Steve Babbs said:
Harry
With the publication of the site guide by Hill and Twist, in 1996 and a more recent edition I would have thought all sites were in the public domain already. I've never heard any suggestion that this guide has caused more collecting. In fact the presence of more observers might reduce the chance of collection. Certainly the EN and the Woodland Trust are open about the presence of rare butterflies on their reserves.
Steve
Hello Steve,
Sadly, I cannot agree, I believe Hill & Twist have written books on both Butterflies and Dragonflies. All these have done is to publicise certain sites where specific species may be found. I do not think for one minute that publicising any site of any species should be made public. The more people that visit a site, the more damage is caused to that site, it may be unintended, but it happens anyway.
I agree that English Nature and the Woodland Trust and even some Wildlife Trusts have an open too all policy. In my opinion that's a bad thing. My own Wildlife Trust manages several dozen reserves. On one of them, the sign at the entrance openly advertised that The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary was to be seen. This is very scarce and rapidly declining species in Durham, down to less that half a dozen small fragmented sites. People wandered over the area, trampled down the vegetation in their ignorance, that this butterflies larvae and pupa are to be found at ground level. I have no idea how many larva, pupa and low roosting butterflies they crushed underfoot, but the butterfly is no longer to be found on that site. It had been known to occur there for more than thirty consecutive years previously.
This could be put down to ignorance, carelessness or downright stupidity on the part of the visitors, many of whom, knew nothing about the species or its habitat.
However, I have seen members of Butterfly Conservation do exactly the same thing, on another SPBFrit site in the same county. You might have expected members of this organisation to know better. That was the first and only field trip I have been on, I won't attend another, I was so disgusted at what I witnessed.
Many reserves are fairly small and some don't even have a footpath, even a small number of visitors can do a lot of unintended damage. A friend of mine who owns some land in the valley where I live took a party of ten botanists from a local natural history society over his land pointing out some of the rare plants that occurred there. Amongst these was a very rare Helliborine. These were the only people to have ever been shown this plant.
A few days later he passed the place where this plant grew and was rather annoyed to find that it had been dug up and removed. As his land is posted as private property and there is no footpath or right of way over his land, it is hardly likely that anyone, other than one of those botanists, took it. So much for caring naturalists.
'Birders' only know too well how many Hides get destroyed by fire and how many so called 'Bird Sanctuaries' have 'after hours' visitors who have no interest at all in wildlife and their sole reason for being there, is to cause damage and destruction.
Publicising any wildlife site, places that site and its inhabitants in danger. If visits were organised and regulated as to numbers of people attending it may stave off some damage for some time, but sooner or later it will be damaged to such a degree that the inhabitants either leave or die out.
I'm sorry if I've ranted on a bit, but all my life I have been a conservationist. I am now very reluctant to report finds of scarce or rare species to the various conservation organisations, who's claim, is that they exist to protect these species. Simply because, once it becomes known that a plant, insect or animal exists in a certain area, it's the first toll of the death knell, for that species in that locality.
Harry
