More than 100,000 people have signed a petition to save Brighton and Hove’s famous starling murmurations.
The petition calls for a ban on chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides from the city’s council-owned downlands.
Artist Steve Geliot created the petition, which has enough signatures to secure a 15-minute debate by Brighton and Hove city councillors when they meet on Thursday 7 April.
In his petition, hosted on Change.org, Mr Geliot says intensive agriculture is killing insects, starlings’ primary food source.
He fears Brighton and Hove’s murmurations could be lost as soon as 2026.
Mr Geliot’s petition said: “Together, we, the people of Brighton and Hove, own a large section of the South Downs called The City Downland Estate.
“We, therefore, kindly call on our council, elected members and officers to immediately implement an outright ban on chemical fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and worming treatments across our entire City Downland Estate.
“We also call on our council to make concerted efforts to reduce sensory pollution (noise and light), which also badly impacts on wildlife, through education and advocacy in the first instance.
“Now it is time to make peace with nature and save our starlings.”
The artist, who created Norfolk Square’s Waves of Compassion sculpture, has previously campaigned to dim the lights at the Amex Stadium, as he believes the lights damage wildlife.
In April last year, he brought a petition to the city council that stated light pollution kills insects.
He was recently involved with the Starlings’ Roost art project where the night vision cameras observed the roost and contributed to the Birds Dance in the Sky film about the murmurations.
The British Trust for Ornithology listed starlings as a bird of high conservation concern.
Since the mid-1970s, the population has fallen by 66 per cent in Britain.
Brighton and Hove City Council owns 12,862 acres of farmland, of which 70 per cent is let across 16 farm holdings.
In November 2019, the council’s Environment, Transport and Sustainability Committee agreed to ban using the herbicide glyphosate unless it was necessary to kill invasive species such as Japanese knotweed or kill tree stumps.
This may well be all true, but the major loss of starling roosts down the very forgotten and neglected eastern end of the city, where there is no vegetation to speak of, is the interference (by site owners/prospective developers presumably) with the remaining gasholder frame on the E Brighton Gasworks site, where, for years, they would gather in droves around the frame and then do that wonderful thing that they do. Something happened to the frame (who knows what) and then they tried to gather on the railinged roof of the French Apartments nearby, but there wasn’t enough room for them all and I haven’t seen them since. Except that, a couple of years or so ago, pre-Covid, I was down in the Marina and they were all on top of the nasty grey and largely empty new flats.
The council’s insistence on bee and bat boxes on new developments is all very well, but what about these amazing birds, who don’t need special boxes on new developments – just the preservation of the places where they have gathered for many years. No chance that this allegedly Green lot would ever do anything to save these precious birds – even if they knew what a starling was – but all power to Steve Geliot and those who have signed the petition.
Not sure that i agree with these assumptions, and i don’t like the arrogance of this petition, ‘immediately implement an outright ban’, this is the sort of thing that causes our Green council to give a knee jerk reaction without considering it may seriously impact the farm tenants. Ultimately the Downland Estate will also suffer. So listen to all the arguments. Replanting hedgerows on the downs north of Patcham might go for a better petition.
Agit-prop art prom:: the birds come from far way //B&H owns a small portion of the huge South Downs and this proposal is disproportionate. And, by the way, they eat a lot of kinds of stuff. And are not endangered at all.
how’d you curb an eccentric with his his eccentric ideas?…. does he go for a shit or piss or is that an existensial exit from reality for him?… dump the twat in the sea north of the pier and see if he’s got sufficient energy to swim ashore…. I doubt it