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Video Comprehension Duration: 3 minutes and 3 seconds
onservationists are worried that highly organized thieves could wipe out some species of Britain's rarest wild flowers. Rare plants and seeds are being stolen to meet an increasing need from gardeners and collectors. In Oxfordshire, volunteers are keeping a twenty-four hour guard on a field of rare orchids. They want tougher laws to protect the region's countryside. Chris Bishop reports.
In Oxfordshire's Chiltern Hills they're on the alert. People here are trying to protect one of Britain's rarest wild flowers. The monkey orchid, so called because of its shape, once carpeted the fields of southern England, but after years of ploughing and picking there are just two small patches left, in the Chilterns and south-east Kent. They're protected by law, and a £2,000 fine for damaging them, but their dwindling numbers are still under constant attack from rabbits, collectors, and thieves. Conservationists are paying these wardens to stop people stealing the last of the orchids, but in two months time the money runs out and these rare plants could be at the mercy of thieves.
I presume it's either motivated by greed because they think they can make money by selling these plants which they then find out they can't, or it's some sort of obsessive collecting notion they have; they just want to possess a rare British orchid. It all seems clearly pointless to me.
And what damage is it doing?
If you steal the flowering plant, the seeds are then not set. We don't get new plants coming in and the whole population just goes down.
It's not just the rare plants that are under attack. At this nature reserve in Surrey, conservationists are running patrols to protect more common wild flowers like bluebells and cowslips. They believe organized crime is plundering the nature reserves for wild flower plants and seeds. Recently, thirty acres of wild flowers here were stripped of seeds in a morning, setting back their spread.
There are gangs going out doing it early in the morning before the normal population gets up and takes their dogs for a walk and so on. And these gangs, what they must be doing is growing them on, growing them on to small plants and then selling them to nurseries and so on and so forth. Not the large reputable garden centres, but smaller, backstreet nurseries and so on. And these types of plants can sell £1.00, £1.50, £2.00 a time.
There seems to be a ready market for the pickings. Six bags of this sphagnum moss were seized before thieves had a chance to take it away for sale. It would have fetched around £400.00. One of the ironies of the situation is that the green revolution has made wild flower gardens very fashionable, so many of the people who claim to care for the countryside could indirectly be helping to destroy it. Conservationists are pressing, during National Environment Week for tighter laws. Among other changes, they want a ban on the taking of seeds, which is still legal. They fear otherwise, the organized thefts will increase, creating even more endangered species like the south-east's dwindling monkey orchid.
SALMON RETURN TO THE THAMES
Video Comprehension Duration: 2 minutes and 16 seconds
he king of freshwater fish, the salmon, continues its slow but steady return to the waters of the Thames. Centuries ago they were abundant, but pollution drove them away from their ancestral spawning grounds. Today, the fish received a helping hand from the National Rivers Authority with the opening of two new salmon ladders to help the fish overcome man-made obstacles in the Surrey stretch of the river. But while many are claiming that the return of the Thames salmon is a sure sign that the battle against pollution is being won, some environmentalists remain unconvinced. Shireen Wheeler reports.
The National Rivers Authority is banking on salmon to clean up their image. More than a million of the young salmon smelts have been released into the Thames since the programme began to promote their population in 1979. These fish will swim out to sea, some returning as adults, hopefully to spawn. But many are becoming trapped in weirs as they make their way up the river. The NRA has planned twenty-two special salmon ladders to help them along the Thames. Two of these were opened at Chertsey and Sunbury today.
Salmon are regarded by a lot of people as a very important monitor of water quality. They have very strict requirements in terms of dissolved oxygen levels and also river temperature and fresh water flow. They have strict requirements, and if those requirements aren't met, then the salmon aren't going to be able to navigate – well, it could be the most precarious part of the river, which is the tideway.
Two hundred years ago this river was full of salmon. But by 1834, their home had become so polluted that the species completely died out. And then, in 1974, some stray salmon were sighted. The then keepers of the river, Thames Water, seized on this as proof of the success of their clean-up policies. But environmentalists are not so sure.
We mustn't allow ourselves to be blinded to the fact that, the salmon being present in the river is an indication of improvement, but it's also an indication of perhaps how much more we have to do. The animals don't yet breed in the Thames, and they don't go through their full life-cycle there. It's really at this stage, a cosmetic exercise.
But the final proof of how successful the NRA's programme has been, will be seen in how many of the adult fish return and stay to breed.
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