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| Hoopoe - 'wiser than King Solomon' |
It is many happy returns of January 1 to Baroness Miller of Chilton Domer. She is someone who can always be relied on to speak up for birds and wildlife in the House of Lords. Aged 70 on Monday, Susan Miller has enjoyed a career in publishing and local government, serving, between 1987 and 2005, on Somerset County Council and also on South Somerset District Council for which she had a spell as its Liberal Democrat leader. She was made a Life Peer on July 28, 1998. When not active in parliament, she and her second husband, Humphrey Temperley, work on the family vineyard. Below is is her contribution to a debate on international biodiversity which was held in the Lords on November 4, 2019.
Many noble Lords will be aware of a bird called the hoopoe.
It has existed not only in its own right but in myth and legend for thousands of years.
It appears in the Bible and earned its showy crest by being wiser than King Solomon: it had a part to play in his relationship with the Queen of Sheba.
It appears in the Koran, and is particularly celebrated in the Conference of the Birds which is an amazing poem in Persian literature: the hoopoe is the messenger of the birds and their leader as they go on a long journey.
It is a messenger again today, because it is a migratory bird, and its increasing appearances in southern England talk to us of climate change. Today, I shall talk particularly about migratory birds.
Many of our best-known summer birds are migrants. There is the cuckoo, whose calls mark the start of spring. There are swallows -your Lordships will know the well-known phrase that one does not make a summer - flycatchers and all sorts of summer visitors.
Then we move into autumn, when other species take over: fieldfares, waxwings and so on.
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| Baroness Miller - student of bird migration |
All those migrants have in common the need for safe passage during often very long migrations, feeding grounds on their long flights and the habitat for them when they reach their destination.
Of course, there are threats from hunting.
Some EU countries, such as Malta and Cyprus, are still not playing their part in this.
Does the Minister know whether Cyprus has continued to improve since UK military bases there made a real effort to address the carnage from netting and shooting birds?
In July, the EU Commission issued France and Spain with a notice that they are in breach of efforts to protect the turtle dove, which we virtually never hear in England now, from extinction.
Far too much hunting is seen as tradition and tied in with patrimony.
However, the main threat to migrating birds is habitat loss: wetlands drained and turned into farmland, an expanding Sahara due to climate change and loss of food as powerful insecticides wipe out insects.
Neonicotinoids may be banned in some countries but you can bet your bottom dollar that the manufacturers will be busy finding new markets for them.
The interplay of aid money, tackling climate change, restoring biodiversity and strengthening, not weakening, local communities is very sensitive.
In October this year, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations made an agreement with the European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, which will lead into COP 15.
In particular, it is increasing funding that will boost countries’ efforts to bring about sustainable changes in agricultural policies and practices, to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and natural resources.
The programme will address some of the most unsustainable practices in agriculture, such as the use of highly hazardous pesticides, and scale up ecosystem-based approaches that favour natural pest control and protect pollinators.
Finally, I mention the environmental activists who are killed or imprisoned for defending habitats and challenging pollution. We often read about them in the newspapers, in places such as Brazil.
This week, in a letter to me, Amnesty International highlighted the case of the activists who have challenged the lack of a clean-up and compensation for a chemical spill in Vietnam that wiped out 6,000 acres of coral reef, meaning that thousands of local fishermen lost their livelihoods.
It especially highlights the case of Tran Thi Nga, a mother of two boys.
She protested about the pollution and spoke up for fishing families.
As a result, she is currently serving nine years in jail. That is the price for speaking out against pollution.
Will the Minister undertake to press the Vietnamese Government to recognise that this is a totally inappropriate response to pollution and to release this brave woman?
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