A hedgerow rant - already???

The Safari was up and down the motorway the other day and saw mile upon mile of mid-summer hedgerow tidying, 99% of  it unnecessary for road safety or any obvious agricultural benefit. so why do it - what on earth is the purpose? If there were any flowers in the spring there sure ain't gonna be no berries for the autumn and not a lot of shelter if we get spells of severe cold again. And we wonder why some of our farmland birds aren't doing to well!

Not only that in our 200 mile trip in glorious hot and humid summery conditions we didn't need to squirty dead bugs off the windscreen - where are they??? No wonder there's trouble with some most farmland birds.

We traveled through some prime dairy country and got the impression that even in these frugal times  more of us should be drinking organic milk and pay the small premium at the till because the cost of silage and fodder maize fed milk is extremely high on the environment, but of course if you don't care about the environment, and the food-chains therein, keep buying the cheaper stuff. Must be better for the cows too.

One day we'll break one of those chains that is one we're connected too - then we'll know it! We're already tempting fate with the use of neonictinoids on crop seeds resulting in the poisoning of beneficial pollinating insects weeks or months later - surely that's not clever...apparently the French and Germans have banned their use.

One of our neighbours removed a long swathe of (non-native) Campanula plants from the bottom of her fence - it was in full flower and looking lovely and full of bees and other insects so why do it? Because it looks slightly straggly? No all you can see is a thin strip of bare soil and the gaps at the bottom of the fence panels - hardly aesthetic...and of course the bees are now gone.

The local Privet flower purge continues unabated - why is it so necessary to remove the lovely white flowers from this otherwise fairly boring boring shrub, and  of course no flowers means no berries later in the year.

Best stop now before we find something else to rant about!
...Today...Now we really do have something serious to rant about...we had a hand malfunction and dropped our SD card with all today's and all the family pics from Tuesdday in to a pot of Strawberry Yoghurt and now it;s asking to be formatted...AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH. What's worse is it worked fine after a little bit of a wipe on the t-shirt and we didn't take advantage and download everything to the laptop's hard-drive.
So no pic of that stinky but interesting fish skeleton with a similar skull to the one we found the other day and no pic of the complete Bean-like Telin which is a rare find for us.
Where to next? National Whale and Dolphin Watch weekend starts tomorrow and we'll be watching with a group of eager volunteers.
In the meantime let us know what's gone horribly wrong in your outback

Some saved pictures from the dead card - we had to format it in the end :-(