The great wildlife invasion

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 577.

The better side of town

In the industrial age, the air in Britain's towns and cities used to be very polluted. And the prevailing winds throughout Britain are from the west. For these two reasons, the more desirable areas of the average British town or city were to the west of its centre. This probably explains why, even now, when industrial pollution is no longer a problem, it is the western suburbs of most towns and cities in Britain which are the richest.

In the last 50 years, a combination of the British preference for building outwards and intensive farming in the countryside has had a curious effect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people migrated to Britain's towns and cities. The British changed into a nation of urban dwellers. More recently, British animals have been doing the same thing! And for much the same reason. It's all about where you can make a living. In the countryside, decades of intensive farming and monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop over a large area) have led to food shortages for many species. But all those back gardens, lanes and parks

in Britain's towns and suburbs are not farmed this way. There, a wide and tempting variety of flora and fauna is to be found. For all those starving rural animals, it's too good an opportunity to miss.

The pioneers were the foxes. They started in the 1950s and have become mainly urban animals. Many other species have followed. Shrews, squirrels, roe deer and brown hares have all been spotted in cities and many more have colonized suburban back gardens. As more species take this route, more 'employment' becomes available for other species there. It's a mass migration. Some wildlife experts believe suburban gardens are now so important to wildlife they should be classified as a special type of habitat.