By the Carpark – a poem

Posted on by Opher

By the carpark

 

By the carpark

Where the wood one stood;

By the stream,

Long since culverted in;

Where the new housing estate now stands

On what used to be a marsh,

A vole hides among the rubbish.

 

Near the runway

For the new airport;

By the side of the new field,

Reclaimed from wasteland;

Alongside the new road,

Bringing travellers to and fro;

On the roundabout

That used to be a copse,

A tiny mouse shivers

Under a newly planted shrub.

 

Opher 18.4.2016

 

Nature is hanging on under the constant development as habitat is flattened. The streams culverted, the ponds filled in, trees felled, hedges grubbed up, marshes drained and the shrubland cleared.

Progress is great isn’t it? Expansion is good. So many more of us; so many less of them.

Book Recommenations – The Environment – Opher Goodwin

Posted on by Opher

This is my book on the environment. It tells the story of my travels, observations and concerns about what we are doing to our poor planet and the creatures that live on it.

If you are a friend to nature and care about the environment, and want a read about what is really happening then why not give it a read?

In the UK:

In the USA:

Thank you for supporting me and my writing.

Finding room for Nature!

Posted on by Opher

A farm is an industrial complex. It is artificial. By its very nature it disturbs the balance of the ecosystems.

Of course nature, in all its forms – from weeds, insects and animals – impacts on farming. That is why pesticides and herbicides are used so greatly.

To a farmer nature is a pest to be controlled and eradicated.

For instance – a farmer a I happen to know of in Texas created a large lake and was perturbed that nature, in the form of beavers, has done damage to the artificial structures that he has put up. It was costing him money. He declared the beavers a pest and shoots them on sight. He thinks beavers are vermin (along with wild boar and coyotes and any other animals that intrude on his land).

He enjoys hunting and killing these animals and aims to kill them all.

He looks at it from the viewpoint of farmers, economics and humans. His solution is to eradicate all nature that doesn’t conform to being helpful to his enterprise. He labels anything that disrupts his farming or costs money as being a pest in need of eradicating.

There’s the problem.

Right across the globe – Africa, South America, America, Indonesia, Australia – farmers are clearing natural habitat, spraying crops and killing any creatures that dare to ‘intrude’ on to ‘their’ land.

Except it isn’t ‘their’ land is it?

I look at it from the viewpoints of the creatures that were there first. And I think that instead of killing everything (which many farmers obviously greatly enjoy) we should be learning to live alongside nature and respect it.

The huge areas of land that we are clearing from natural habitat to farmland is killing huge numbers of animals. They are literally starving to death.

On top of that we have extensive hunting and overfishing.

The intensive spraying with pesticides and herbicides is killing off all the insects and polluting our food.

There is no doubt that we are systematically destroying nature.

I believe there has to be a healthy balance. We have to give enough wilderness to the animals and plants so they can thrive too. We not only share a planet with them and should respect them but we are dependent on them!

To me it sounds fair that we preserve half of the planet for nature, in the form of national parks and conservation areas, and have half for humans.

We should respect nature and learn to live with it!

Joey my Crow

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Joey my Crow

 

Round where I was growing up they used to poke crows. That’s how I came by my pet crow Joey.

In order to cull the crows they would go along to the rookery with great long poles that reached right up to the top of the trees. They would poke the nests and knock the fledglings and eggs out.

My friend Tony and I went along after the pokers had gone and found two live fledglings. They were the ugliest things you could imagine with their transparent saggy skin, bulbous bellies and no feathers but we thought they were great. We took them home.

The little birds needed feeding every two hours. We mixed up this thick goo of egg, milk and bread. I would put a dollop of this paste on my finger and when I approached him Joey would stretch out, flap his rudimentary little wing stubs, open his beak wide and squawk loudly. He thought I was his Mum. I simply shoved the paste down his throat. Every now and then I would give him worms or bits of bacon to vary his diet. Both our birds seemed to thrive on it.

School was a problem. The teachers were not very understanding as to regarding the feeding necessities of crows and we doubted that they would be amenable to letting us out of class every two hours to go home to feed them. We got round that by taking our birds into school. As we thought that our teachers might take a dim view of us bringing our baby crows into school we simply did not tell them. Fortunately we had those big old wooden desks in our form-room which were quite deep and had lids. We were supposed to keep our books in them but ours were empty so we used them for crow rearing.

We made little nests out of paper and plonked the crows in. When you shut the lid it was dark inside and they went to sleep. At break and lunch we opened the lid and to everyone’s amazement they would squawk and clamour and we’d cram the egg and milk paste down their throats. It was magic. You shut the lid and they were silent. It was like turning the light on and off. Our classmates thought it was great and not one of them spragged to the teachers about it.

