Victoria's Green Matters - 6th June 2013

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury

One of our most popular television programmes is ‘Springwatch’ when we delight in seeing all sorts of wild animals going about their daily lives.

 It is difficult to realise that in some areas of the country it is quite legal to kill the buzzard that we have watched hatching and feeding its chicks. It was recently reported that Natural England had issued licences to kill buzzards where game birds were being bred. An increasingly rare gull has seen its population decimated since the 1970s, originally culled to protect water supplies from pollution but latterly believed to be culled to protect game birds for a small number of people to kill for sport.

Our government is also likely to go ahead with a cull of badgers, a protected species, against all scientific evidence that it will be ineffective and without any recourse to the dairy industry which insists on reducing their cattle’s resistance to disease by continuing to over produce milk.

Many people here in Deal will be unsympathetic regarding the plight of gulls which are regarded as nothing but a nuisance. The lesser black back gulls in question are summer visitors that breed in Lancashire and then return to Portugal. Our much more common herring gulls which scavenge for food here can cause lots of trouble, coming into gardens for food and nesting in inconvenient places. It is important not to give them the opportunity to tear open rubbish bags which should not contain food.

Victoria Nicholls. DWI Transition Deal.