might look for a change of emphasis. The RSPB and other conservation organizations will certainly be lobbying for one.
Rare Birds of the World says: "The conservation of wildlife has to be seen in the context of man's own survival. Where wildlife thrives, it is an indication of a healthy natural environment. Where it declines, or has been wiped out, the environment is clearly degraded and man has taken another step towards his own classification as an endangered species."