It amuses me to think that many other kids sat at those desks in the course of the day without ever knowing our crows were inside. They might have had quite a shock if they’d lifted those lids – but nobody ever did.

We did it for weeks, until our crows were fully grown, and never got caught.

I named my crow Joey. He grew into a fine handsome affectionate crow with inky black feathers that had a lovely blue sheen. When he was an adult I kept him in my shed. Every morning, and when I got home from school, I would go down to the shed and get him. He’d jump straight on my shoulder and nibble my ear.

I taught Joey to talk. Well he could say twelve words. When I went in to him he’d squawk ‘Hello’. He could say his name ‘Joey’. He was quite clear in his pronunciation.

I had to teach Joey to fly. I’d take him into the garden and throw him into the air. He’d flap to the ground and crash. Gradually he caught on to the idea and then the progress was rapid and he’d enjoy flying round and then sit on the roof. He’d always come back and land on my shoulder though.

One day I took him out front for a fly round somewhere different.

We had a neighbour called Mrs Drain who was very house-proud. She had a red tiled doorstep that she used to get on her knees and polish every single day. Joey saw her down below and decided she would make a good perch so he landed on her back.

It gave her such a fright. He was very big and heavy and had sharp claws. She wasn’t expecting a big bird to suddenly land on her. She jumped up with Joey hanging on to her and ran screaming down the road. Joey dug his claws in and flapped his wings. I can still picture her running back and forth shouting at the top of her voice with Joey clinging on for dear life.

She eventually forgave me.

I lost Joey when I went off to camp for two weeks leaving my Mum in charge. One day, while she was out shopping a man came round. He had lost his pet crow and heard from one of our neighbours that I had a crow in my shed. He thought it might be his crow. He knocked on the door but nobody was home. So he went down the bottom of the garden and opened the shed. Joey flew out.

My Mum said that Joey sat around on the roof for over a week but she couldn’t entice him down. She told me he was looking for me.

By the time I got home he’d gone. I never saw him again.

I hope he met up with a nice lady crow and impressed her with his line in human sweet-talk. She would have been sure to be impressed. My hope is that Joey’s descendants are squawking up in the trees right now, discussing the great god who had given life to their forebear by feeding him with the gooey elixir of life.

So if you hear a murder of crows up in the trees squawking something that sounds like ‘Joey’ or ‘Hello’, please let me know.

Ode to Greta Thunberg – poem

Posted on by Opher

Ode to Greta Thunberg

 

It takes a schoolgirl like Greta Thunberg

To point the way.

In a world without an iceberg

We’ll have had our day.

With our cities under water

Life will not be the same.

It takes a young Swedish daughter

To change the game.

Eight billion refugees will be set loose

As the weather alters.

We’ll need to be waterproof

Or else listen to Swedish daughters.

 

Opher – 24.4.2019

 

 

Who would have thought that a young schoolgirl to get people to pay attention. With her schoolchildren sit-ins she has forced politicians to pay attention to what is going on. More power to her.

The young are the future. They will inherit the Earth from us. We need to leave it in good shape.

This last few hundred years has been a disaster for the planet.

We, as a species, have gone berserk. Our numbers have gone through the roof. Our technology has gone astronomical. We have massacred the wildlife, decimated the forests, polluted the oceans and filled the air with our effluent.

Three hundred years ago we seemed to think the world’s resources were infinite. We are clearly seeing they are not.

Unless we step back from the brink and bring sanity to bear we will wreck the world we depend on.

Greta Thunberg knows this. Why is it so many older people fail to grasp it?

Overpopulation is the biggest problem.

Posted on by Opher

The tide of humanity is sweeping nature out of existence.

We are destroying the planet bit by bit.

We need to reduce our numbers in order to live sustainably and stop this crazy train before it runs off the tracks.

We do not need to kill people off.

We can control the world’s population by a big dose of fairness and birth control.

What is killing the world is runaway capitalism – unbridled selfishness and greed, a lust for more and more, the mantra of growth at all costs, profit before people, profit before nature, pollute if it saves money, gross inequality. There are a greedy bunch of people running things who simply do not care. They selfishly put their own acquisition of wealth above everything. They profit from extreme poverty, the destruction of nature and wars. They are utterly immoral.

And those are the people who are leading us on this road to ruin.

We need a better way of life, a more equal world, a fairer society and far less people.

That’s what I believe.

I believe we can live peaceably with each other and nature.

A response to a ‘friend’ who doesn’t believe that nature is under threat at all.

Posted on by Opher

I have a ‘friend’ on an American site who does not believe in global warming or species extinction. He believes that nature is incredibly resilient and humans are not having a profound effect on it. He does not really care about cruelty and the way creatures are being massacred or their habitats destroyed. He thinks that the only thing that is important are humans.

