DR TONY Whitbread, Chief Executive of Sussex Wildlife Trust, in a recent opinion article, draws our attention to the fact that sadly nature is not valued in our current economic system when important decisions have to be made.

This will have to change in the future. More must be done to change the views of decision makers and instil in them from a younger age the hidden value that nature has in our environment.

I am always surprised by how little people seem to know about nature and birds in particular. On recent TV quiz shows contestants have failed to identify correctly any of the British bird photographs even when part names were below the photos, e.g. ---- wagtail, ---- thrush, ------ duck, ---- bunting, -------- dove. It appears to me that most people can probably only identify about eight common garden birds. The answers were “pied, song, tufted, snow, collared. “My nine year old daughter identified four out of five. On another show a contestant said, “How should I know that? I don’t know anything about nature.”

With this lack of knowledge about the nature surrounding us is it any wonder that the environment is going to suffer and become degraded? The average person may not know or want to know about the way wildlife works in the natural world, but they can immediately help by thinking twice about covering their gardens with concrete and a more recent fad of laying down large areas of artificial grass and plastic windbreaks for hedging. Just consider for a moment how wild birds are expected to pull worms out of a plastic surface. Is it any wonder our bird populations are declining.

Let us hope 2016 will see a major change in attitude amongst our decision makers and garden owners and that nature will again become much more valued before our environment is damaged beyond repair.

  • Roger Musselle runs Roger’s Wildlife Rescue in Woodingdean