Avoiding disturbance of falcons & other wildlife

[Anonymous]

Hi, Just had another great visit to Kalymnos in early October. Thanks to everyone who makes it wonderful for us visitors!

I have often seen falcons in the air at various cliffs and this is wonderful. This year at Pescatore we heard & saw several falcons, think they were peregrines, and a mix of adults & young ones. They were circling a lot & calling in a what seemed an upset manner behind & above the left end of Pescatore & towards Glaros. In the UK we try to ensure the minimal disturbance of wild-life, in fact there are legal measures in place for certain species & there is an established ‘Bird Ban’ on various cliffs, agreed with interested parties & the BMC (British Mountaineering Council). As the development of Kalymnos’s cliffs extends more & more and visitors are more numerous, maybe there should be a policy to protect nesting birds (and other animals)?

[Anonymous]

Bird ban! Protection of wildlife and birds, what are they going to hunt and shoot to smithereens, god sake man this is Greece!!

[Anonymous]

First – I am a woman. Next – this is the second really unintelligent post you have made. Your comment re smoking; what price all the various diseases you can get….but, you say, it’s so cheap in Greece. You are pretty out of step with what most outdoor people feel across the world re health & environmental issues.

[Anonymous]

a woman … of course )

“In the UK we try to ensure the minimal disturbance of wild-life, in fact there are legal measures in place for certain species & there is an established ‘Bird Ban’ on various cliffs, agreed with interested parties & the BMC (British Mountaineering Council)”

… but Kalymnos is not in UK and the birds are not protected … lucky for the climbers of the world … )dictatorship of ecology is not yet here

[Anonymous]

This was, I think, just a proposal.

Climbers do not play an abusing game: we practice climbing in nature, and to do so we reach a compromise on nature WITHOUT the opposite party, that is…nature!

So we should be smart enough to act in a decent way and learn to live in nature respecting nature. This is not always easy, I know it well; but it’s easier if you try. A lot of big climbing areas in the world have bird bans and usually they do not cause big problems to climbers.

Sometimes nature has proved climbers are wrong: for example when they open new crags that come down after the rain. Or would you say it’s the birds’ fault to choose to live in a hole in the rocks on which we usually climb?

Anyway, it is also true (I would say obvious) that climbing is NOT the most dangerous threat for nature and wildlife nowadays.

So no one wants a “dictatorship of ecology”, but…considering the amount of rubbish you can find in some Kalymnos areas, I think it would probably be a better world with more birds in the air and less dickheads at the crags.

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