I’ll be careful to avoid the traps sent for my feathered friend

It was recently brought to my attention that Hunstanton is to be the location for some small-scale efforts to capture and mark birds under the authority of the British Trust for Ornithology.

This will involve ringers using small items of equipment, such as spring traps, or walk-in traps no larger than a metre square.

The birds will be assessed, marked with individually identifiable colour rings and released within no more than 15 minutes. This will only take place in the winter months when there is less footfall in the town.

This is part of the black-headed gull project, but in addition to gulls, the traps are also being used to target turnstone!

This will doubtless come as welcome news to numerous individuals at West Norfolk Council, until they realise that the Turnstone in question is of the feathered variety, and not a columnist posing questions they would prefer not to answer.

It might surprise some of them to learn that I can fully understand where they are coming from.

As regular readers know, the ‘Lookback’ feature in the Lynn News often provides a theme for Turnstone.

This week, a letter from the town council dated December 14 2004, is my own personal choice. In attempting to answer the questions put to him, acting chief executive, Ray Harding, dug himself into a hole from which he failed to emerge unscathed.

As indicated by his title, he was new to the job, but this did not prevent him from making this claim in his reply dated January 4 2005: “The council have indeed subsequently agreed to absolve the developers of the obligations to build a new pier. This agreement was reached in 1978 when the council accepted that it would not seek to enforce the term of the 1870 lease relating to monitoring the pier.”

In this one paragraph he admitted that in 1978 the recently-formed West Norfolk Council had failed to act in the public interest in its capacity as ‘pier’ landlord!

This undoubted gaffe came back to haunt the council in 2007, when its declared policy was to reinstate Hunstanton Pier. According to former leader, Nick Daubney, it was only the recession that prevented this from happening!

In reality it was the letter to the town council, a copy of which was sent to him by solicitors acting for a Hunstanton Pier Company (HPC) together with a covering letter asking the council to execute a Deed of Variation to the 999-year lease for Hunstanton Pier.

At first the council refused to oblige, because it would not be in the public interest to do so. What this HPC should have been told is that it would not be legally possible to remove, or simply ignore the obligation to make and maintain the pier specified in a pier lease! If the lease had been just for land, as claimed by Mr Harding at a subsequent public meeting on October 13, 2009, there would have been no need for a repairing covenant!

The question that will now hang over West Norfolk Council, during the ‘Christmas Truce’, is how long are members and officers going to hide in the foxhole before digging themselves out of it with the shovel of truth?

A very Happy Christmas to all Turnstone readers and a peerless New Year to the rest.