Animals and how they break my heart

A robin’s egg. And I found another a few days later. Neither in my garden. I guess the good news is that someone got their breakfast.

Worse was to come when I drove to the hospital. Roadkill. Five roe deer (three newly killed – a stag and two does - and one tiny baby that’s been on the westbound carriageway of the A14 for weeks), three badgers (one new), two hares (both recent), a domestic cat (recent – this one was calico, I didn’t notice this time the black cat I’d seen in the central partition a week or so ago), a goose, various bundles of rabbit, pheasant and other unrecognisable things.

We don’t have an animal who could easily scavenge a deer – the jaws of wolves and lynx better suited to tearing them apart. I don’t think buzzards or kites could get through the skin.

They just lie there, like the blown tyres and the plastic bottles.

The misery continues.

I’ve been listening to Vaquita by Brooke Bessesen about the porpoises of the Californian Gulf. It’s such a complicated and depressing story. They were always a small population – maybe around 5,000 – a species adapted for the silty water and rich biodiversity of the habitat. They were the apex predator – well, the resident apex predator as sharks and orcas paid visits. That biodiversity was amazing and the numbers of fish phenomenal. But it started to go wrong with increased fishing, notably the use of gill nets to catch tortoba – a sort of fish with, as later became relevant, a swim bladder prized by the Chinese. Anyway, the numbers decreased to maybe 500 and then the tortoba were fished out and the fishermen got shrimp for the US market and that killed vaquita too. To make matters worse, a black market in swim bladders run by cartels developed and the authorities failed to police it.

When Bessesen started the book, there were 60 vaquita. By the end, fewer than 30. In 18 months.

As part of the conservation effort, they tried to capture some to do ex situ conservation – basically keeping them alive until nets were banned and maybe captive breeding, though it appears no porpoises have successfully bred in captivity. It was their last hope, though. They spent a month searching for the vaquita and finally managed to capture two - a mother and six-month-old baby. The mother escaped before they could take her but they took the baby who was so distressed (no shit, Sherlock) that a few days they released her. Whether she survived is not known. Then they caught a healthy adult female. She seemed fine, then freaked out and when they released her, she had a heart attack and died.

A species gone through greed and corruption and the government’s repeated failures to support fishermen transitioning to different ways of fishing.

Let’s cheer up a little, in that sounds book, Bakker tells the story of acoustic research into turtle sounds. Not only do turtles communicate – to coordinate egg laying time and so on – but turtle embryos communicate with each other to determine when to hatch all together. Then, more astonishing still, the hatchlings communicate their readiness to the mother, who calls back – communicating which way to go. Turtle mothers don’t just lay eggs and sod off: they parent. And why not? They share an ancestor with birds. Alligators parent… or crocodiles… or both… not sure.

The sounds and not frequent, are quiet and many are outside the range of our hearing.

These worlds that we just trampled over. They used to roast the hatchlings alive, with the mothers turned on their backs so they couldn’t escape. The mothers and young would have been calling to each other. No one heard. Or no one cared.

Ok, so I haven’t cheered up much.

But, tomorrow, I promise – a mystery lagomorph and sex in the garden.