Birds are probably screwed anyway. Their numbers are falling, their habitats being destroyed. I hope that comes as some comfort to any builders annoyed that it’s illegal to cut down trees containing active nests: you can console yourselves with the thought that, in the long term, those flappy little shits have had it.
So, as you resentfully eye up some apparently cosy blackbird that is delaying construction of luxury flats for months and months, causing costs to spiral and profits to dwindle, don’t project too much smugness on to the poor thing. Don’t think of it like it’s Sir Philip Green straddling a branch in the nude, biting into a chicken leg Henry VIII-style and laughing. In reality, it’s going through hell. And blackbirds don’t eat chicken anyway. Though they are nude – but it somehow seems different because of the feathers. The Windmill theatre probably tried that one on the lord chamberlain.
But what I’m saying is that, annoying though all those obstructive squeaking egg baskets may be, and challenging though the commercial conditions in which you’re operating undoubtedly are, the birds are much more definitely doomed than you. If they’re your adversary, you’ve won. Take that, garden birds! That’ll teach them not to contribute to the GDP apart from, I don’t know, binocular sales and RSPB membership and the odd sack of seed. They’re commercially unviable and they’re getting out-tweeted by social media.
My awareness that some builders find birds’ nesting habits frustrating has risen because of the news that developers in Guildford have been ordered to remove netting from 11 trees on the banks of the river Wey. Apparently, it is not uncommon, during nesting season, for builders to put nets around any trees they might want to chop down to prevent any avian construction from delaying their own. How mean! Just imagine a plucky little sparrow turning up hopefully with a twig.
Obviously I appreciate that the fact that this is mean is absolutely no reason not to do it. It’s important to do mean things a lot of the time – that’s life, commerce, war, the wild, etc. Birds are mean to worms and it does wonders for their punctuality. It’s a cruel world. I totally get it and I’m part of it. I’ve literally just eaten a sausage sandwich and, albeit only as a passenger, I’ve been an unflinching apologist for some pretty aggressive parking over the years. So, you know, go for it, “Timber!”, you’ve got to build bypasses and so forth.
What made the Guildford case a bit different was that construction wasn’t planned to take place on the site until after nesting season – December probably – and, according to the leader of the borough council, the developer, Sladen Estates, doesn’t even yet have “active planning permission”. So it seemed a bit too mean and one thing led to another, the author Sir Philip Pullman got wind of it online and now the netting has been removed.
Do try though, Sladen Estates, not to blame the birds or imagine naked Sir Philip Green doing a poo on your car and make that a reason to hate chaffinches. It’s mainly Sir Philip Pullman’s fault. A very different Sir Philip altogether. It’s confusing and I regret bringing Sir Philip Green into it, though it would certainly help matters if he had his knighthood removed and possibly his Philip as well, just as a precaution, so that everything’s clear.
To be fair, Nick Sladen, chief executive of Sladen Estates, seems pretty sanguine. He denied that the nets’ removal was prompted by public pressure, claiming it was just because the construction schedule had changed and said that netting trees was “a positive ecological thing – the alternatives are the development carries on and the nests are disturbed or development is delayed”.
I’m not sure why that makes it “a positive ecological thing”. The first alternative he suggests to netting is certainly less ecological, but is also less legal. The only lawful alternative he gives – delaying construction until the nests have been vacated – is surely a much more “positive ecological” option than forcing birds elsewhere with nets. So it seems quite a stupid thing to say. Of course he may simply be trying to deceive people.
It’s lazy, sly behaviour: let’s stick nets over all the trees so that, the moment we’ve got permission, we can chop them down safe in the knowledge that there’ll be nothing alive in them. It’s like people who register patents for theoretical computing innovations that haven’t actually been invented on the off-chance that, one day, someone will – and will then be forced to pay to license their own idea. It’s low, parasitic commerce – the business equivalent of goal-hanging.
The news that Severn Trent water is trialling the use of Uber drivers instead of engineers when someone reports a leak feels similarly seedy. “All we’re asking them to do,” explained a spokesman, “is hold a phone up and respond to the engineer as he makes an assessment”.
This idea has the obvious flaw that a minicab driver isn’t going to be any better at video-phoning a leak than the customer who reported it in the first place, rendering this whole taxi stage of the leak-triage process completely superfluous. And, frankly, if your solution to the problem of maintaining a vast water supply infrastructure is to send taxi drivers around making videos on their phones, then you should go back and check your working – because that solution doesn’t make any sense outside the context of the single line in the budget you’re trying to cut.
This is the wrong use of the human brain’s innovative powers: more like planning a murder than devising a recipe. It’s the product of someone looking to take shortcuts, find loopholes, game the system.
Well, the system can’t cope. Our society isn’t resilient enough to function if people only focus on the tiny problem in front of them: how to reduce leak-repair costs, how to get those trees chopped down, how to force the deal through the Commons. Our laws and leadership are too feeble to protect it, let alone make it better. We need to lift our heads. The birds are dying.
