Here's Hoping
My afternoon with the Weekend Warriors of Stump Up for Trees, which I mentioned in my post about the Olchon Valley a few variants ago, has left me with a new sense of optimism and a slightly different slant on the history and future of our misuse of the biosphere. There is now a reaction to this destructive history that I am starting to see as a force that is gathering momentum, powered by individual and collective action all over the country. Things have to change, because nothing else makes any sense, and meeting the Weekend Warriors has strengthened my sinews more than somewhat. Nature conservation in the UK has always been led by visionary individuals, by wildlife charities and energetic volunteers. Governments in this country have consistently failed to take significant action to halt the assault on our biodiversity. Without all those individuals and organisations, in a conservation movement of extraordinary energy and determination, the state of nature here would be completely catastrophic, as we have not so far been able to rely on our governments to take the problem seriously enough. So…
Having absorbed the words of the Book of Genesis, ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’, we in Britain have acted for centuries as if it was our God-given right to dominate and exploit the whole of nature. The Tudor vermin control legislation, which was effective from 1553 to about 1800, was informed by this assumption.
Under this legislation the vestry committees of individual parishes all across the country paid rewards for the extermination of ‘vermin’. Their interpretation of the word ‘vermin’ was very liberal. Anyone short of a few bob could kill almost anything, go to the churchwardens with the corpses, or the heads or tails, and get some beer money.
James Knapp, writing in Gloucestershire in 1829, said ‘
We still continue here that very ancient custom of giving parish rewards for the destruction of various creatures in the denomination of vermin. … An item passed in one of our late churchwarden’s accounts was “for seventeen dozen tomtit heads”. In what evil hour and for what crime this poor little bird could have incurred the anathema of a parish is difficult to conjecture.’ *
There seems to have been a belief that every creature that was not positively identified as beneficial should be eliminated. Before we were aware of how organisms interrelate in the symbiotic cooperations of the biosphere, and at a time when we thought all nature was ours to exploit, there were probably no wild creatures whatsoever identified as beneficial to man until the discovery of pollination by bees in 1750. An old Bedfordshire keeper, asked what harm Red Squirrels do and why he shot them, replied, “It isn’t that they do any harm, but what good do they do?” *
Given these attitudes and the financial incentives, it is a remarkable that nature was resilient enough to survive at all. Certain birds and mammals were very badly affected by this persecution, but many species were able to survive into the next great age of persecution, which was brought about by the rise of the sporting estates in the 19th century.
The protection of ‘game’ by gamekeepers on these estates led to the destruction whenever possible of any bird or animal thought to be harmful to ‘game’. On these sporting estates ‘game’ often meant, and now almost always means, Pheasants, an alien species which would be regarded as a harmful pest, like the Grey Squirrel, had it not become such an important way for farmers and landowners to articulate their place in rural society and, dare I say, their masculinity . It is interesting that we have so completely eliminated almost any wildlife that might provide ‘sport’ for these manly individuals that they had to import 27 million ‘game’ birds and ‘game bird’ hatching eggs in 2018 (a typical year for which I happen to have found the figures). At the beginning of the shooting season, after the release of about 47 million pheasants, these alien birds comprise between one and a half and two times the total biomass of all the native birds in the UK.
Although the age of the persecution of ‘vermin’ by gamekeepers has not ended yet, and although it provides us with a depressing catalogue of destruction, it is also possible to see the records of ‘vermin’ destroyed on sporting estates in a more hopeful light, as evidence of the kinds of numbers of species that our countryside was once capable of supporting and could reasonably be expected to sustain once again in a more enlightened future. The Glengarry estate in the Scottish Highlands, for example, in only the four years 1837-40, recorded in its vermin books the killing of:
198 Wild cats, 246 Pine Martens, 106 Polecats, 301 Stoats and Weasels, 67 Badgers, 48 Otters, 27 Sea Eagles, 15 Golden Eagles, 18 Ospreys, 98 Blue Hawks (probably Peregrines), 11 Hobbys, 275 Red Kites, 5 Marsh Harriers, 63 Goshawks, 659 Buzzards, 462 Kestrels, 78 Merlins, and 63 Hen Harriers. Of the eight other species listed at least one, the 71 Fern Owls or Nightjars, has absolutely no conceivable place in any list of ‘vermin’, living as it does on a diet of moths. Foxes are missing from the list, which may suggest that they had already been locally exterminated.
You cannot realistically extrapolate from those figures the numbers of prey species of birds, fish and mammals required to feed them all, but clearly potential prey species must have been present in very large numbers to sustain them in such numbers, and this clearly illustrates the potential for a luxuriant wildlife on this estate. In fact much of the area covered by the old Glengarry Estate is probably much better habitat now than it was in 1840, due to conservation work by the Forestry Commission and the charity Trees for Life. The wildlife potential on estates all over Scotland is likely to improve as the result of the pressure for tree planting and carbon sequestration, and as the rewilding movement gains ground, and there is a huge potential therefore for wildlife restoration. The vermin books also give us an inkling of how much more biodiversity must have been present even earlier, when the Atlantic oak and hazel forests and the Caledonian pine forests covered so much more of the Highland mountains, and wild boar, beavers, wolves and lynx were present.
The same will undoubtedly be true of the English and Welsh moorlands as their restoration gains momentum, after centuries of destructive grazing by sheep. I like to regard this restoration of the biosphere as inevitable simply because it is the most intelligent use of that land. The rich owners of sporting estates on the Pennines and the North York moors will use all their power to argue for the importance of grouse shooting, and to suggest that their heather monoculture is the natural vegetation of the region. So natural, in fact, that they suggest it would not survive without their management, a curiously paradoxical argument.
