Last week I visited my grandparents who live near Morecambe Bay and while my grandad and I were out on the boat about 3 miles out into the Irish Sea from Fleetwood we saw a huge Basking Shark, easily as long as the boat which was 24 feet. Afterward he and I were talking about it and he says that when he started working on fishing boats as a boy in the early 1950s Basking Sharks were extremely prevalent but you had to go to Scotland or past Ireland out into the Atlantic to see seals, dolphins or whales but in the last decade or so it’s been the opposite, Basking Sharks are so uncommon that when someone sees one they’ll post in a local Facebook group that they saw a Great White and seals, dolphins and even whales are quite common even in the bay, and it made me start thinking about how in my own community (between Bradford and Leeds) hedgehogs seem to have disappeared from gardens while at the same time foxes appear much more bold, though I don’t know how related those two things are, and wondering how the environment in other areas have changed.