Miss Namini has recently moved into a student house in the Balsall Heath area close to the city centre she stated ’We thought we were dealing with one mouse but a few days after moving in we realised that is was actually several.’

‘They come through holes and if there aren’t any holes they will make some. Next door is the problem because they won’t do anything about the mice in their home. They are prepared to live with it but we aren’t! Because it’s a terrace house every time we think we have got rid of them they just make tiny holes in the skirting boards and come back, it’s never ending.’

When asked how these rodent problems affected Laila she answered ‘I was gutted when we first spotted them, it was so stressful having to live with them. My house didn’t feel like my own and it seriously got me and my house mates down. Trying to sort the problem out was a huge headache because our landlord is either lazy or awkward… or both, which I think is probably the case.’

Dave Marshal, aged 43 and has been working for the Birmingham based pest control company ‘Pest-A-Kill’ for almost 11 years. In the January of this year he was in charge of dealing with a major mice mess up which happened at the Selfridges store in the Birmingham Bull Ring. Six dead mice had dropped from ducting in the buildings roof and landed in the middle of the food hall, close to the Noodle Bar. 

“Work is always booming.” stated Mr Marshal “When they built the Bull Ring they had to dig into underground tunnels and sewers, disturbing whole nests of mice, rats and other nasties who were lurking down there minding their own business. Because of this the whole city centre and the residential areas around it are dealing with pest problems. The Arcadian is bringing in a lot of business at the moment, perfect place for the mice to move to with so much food around for them.”

But according to the pest control company Birmingham will be dealing with it’s pest problem for a while yet due to the huge scale of the infestation and the large area that’s affected.

Rodent Fact File:

• Mice can squeeze through gaps as small as 6mm wide but they leave a tell-tale black grease smears behind from their fur on floors and walls.
• Mice only eat a tiny 3 grams of food a day.
• They will eat anything, and i mean anything! From soap to candle wax, but cereal is their favourite snack.
• They do around a whopping 80 droppings a day!
• Female mice can breed every 3 weeks and the average number of offspring is 10!
• There is no such thing as a grey mouse, if you have one of these hiding in your house chances are it’s a baby rat.
• Mice can carry diseases such as: Salmonella, Hantavirus or Lyme Disease.

Over the last few years studies have shown that the average spider in the UK has actually grown in size by around 2%, with most of these growth spurts taking place in the female side of the species.

Andrew Davies, aged 23, is a graduate of Birmingham University and studied spider growth for almost two years as part of his degree. He states:

“We haven’t managed to pinpoint the precise cause for the increasing size of the spiders but we have a good idea whats behind it. Due to Global warming the UK summertime is gradually increasing in temperature and length, giving the spiders longer to feed and breed.”

“Instead of having skeletons on the inside, spiders have them on the outside and these are called exoskeletons. They are made up of layers of cuticle, which the spider then sheds at various times within its life and is then replaced with larger, thinker and stronger exoskeletons.”

“But because of the longer and warmer summers the UK now has, just one of the side effects of global warming, the spiders are shedding there exoskeletons more frequently. Mostly noticeable in the female spiders is the fact that the new exoskeletons replacing the old ones are around 10% thicker then usual. As a result the larger females were able to produce a high number of offspring.”

We have yet to see how this faster, stronger and more numourus version of the average house spider is going to effect the UKs ecosystem, it certianly sounds like bad news for the average house fly.

However, since 2008 the company has started making various moves to help reduce the size of its colossal carbon footprint. Starting with its delivery trucks which make around 2,000 deliveries a week to pubs and bars across the UK.

They have started running their company delivery trucks on Bio Diesel which originates from the cooking oil previously used to cook food in the company pubs. An impressive 95 of these more environmentally friendly delivery vehicles have been successfully put on the road after joining forces with DHL Exel Supply Chain and Bio Diesel Energy Company Agent.

But it doesn’t stop there because Wetherspoons are currently installing a glass crusher at their main distribution depot in Daventry. Glass from all the company pubs and bars will be returned here and then crushed onsite and recycled as road aggregate.

Victoria Jayne Hollick, 22, is a Team leader at the Elizabeth of York Wetherspoons pub in Mosley, Birmingham. She stated “I think it’s brilliant that so much effort is being put into recycling! Only a quarter of the company’s pubs actually recycle glass and cardboard onsite so the glass crush is a great idea!”