The Welsh establishment, who tend to think that the language and culture of Wales depends on sheep farming, will shrink from confronting the fact that sheep maintain upland devastation and are incompatible with plans for restoration of biodiversity in places like the Brecon Beacons National Park, but the rewilding movement, the need to protect carbon-storing peat from muirburn and drainage, the importance of flood mitigation, and the urgent need to repair the biosphere cannot be ignored. I believe that rewilding and conservation in these areas will offer a better social and economic future for upland communities than either sheep farming or working on sporting estates, and a more exciting future for the young people of these areas who normally move out. We have, in short, vast areas that are suitable for the biosphere restoration that is essential not just to conserve nature but ultimately to ensure our own survival. Huge expanses of desolate moorland are ripe for rewilding and the country is full of people like the Weekend Warriors eager to make a start.
I also draw optimism from one of my favourite books, Gilbert White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne’. This 18th-century country parson cheers one with accounts of plentiful wildlife in the south of England. He writes of vast flocks of chaffinches and of stone curlews on the downs, or of large numbers of harvest mice living in corn ricks. Even this comparatively ‘organised’ and long-settled countryside was evidently capable of sheltering surprisingly large populations of birds and animals that are now scarce. On a good day it is possible to see this as cause for hope that this richness could return if the countryside were managed better.
The present age of course is now also the age of reintroductions. This started when the Osprey reintroduced itself in 1954 at Loch Garten on Speyside, after having been exterminated by ‘sportsmen’ and egg-collectors in 1916. An incident in 1958 involving an egg collector replacing the eggs with hen eggs smeared with boot polish was shrewdly used by the RSPB to gain sympathy both for the Ospreys and for the RSPB, and marked a turning point in the development of widespread public support for conservation organisations. Since then the Red Kite, down to about 10 birds hanging around Tregaron tip when I was a boy, is now widespread over much of the UK, due to community action that included boy scouts guarding nest sites round the clock in Radnorshire and elsewhere. The Goshawk is no longer extinct and can be found nesting only a few miles from my house. The Great Bustard, a colourful dramatic turkey-sized bird of open downlands that was exterminated in 1832 is now the subject of an extraordinarily dogged attempt to re-establish it on Salisbury Plain, which is teaching conservationists a great deal about the problems of such reintroductions. At one point an ex-policemen was running a ‘predator awareness training programme’ for the young bustards, which were raised in incubators and had no parents to teach them about foxes. The Common Crane reintroduction programme on the Somerset Levels used volunteers dressed as Cranes to teach young Cranes life skills, while avoiding the risk of the young Cranes ‘imprinting’ or identifying as humans, and just as this was gaining momentum Cranes arrived at one of their old breeding sites in the Norfolk Broads, where there are now 20 breeding pairs after an interval of several hundred years. At the pioneering rewilding estate at Knepp in Sussex there is now a breeding population of White Storks, missing from Britain for over 600 years, and maybe they will have beavers there soon too. Meanwhile the Chough, locally extinct in Cornwall for some years, re-established itself with young birds from Brittany, and the Sea Eagle, reintroduced to the Isle of Rhum in the 1970s, is now so common in the West of Scotland that it has become a tourist attraction that considerably boosts the prosperity of islands such as Mull and Skye.
The Otter has returned from near extinction caused by pesticides, and the Wild Boar and Beavers are once again living in the UK, something beyond my wildest dreams only a few years ago. The Wild Boar is very well established, and the Beaver is gaining recognition as an essential architect of nature recovery. The Pine Marten and the Polecat are gaining ground in Wales as well as Scotland; the increase in Pine Martens seems to be discouraging Grey Squirrels in favour of the native Reds, and there are active conservation and reintroduction programmes for the Scottish Wild Cat and the Water Vole.
Some of these conservation projects are partly motivated by the need for something dramatic and newsworthy that will inspire people to support conservation work. That would be true, for example, of the wonderful colony of White Storks being encouraged at Knepp and on neighbouring estates. These Storks can survive on these estates, particularly Knepp, because the rewilding provides a habitat for frogs and other species that Storks like to eat. But they will find it much more difficult to feed themselves in areas of industrial agriculture, where many species less charismatic than the White Stork also need our support.
To take a simple example, the common house sparrow was once so numerous that organised Sparrow Clubs, or Rat and Sparrow Clubs, became an integral part of village life. Rudgewick Sparrow Club celebrated a haul of 5.313 sparrows’ heads at their annual dinner in 1865, and the Wirral Farmers Club is said to have paid a bounty for 10,000 sparrows annually. Sparrows are now endangered. To maintain their numbers they need to raise 2 or 3 broods each year, feeding their young on insects. There are now so few insects in the countryside that they struggle to raise one brood annually, which is due principally to farming using huge amounts of insecticides. The same is doubtless true of many other disappearing farmland birds.
It is therefore with great regret that I have to end this hopeful piece on a less optimistic note. If we are to consolidate the kinds of achievements noted above, we have no alternative but to confront industrial farming, and the industry fiction that you can’t produce food without using pesticides. Insects in the countryside are as vital as plankton in the sea. Kill the plankton and you end up killing Blue Whales and everything in between. If you kill off the insects of the countryside a similar catastrophic cascade will happen. Is already happening, actually. Very few creatures will survive in a world without insects. And here and now, just as I struggle with the effort to be optimistic, I get sent a link to some research that shows that one single exposure to insecticides can affect bees so badly that they take several generations to recover. No wonder that I had 84 colonies of honeybees a few years ago and am now down to about 20. More on this, you may be sure, another time!
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2019-05-07.251253.h (Game bird imports, parliamentary questions)
*(Silent Fields, Lovegrove, 2007).
https://www.whatthesciencesays.org/estimating-the-number-and-biomass-of-pheasants-in-britain/
Thanks for another brilliantly engaging and informative article Richard :-)