Aldo Leopold, great American environmentalist, said:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
My father was a farm worker. As children we scoffed when he told us that there had been more butterflies when he was a child. We were surrounded by the Herefordshire countryside, he brought snakes home in his shirt to show us, we fished minnows in the brook, and there were birds everywhere.
His ecological baseline was what he had experienced as a child, and for many years that was the same for me. Although I have lived in wild and rural places all my life, I have been slow to realise how seriously my own ecological baseline has been eroded. Maybe the first real pain came when a summer went by without the cuckoo. I’m out in cider orchards most days in summer, looking after my bees. If there’s a cuckoo I’m going to hear it. Then, come to think of it, why were there so few swallows? I love those birds above all others. I kept a Nature Diary when I was a boy, so I know what was about then. There were larks singing above arable fields; there were peewits and curlews, yellow hammers at intervals along the hedges; there were greenfinches in the yew hedge, bullfinches eating the fruit buds, newts and sticklebacks in the pond. Suddenly the full realisation of the disappearance of the creatures that had built my ecological baseline became an open wound.
When the media presents me with articles about ecological damage, I tend to take avoiding action, because I can’t stand the pain. I switch the radio off or scroll past. So it was quite out of character for me to start reading ‘Silent Fields, the long decline of a nation’s wildlife’, by Roger Lovegrove. This account of the persecution of all creatures classed as vermin in the UK over the last four or five centuries doesn’t have a baseline because it starts with an analysis of parish records of payments made for killing ‘vermin’ going back to Tudor times. The only inkling of population levels comes from incomplete statistics, And when large numbers of killings are recorded, is this evidence of how numerous these creatures were? Or evidence of the speed at which they were moving towards local or national extinction? Either way it suggests numbers of many species utterly unheard of in the pesticide years since the second World War.
Maybe it was the historical distance which made it possible for me to read this book with less pain than I expected. But then there was a reference to Much Cowarne, the Herefordshire village where I can remember suddenly, at the age of five, becoming conscious of being a conscious being. Much Cowarne was a parish that killed large numbers of ‘vermin’. And if it could harbour such numbers in the past, maybe it is possible with the right management for the UK countryside to be hugely more biodiverse than the baseline of anyone now living. The book has many instances that suggest populations way above current levels. For example, 8883 stoats killed in ten years (1920-1930) by the gamekeepers of the Elvedon estate; 1269 Stoats, 454 Weasels, 206 Polecats, 9 Pine Martens and 197 Red Squirrels in 9 years on the Burley estate in Rutland a hundred or so years earlier.
My conclusion for now is that although the UK ecosystems are on their knees as the result of the use of pesticides, loss of habitat and rapacious farming methods, the possibilities of rewilding, ecosystem repair and agricultural reform could make possible a wildlife luxuriant beyond what most of us can imagine or remember. More on that to come.
Thanks for a very interesting article Richard
The decline in bird numbers was so apparent to me over the thirty odd years I cycled to Pembridge and back. From 1982, when I started making that journey, towards Eardisland, just past the turn off to Kingsland, the skies were full of the song of skylarks, the whoop of curlews and the, to me, chuckling chatter of lapwings. In fact, at times the song of the skylarks was so boisterous and exuberant that I would stop just to absorb the exhilaration of it. After ten years those were gone and now all that can be heard is the occasional call of a sky lark. Also, sightings of little owls came to an end. And, yes, cuckoos were regular visitors to Dunkertons orchards, for several years there were two visiting different parts. For the past fifteen years or so they have only been infrequently heard.