Nature Reserve

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Good afternoon. Thank you for coming to this public meeting which has been called to discuss the idea of creating a nature reserve in the city. That is, an area where wildlife is protected. And to begin with, local teenager Tricia Simkins is going to tell us some of the background to the idea. Tricia.

Yes, hello. I’d like to start by saying that, like many city teenagers, I don’t have much contact with the countryside. I live off a busy, polluted shopping street full of people and cars in the middle of a crowded city and I’d never given any thought to wildlife. Even though every house down my street has got a bit of a garden and we have trees along the road and a piece of waste ground at one end, it seemed nothing out of the ordinary and I took it all for granted. My attitude started to change when we had to do a survey of the wildlife in the city as part of a school project.

We chose ten families from the street and we asked them just to write down all the animals, birds, insects and so on that they could remember seeing in their garden or down the street during the last couple of years. All sorts of surprising things soon started coming out of that survey, like that we have 20 different sorts of butterfly, 50 different types of birds and all sorts of animals, even some quite large ones like foxes and deer. At first we wondered what it meant, like was it a world record or something and we’d no way of knowing. So what we did, we got in touch with a nature reserve out in the country and asked them what you could see there and that’s when we realised that we’ve as much, if not more, wildlife than they do and that’s what really got us interested in the idea of a nature reserve here. Because what worries us now is that we may be losing our local wildlife.

One specially worrying thing has been all the cutting down of trees in the streets. We’ve got really big old trees here in this part of the city and of course if one gets damaged and a storm or gets a disease it has to be removed. But this year alone over 100 of these trees have been chopped down. Now the reason given for this is that the trees have really extensive root systems which makes it difficult for people laying gas pipes, electricity cables and things but we think these problems are not as serious as they are made out to be and there’s no need for all this destruction. What’s more, although the local council has agreed to plant new trees in place of the old ones, what they’re planting are these little ornamental trees that look nice but the birds and animals just don’t use them in the same way and they’re not even saving money because more suitable trees cost just the same.

Another example of what can happen is the wasteland at the end of our street. It belongs to the city council and as children we all used to play there and we thought it was really great because it was so covered in bushes and wild flowers that you could get lost if you went off the little muddy tracks. Then a few years ago, no doubt thinking they were doing the right thing, the council decided to tidy it up and now it’s just an area of grass where people go to exercise their dogs. There are few little trees but basically there’s not a lot there anymore. So what I’d like to propose this afternoon is that we use this space to create a nature reserve.

We think it should be allowed to go back to its natural condition thus providing a refuge for the local wildlife which may be suffering from the loss of trees in the area. This would of course also be a leisure amenity for people who want to get away from the stresses of city living which is hardly something we would want to deny them.