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Badger Cull: Chance In A Lifetime Has Been Missed, Farmer Says
John Carson believes badgers play a role in the transmission of bovine tuberculosis
"A chance in a lifetime" has been missed after a decision by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera) for a badger cull was quashed in court.
That's the view of John Carson who knows all too well the impact of bovine tuberculosis (bTB).
He estimates that there have been outbreaks on his County Down farm in 15 of the past 20 years.
"Where we go from here, I just don't know," he told BBC News NI.
Like many farmers, Mr Carson believes badgers play a role in transmission of the disease and news of the proposed cull being quashed came as a blow.
"I don't like the idea of talking about a cull," he added.
"I like talking about trying to reduce disease levels.
"I can say we've been culling cows for the last 50 years.
"We want to reduce the level of disease within the wildlife as well as the cow."
Almost 9,000 cattle have been slaughtered this year after testing positive for bovine tuberculosis
Between the testing regime and compensating farmers for destroyed animals, the cost of dealing with the disease in Northern Ireland is expected to reach at least £50m in 2023.
Almost 9,000 cattle have been slaughtered in 2023 after testing positive.
Mr Carson believes "this was a chance, I think in a lifetime" to have everyone from vets and departmental staff to farmers and industry representatives working together.
The proposal was quashed on the grounds that the consultation for it was flawed, which has angered him.
A badger set on John Carson's farm
"To think at the end that Daera couldn't get it right, that senior management couldn't get it right, to put a case forward on our behalf - I'm disappointed," he said.
A "contentious and divisive" cull has been carried out in parts of England and is coming to an end, with a move towards vaccinating badgers.
Badgers should be vaccinated and removed, the USPCA says
More than 200,000 badgers have been killed in the past 10 years, some say up to half the estimated population in GB.
Conservation groups say there has to be a better way.
"If they do pursue with a wildlife intervention, the only acceptable option on the table would be test, vaccinate and remove," USPCA chief executive Nora Smith said.
The group was not involved in the legal action.
"We feel that the focus on a wildlife intervention is an unnecessary distraction," she added.
"Take a wider and more objective approach to this and look to Wales (where cattle movement is the focus).
"And look at the innovation that's happening in Devon, where you've got a vet and a farmer working together and using a new testing regime as well.
"So there's lots of innovation, but we just seem to have this entrenched view at the minute."
The results of a five-year Test, Vaccinate or Remove wildlife intervention study in County Down were analysed by scientists.
They concluded it showed "considerably more common" cattle-to-cattle transmission of the disease than badger-to-cattle.
Daera said it would "carefully" consider the court's decision and its next steps.
What's next for farmers?The heartbreak of bTB is horrible for farmers, driving some out of cattle-farming altogether and taking others to the brink.
But for those in conservation, the prospect of killing potentially healthy badgers by shooting them is unthinkable.
Perhaps a Test and Vaccinate or Remove programme is the most likely outcome in the long-term, but farmers say culling is needed in the interim to get the disease to controllable levels.
Everyone is waiting to see what Daera's next move will be, but it's unlikely this is the last time this issue will be before the court in Northern Ireland.
Jeremy Clarkson And Kaleb Cooper Rip Into BBC's Countryfile For 'biased' Badger Report
JEREMY Clarkson and Kaleb Cooper ripped into Countryfile for their positive reporting on badgers recently.
The Clarkson Farm stars were not happy with the way the animals were portrayed on the show, and hit out on social media.
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Jeremy Clarkson has ripped into a recent Countryfile episodeCredit: BBC3
He was unhappy with how positively badgers were portrayedCredit: BBC3
His farm has been affected by the creaturesCredit: Arthur Edwards / The SunIn the Countryfile segment viewers at home had been welcomed to send in videos showing acts of kindness to wild animals in Britain.
A woman from Harrogate sent in a clip of the picnic bench she'd prepared for the fluffy creatures.
But Jeremy Clarkson was quick to share the video on social media, unhappily captioning it: "FFS."
Farming contractor Kaleb Cooper responded "Just thinking the same" with a face palm emoji.
The pair had previously shared how badly the animals can affect cattle in Clarkson's Farm.
Fans flocked to the comments to agree that badgers are a "nightmare" if you have a farm.
One person fumed: "I HATE badgers. Besides eating every hedgehog in England they're just like teenagers.
"They sleep all day, stay up all night, transmit diseases, and when the sun comes up they go back to bed again."
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Nella Rose's tragic family past revealed after she lost both her mum and dadAnother agreed: "They should balance that idiotic piece of propaganda by talking to a farmer who has lost his cattle to TB, makes me so angry."
A third fretted: "I had to turn over… just fills me with dread and worry just seeing them."
Some viewers even expressed their strong views that badgers should not be legally protected from hunting in England.
One wrote: "If I were King of Britain I would not only remove the protections badgers have been taking advantage of for decades, but I would declare open season on them."
