BLOCKBUSTER TV series like Sir David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet might scoop awards and gain massive publicity, but a documentary triumph of equal merit over recent years has been the BBC’s Coast series. Round and round the British coastline its makers circulated, four times in all. Each time they alighted on several points of interest in their chosen segment. The perfectly-crafted cameos covered history, archaeology, geology, natural history, even topical issues. On Teesside, Coast visited a shipbreaker’s yard and considered the rights and wrongs of its contentious plan to dismantle asbestos-riddled merchant ships from the USA.

Coast offered much to surprise and delight. And perhaps nothing was more eye-opening than a visit presenter Alice Roberts (Prof Roberts, to doff our caps) made to the Dorset coast. Off its shore she dived in to reveal to us the presence of – seahorses.

It’s a safe bet that not one in a thousand of her viewers knew they were there. But Prof Roberts assured us there were several seahorse colonies around Britain’s coast, which is, after all, almost 20,000 miles long. But the Dorset colony was far and away the best. And there they were, the charming creatures, sheltering amid the waving seagrass on which they feed. It was a vision straight out of fairyland.

So can you believe that an oil company, Corallian Energy, plans to drill close to their home in Studland Bay? Not just a single test well but three. The chief executive of the Seahorse Trust, which monitors the British populations, says: “The colony will be greatly affected by this.”

Given today’s rising concern for the environment and wildlife you would think that any company would simply rule out exploiting such a sensitive area. But the drilling plan is only one of the threats facing the Studland Bay seahorses. Though given protection in 2008 from being killed, injured or removed, they are struggling against loss of their grass pasture through activity by speedboats and trawlers.

Those intrusions, surely, could be stopped almost overnight. Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet was chiefly notable for highlighting how the human threat to marine life has reached Earth’s remotest extremities. But the plight of the Studland seahorses is a prime example here on our doorstep.

FOLLOWING up from the above we can come even closer to home. The reader’s picture on this page on Monday of a red squirrel investigating a discarded Greggs drinks container might, for some, raise a smile. But it strikingly illustrates the menace, as well as the unsightliness, of litter. For wild creatures not uncommonly get their heads stuck in cast-aside tins and other containers. It’s a hazard to which hedgehogs, already in steep decline, are especially vulnerable. Whoever thoughtlessly threw away that Greggs container deserves to lose the hand that tossed it – or at least a finger or two.

Of course I don’t mean that. But saying it reflects my despairing conviction that nothing less than such drastic punishment seems likely to deter what, from the amount of litter now swamping both town and country, is the sizeable number of people who simply throw away at the earliest opportunity any item they have finished with.

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