The company has also taken up the ‘Tote-Box’ scheme, which entails food such as meat or vegetables to be directly placed into plastic containers. On delivery the full containers are exchanged for empty ones which are then taken away, cleaned and reused. This enables Wetherspoons to drastically cut back on the amount of plastic and cardboard packaging used on the food.

This huge slab of pollution is partly down to the carbon dioxide emission caused by fertilization used on the cattle’s feed crop and farm machinery to harvest it. Then there is the shipping of cattle feed to the cows and the shipping of cattle around the world as food for ourselves.

But it doesn’t stop there. A shocking 30 percent of the Methane gas in the atmosphere is caused by Bovine flatulence, but even worse is the fact cattle’s manure also contains the Ozone destroying Nitrous Oxide.

You may not have known this but Methane actually has a global warming effect 23 times that of the bog standard Carbon emission. But Nitrous Oxide is the big daddy of the pollution gasses by having a terrifying 296 times bigger effect on the atmosphere then Carbon, that’s gigantic!

But don’t start blaming the bovines…  it’s partly our fault too. The increasing human population means the demand for beef as food is ever rising, so more and more cattle are bred to keep up with them. As a result the cows are creating their own hoof-print on global warming.

The baby bottlenose dolphin was instantly recognised as being an albino by its red eyes and pink body due to lack of pigment in the skin. This is the first known case of an albino dolphin and even though there were fears of sun damage because of its albinism the dolphin is perfectly healthy and doing well. This then led me into researching into dolphins and how we humans and our nasty pollution are affecting them.

According to WikiAnswers global warming is the major threat to the dolphin’s survival because as they migrate they search for warmer waters, the dolphin pods usually have one leader and they all follow him. However, because the waters are becoming warmer due to global warming their leader end up getting mislead and guides his pod more inland then they should swim. They then become trapped in bays and gulf and are basically lost and tragically this usually results in whole pods of dolphins drowning.
As the primary causes of global warming we need to protect our wildlife as best we can, after all it’s just as much their planet as it is ours…
The discovery of Pinkie the first ever know pink dolphin to exist is so amazing it has won first place on the ‘Weird and Wonderful Animals’.

But is this really enough? Seal hunting is the largest mass slaughter of marine mammals in the world. Russia’s harp seal population has decreased by a third in the last ten years to numbers of only around 200,000.

Seal hunting is also carried out in Sweden, Finland and also Canada. This is a shocking practice especially when you take in to account that every spring over 325,000 seals are killed in Canada alone. Facts about hunting can be found on the Seasheperd site.

Why are such large numbers of seals being slaughtered when seal meat is considered mostly inedible to humans? Synthetic fur has been so well produced that its appearance is almost identical to that of real seal skin, there is no excuse.
On top of this the seal numbers have also been slowly dwindling, especially around Russia because of the shrinking Arctic ice in the White Sea region due to global warming.

A petition can be found on the HSUS site, take some action and put your name down.

Modern people are well aware of the serious ever increasing pollution problems we are facing for the future.

The average British person has a gigantic estimated carbon dioxide emissions usage of around 10tons a year! The government has suggested a person should be creating no more than 2tons of emissions a year in order to cut these nasty fumes by a target of 80% by 2050.

So why I ask you are airports such as Heathrow building even MORE runways to add to their collection? How are people supposed to be reducing their carbon footprints when the government is allowing them major means to increase them? This could be sending the wrong message out to people as its leading them to believe that our pollution problems are unimportant for the time being. ‘We will worry about them later’ I can almost hear people think.

On my surfing travels through the internet I came across a handy flight carbon emissions calculator on the website. By using the emissions counter I discovered that a holiday to Ibiza for four is causing over a whapping 1.5tons of carbon emissions. For each person that’s almost half of their yearly recommended emission allowance of 2tons used up in just 8 hours of flying.

Flights from London to New York cause over 2 huge tons of ozone destroying carbon emissions in one go. Don’t even get me started on the Oozy lovers who cause around a mind blowing 7tons of emissions with their long haul flights to Australia. I understand it’s a very beautiful country but it won’t be staying like that for long if you highflying travelers don’t start cutting back on your air miles.

Maybe the credit crunch isn’t such a bad thing after all, the less money people have to spend on flights away the less carbon emissions they cause. Think of the planet people!

By Kimberley Gammon ]]> http://www.birminghamrecycled.co.uk/conservation/a-plane-load-of-pollution/feed 3