THE coronavirus pandemic devastated Britain in many different ways.

We’ve mourned tens of thousands of deaths, of course. Many families lost loved ones far too early.

For Prime Minister Boris Johnson and so many other politicians worldwide it sometimes seemed that the biggest disaster was the decline in the GDP.

British unemployment soared — although members of Tory government have never worried about anybody losing their job but themselves.

Still, we welcomed one man losing his job — but as we go to press Trump is still hanging on for grim life: I understand he has pardoned me along with so many other usual suspects. 

Many children have missed months of school, universities have been disrupted and families have been unable to spend time together. 

Universal has been the complaint that we aren’t allowed to embrace loved ones any more.

No wonder pet dogs and cats have proved so popular. Sanity might just come down to having a pug to hug. 

I’m just as depressed as you are by all that bad news — but I thought I might look for anything vaguely resembling a silver lining and I have located a few pale glimmerings in the darkness of the Great Lockdown of 2020.

That lockdown appears to have been quite beneficial for some local and worldwide wildlife.

The government’s stay-at-home rules significantly reduced the amount of traffic on British roads and that was excellent news for hedgehogs.

Some 150,000 hedgehogs die on the roads in a normal (non-Covid-19) year.

This year must have been a welcome reduced-traffic break for our spiky friends.

There have also been more hedgehog sightings in gardens, including people seeing the prickly animals mating: apparently they do it very carefully.

These sightings may have been because so many people are spending more time at home and in the garden.

The lockdown has also helped Britain’s embattled bee population in various ways.

First, another bonus is there are more wildflowers about, as Britain’s roadside verges have been allowed to grow freely, creating new habitats for busy bees — as well as butterflies and other insects — to use. 

Car fumes make it harder for bees to sniff out nearby flowers, so the decrease in traffic and air pollution has enabled them to make shorter, more efficient trips when foraging for nectar and pollen.

Bees aren’t the only insects that have benefited from the recent drop in road traffic.

Insects are frequently struck and killed by vehicles — remember those insects splattered on summer windscreens? 

Many fewer summer drives because of the lockdown may prove quite the boon for British insect numbers.

That drop in insect deaths has also had a knock-on effect for British birds.

More bird food is on the wing. Bug-eating birds could consider themselves spoiled last year.

Birds, too, have been building their nests in places that would usually be too easily disturbed.

With fewer people walking in the British countryside, ground-nesting birds have had more nesting options than usual.

You’ve probably seen all the social media reports of animals venturing into deserted town centres: pumas spotted prowling the streets of downtown Santiago, Chile, and dolphins in the untypically calm waters in the harbour of Trieste, Italy.

Some may be Photoshopped fakes, but others are certainly real: Llandudno’s wild goats really did come down from the Great Orme and invade the otherwise nearly deserted resort.

I’m less sure about the plagues of dancing mice said to have been filmed on the London Tube — and did wild boars invade downtown Barcelona? I’ll let you decide.

Certainly less incidental human disturbance from noise, smells, movement and the like did result in wild animals increasing their movements and range, and thus having more unplanned meetings with humans. 

Over many years many wild species have adapted their feeding and behaviour to rely totally on human assistance — for example, the Indian monkeys begging in tourist hotels, gulls scavenging from landfills or the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. 

Coronavirus has removed most of the humans and the dependent species have suffered with reduced opportunities to forage on begged titbits, spilled foods and leftover takeaways.

This could have dire consequences for these scavenging species and cause starvation, lower breeding success and perhaps even severe population decline.

Rats having a hard time finding food might be a bit of a mixed blessing, but packs of starving rats might be the ultimate bad news story. 

Meanwhile there were mixed opinions on whether other animals, wild and domestic, might also be able to catch and pass on the coronavirus. Various juries seem still to be out on that one.

It has been reported that a tiger in a New York zoo tested positive, prompting speculation of whether smaller wild and domestic cats are also able to carry the virus.

It seems very likely that humans’ closest living relatives, the great apes, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, are threatened by coronavirus. They need no further threats. All of them are already vulnerable to extinction even without that additional threat.

Huge increases in human population and increasingly crowded cities have been shown to be just one reason that diseases can and do spread.

Cheap and easy air travel has been another factor. The coronavirus has taken advantage of cheap flights.  

It is not a coincidence that bird flu, swine flu, Mers, Sars, Ebola and coronavirus have all occurred in recent decades.

Just this Christmas we saw a huge outbreak of avian flu across Britain and Europe among the huge breeding flocks of turkey, geese, chicken and other holiday roasting birds.

We have seen the world and Britain give some indication of how we can sometimes speedily mobilise radical, large but viable financial action in response to a global emergency. 

This is perhaps the urgent signal that we need to move to a green global future with sustainable degrowth, a future in which we value community and our physical and mental health, and in which   we protect our environment and the wildlife with which we share our green planet.

The former King Wangchuck of Bhutan has suggested making what he calls Gross Domestic Happiness the key measure of civilisation’s success. What a wonderful idea. It would certainly be a massive advance on a world with leaders who too often seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. 

Happy new year.