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MILLION-POUND CLEAN-UPS HAVE BROUGHT BIRDS BACK TO BRITAIN

KINGFISHER: Express reader Steve Young took this stunning shot

Friday October 10,2008

By John Ingham

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FEW birds dazzle like kingfishers.

Sporting emerald green, peach, turquoise and white, they flash past like tropical jewels.

But the one below, photographed perched on an iron bar by Daily Express reader Steve Young, was in unexotic Liverpool Docks, in what is now Seaforth Nature Reserve.

I can’t imagine many kingfishers thriving in the docks just 20 years ago when I lived nearby but this beauty symbolises the transformation of some of our most polluted industrial sites.

Partly this is because heavy industry has sunk virtually without trace, cutting pollution as well as jobs. But it’s also thanks to million-pound clean-ups by firms and government, partly under the pressure of EU directives.

Take the RSPB’s Rainham Marshes in Essex, which for 100 years was a military firing range.

Now it’s a wildlife haven where two years ago I saw one of the world’s rarest birds, a sociable plover blown off course on migration to India.

Coal mines that are green again include Durham Wildlife Trust’s Rainton Meadows, where owls, merlins and hen harriers can be seen over what was an open-cast pit just 12 years ago.

Lancashire WT’s Wigan Flashes, once filled with colliery waste, now host wintering water-fowl.

In the Amwell and Lee Valley, the Hertfordshire and Middlesex WT has turned gravel and sand pits into a wetland

reserve which attracts dragonflies, orchids and, in winter, bitterns.

The British Trust for Ornithology has gone one further, getting firms to record the wildlife at active industrial sites, with 266 bird species recorded this year alone.

Power stations figure prominently with peregrines at Fawley in Hampshire, natterjack toads by Sizewell B’s giant golfball of a nuclear plant in Suffolk and a great bustard, the world’s heaviest flying bird, at Oldbury, Gloucestershire.

They all show that industry and nature can live together in harmony, provided man gives wildlife a chance.