Personally I think cruelty and mindless destruction are unpardonable. I’d lock people up for life.

I wrote him a diatribe including a section from the article on Turtle Oblivion in Brazil

Turtle oblivion: the rise and fall of an Amazon trade

Here’s a little extract talking about the immense damage done to one little part of nature – the turtles. Bear in mind that this was done to most other groups of animals across the globe – manatees, penguins, sea-lions, whales, dolphins, porpoises, bears, tigers, seals……..:

One witness calculated that based on a turtle laying a minimum of eighty eggs, to make one twelve-litre jar of manteiga required the eggs of forty turtles, a total of some 3,200 eggs. Another horrified observer referred to a stretch of beach that annually yielded two thousand jars of oil, each jar requiring about twenty-five hundred eggs, in that one locality alone causing the destruction of five million eggs. It was estimated that by the late nineteenth century a total of around 250 million turtle eggs were being destroyed each year simply for the production of manteiga.

This is just one example of the massive impact we have had on animal communities across the globe.

Something you seem to deny.

Across the world I have seen overfishing, overhunting and destruction of habitat. Quite apart from the immense cruelty (slowly roasting live turtles on open fires for instance) this is simply unsustainable. Watching lorry loads of bush meat – chimps, gorillas and monkeys – going past in Zambia. Walking through silent jungles in Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Seeing the refuse trucks from Lima depositing tipping their waste on the beaches alongside barrels of industrial waste to fill the ocean with crap, slicks of raw sewage from the Townships in South Africa. I could go on and on. But it doesn’t concern you does it? You didn’t shit in those toilets, dump your rubbish in a bin in Lima or shoot the chimps and you really don’t care. You think that all those chimps and gorillas will magically repopulate themselves and the remaining forests will reclaim their populations of animals. Nature is so resilient. There’s always another dodo or passenger pigeon. We’ve all seen a rhino. Who needs orangutans anyway? Besides – you aren’t actively killing them. Why worry. It’s only people that matter. We can live in concrete jungles. We don’t need nature at all.

Let us mourn the dead.

Posted on by Opher

Let us mourn the dead.

 

Yesterday I drove three hundred miles

I parked the car and looked out

Through the windscreen in dismay.

There were no splattered insects.

 

‘Shall I check the oil, sir?’

‘Check the tyre pressures?

‘Clean the windscreen?’

 

Voices from an age long gone.

These days the engines do not leak oil,

The tyres do not leak air

And there are no insects to splatter

The windscreen.

 

I looked up into the blue

Summer sky and it was empty.

No more flocks of swifts

Chasing each other

Shrieking in delight;

No more blue tinged swallows

Diving to skim the grass

And snatch their dinner

From the air

 

Opher – 18.4.2019

 

 

The flies, bees, crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies and bugs are gone.

In my youth the meadows were strewn with splashes of colour and alive with the buzz of life.

I’d lie on my back and watch ladybirds crawling up the flower-heads, beetles scurrying in the undergrowth and, up above, the birds soared, wheeled and dived.

It felt like heaven.

There were frogs and newts in the ponds, sticklebacks in the streams, lizard, slowworms and snakes in the fields.

At night the voles, shrews and hedgehogs came out from their dens.

But they all live off insects.

They are spraying all the fields again today.

Please help to save our endangered Swifts by signing the petition!

Posted on by Opher
Save our Swifts 
Dear Friends,

Thank you for signing the petition to Save our Swifts.

There has been a magnificent response to this petition – so far over 127,000 people from all over the country have taken the trouble to sign it, including leading experts on these wonderful birds.

Can you help spread the word by forwarding the link below to your friends?

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-our-swifts
Dear Friends,

Thank you for signing the petition to Save our Swifts.

There has been a magnificent response to this petition – so far over 127,000 prople from all over the country have taken the trouble to sign it, including leading experts on these wonderful birds.

Can you help spread the word by forwarding the link below to your friends?

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-our-swifts

The Meat Producers need to get their act together. There is no excuse for cruelty.

Posted on by Opher

I eat meat but I want animals to be treated and killed humanely. I don’t like killing things but I am quite prepared to kill animals for food – as long as it is humane. I used to do that when I worked in an animal house.

Animals should always we treated with respect and reared in pleasant conditions. They should never be cooped up in tiny cages, mistreated or abused.

I think animals should be killed on the farm where they are raised and then transported as carcasses without all the pain and terror and the discomfort. At present animals are transported thousands of miles without food and water all cramped together in transporters, in terror and fear. It can’t be right.

The whole meat industry needs to up its act.

Unless conditions change and animals are treated better I think the whole industry will suffer. People are sickened by what they hear about the cruelty and agonies our food animals suffer. It is simply not right.

Animals are sentient beings. They should be treated as such.