I would like to wish all my blog viewers a very merry Christmas and I hope you all enjoy your day. I hope you’ve all had some lovely gifts too. I’ve got my first DSLR camera which I am looking forward to using.
My Christmas wish
My only Christmas wish for this year though is not for lots of presents or money but to help save our natural world. The natural world is a very important place to me and it always has been for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are walking with my Granddad or getting home from school and feeding the birds that visited the garden. Unfortunately though over past years lots of problems have occurred. There are four principal causes of damage: habitat degradation, over-exploitation, pollution (particularly global climate change) and the introduction of invasive non-native species. The State of Nature report found that 60% of our UK species we know about are in decline. Habitats are becoming more fragmented and their condition is worsening to the extent that only 37% of the best sites are in good condition. These are just two of the worrying statistics about the alarming drop in our UK nature. From here though, at the moment, things aren’t looking too good for the future as only 1 in 10 children regularly play in wild places, compared to almost half, a generation ago. Without more young people growing an interest in the natural world and fulfilling a career in years to come the state of conservation will be lower and these statistics could decrease more and more.
Wildlife crime is also a big problem. It takes place throughout the UK and one of the main reasons for this is that members of the public don’t realise that what they’ve seen is against the law and therefore don’t report it.
My wish this Christmas is for everybody of all ages to realise and understand how precious and wonderful the natural world is so we can preserve it for future years. There are many different campaigns to help do this which you can find by looking at some of my recent blog posts.
Christmas foxes.
Over the past few weeks I have been filming some foxes on one of my local patches, here’s some of the best footage from this week.
If you watch this clip carefully you’ll see a fox entering from the left hand side then another fox comes and pounces on it. They then stay in an unusual position until the clip is over. The position shows that they are asserting dominance.
Georgia Locock 