Another questioned: "Why are you not allowed to hunt this spawn of hell in England ???"
Hummingbirds' Unique Sideways Flutter Gets Them Through Small Apertures
Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation—they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through.
But hummingbirds can't bend their wing bones during flight, so how do they transit the gaps between leaves and tangled branches?
A study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that hummingbirds have evolved their own unique strategies—two of them, in fact. These strategies have not been reported before, likely because hummers maneuver too quickly for the human eye to see.
For slit-like gaps too narrow to accommodate their wingspan, they scooch sideways through the slit, flapping their wings continually so as not to lose height.
For smaller holes—or if the birds are already familiar with what awaits them on the other side—they tuck their wings and coast through, resuming flapping once clear.
"For us, going into the experiments, the tuck and glide would have been the default. How else could they get through?" said Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of the paper. "This concept of sideways motion with a total mix-up of the wing kinematics is quite amazing—it's a novel and unexpected method of aperture transit. They're changing the amplitude of the wing beats so that they're not dropping vertically when they do the sideways scooch."
Using the slower sideways scooch technique may allow birds to better assess upcoming obstacles and voids, thereby reducing the likelihood of collisions.
"Learning more about how animals negotiate obstacles and other 'building-blocks' of the environment, such as wind gusts or turbulent regions, can improve our overall understanding of animal locomotion in complex environments," noted first author Marc Badger, who obtained his Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 2016.
"We still don't know very much about how flight through clutter might be limited by geometric, aerodynamic, sensory, metabolic or structural processes. Even behavioral limitations could arise from longer-term effects, such as wear and tear on the body, as hinted at by the shift in aperture negotiation technique we observed in our study."
Understanding the strategies that birds use to maneuver through a cluttered environment may eventually help engineers design drones that better navigate complex environments, he noted.
"Current remote control quadrotors can outperform most birds in open space across most metrics of performance. So is there any reason to continue learning from nature?" said Badger. "Yes. I think it's in how animals interact with complex environments. If we put a bird's brain inside a quadrotor, would the cyborg bird or a normal bird be better at flying through a dense forest in the wind? There may be many sensory and physical advantages to flapping wings in turbulent or cluttered environments."
To discover how hummingbirds—in this case, four local Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna)—slip through tiny openings, despite being unable to fold their wings, Badger and Dudley teamed up with UC Berkeley students Kathryn McClain, Ashley Smiley and Jessica Ye.
"We set up a two-sided flight arena and wondered how to train birds to fly through a 16-square- centimeter gap in the partition separating the two sides," Badger said, noting that the hummingbirds have a wingspan of about 12 centimeters (4 3/4 inches). "Then, Kathryn had the amazing idea to use alternating rewards."
The team placed flower-shaped feeders containing a sip of sugar solution on both sides of the partition, but only remotely refilled the feeders after the bird had visited the opposite feeder. This encouraged the birds to continually flit between the two feeders through the aperture.
The researchers then varied the shape of the aperture, from oval to circular, ranging in height, width and diameter, from 12 cm to 6 cm, and filmed the birds' maneuvers with high-speed cameras. Badger wrote a computer program to track the position of each bird's bill and wing tips as it approached and passed through the aperture.
They discovered that as the birds approached the aperture, they often hovered briefly to assess it before traveling through sideways, reaching forward with one wing while sweeping the second wing back, fluttering their wings to support their weight as they passed through the aperture. They then swiveled their wings forward to continue on their way.
"The thing is, they have to still maintain weight support, which is derived from both wings, and then control the horizontal thrust, which is pushing it forward. And they're doing this with the right and left wing doing very peculiar things," Dudley said. "Once again, this is just one more example of how, when pushed in some experimental situation, we can elicit control features that we don't see in just a standard hovering hummingbird."
Alternatively, the birds swept their wings back and pinned them to their bodies, shooting through—beak first, like a bullet—before sweeping the wings forward and resuming flapping once safely through.
"They seem to do the faster method, the ballistic buzz-through, when they get more acquainted with the system," Dudley said.
Only when approaching the smallest apertures, which were half a wingspan wide, would the birds automatically resort to the tuck and glide, even though they were unfamiliar with the setup.
The team pointed out that only about 8% of the birds clipped their wings as they passed through the partition, although one experienced a major collision. Even then, the bird recovered quickly before successfully reattempting the maneuver and going on its way.
"The ability to pick among several obstacle negotiation strategies can allow animals to reliably squeeze through tight gaps and recover from mistakes," Badger noted.
Dudley hopes to conduct further experiments, perhaps with a sequence of different apertures, to determine how birds navigate multiple obstacles.
More information: Sideways maneuvers enable narrow aperture negotiation by free-flying hummingbirds, Journal of Experimental Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.245643
Citation: Hummingbirds' unique sideways flutter gets them through small apertures (2023, November 9) retrieved 22 November 2023 from https://phys.Org/news/2023-11-hummingbirds-unique-sideways-flutter-small.Html
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