Superficially, Britain in 2015 doesn’t look much different from the way it
looks now. The urban fringes still bleed into the Green Belt; economists
still think concrete makes better sense than grass; farming is still a
largely monochromatic business of spray-clean prairies. Few people have ever
heard a corncrake.
And yet, if you look carefully, there are signs of change. Field margins are a
bit shaggier. Hedge-rows have fewer gaps in them. In managed woodlands, dead
trees rot where they have fallen. Butterflies dance in the sun, many of them
further north than butterflies have ever danced before. Gardens are loud
with birdsong and bees. It is a rare trip into the countryside that does not
yield sight of a deer or the sound of a lark. Our relationship with nature
feels more secure than it has been for more than half a century.
But none of this will happen by accident. It will take imagination,
commitment, and the resolution of some dilemmas that would test the wit of
Solomon, never mind an environment minister. One thing is certain: the
future cannot be like the past. Natural England declares its ambition at
every opportunity “to conserve and enhance the natural environment, for its
intrinsic value, the wellbeing and enjoyment of people and the economic
prosperity that it brings”. That would have been anathema to the old Nature
Conservancy Council, for whom “people” were a species of pest.
The old way was a powerful force in the polarisation of interests — wildlife
versus crops — that characterised the post-war agricultural revolution. Its
effects are well known to anyone who can tell a dunnock from a dock leaf.
Who would have believed that the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UK BAP) would
have to conserve the likes of hedgehog, hare, harvest mouse, skylark, cuckoo
and toad? It was unimaginable, but it has happened. The full BAP list, which
now contains 1,150 species, may not be a requiem, but it is a reminder that
a battle has been fought at great cost.
The countryside has needed a Mandela moment. For too long it suffered under
apartheid — wildlife on one side, man on the other. Confined to ghettoes,
animals lost touch with each other and biodiversity was reduced to its
lowest ebb since the Ice Age. We imposed a kind of multiculturalism in which
a home for one population too often meant displacing another. A small but
important first step towards reintegration was taken by the
government-funded agri-environment schemes that rewarded farmers for
environmental improvements: replacing hedgerows, leaving unploughed
headlands, and field margins for wildlife.
But it has not been enough. The best efforts of bird-friendly farmers are
devalued if neighbours don’t follow suit. Their farms remain de facto nature
reserves, disconnected islands in seas of sterility that vulnerable species
can’t navigate. Instead of waiting for volunteers, Defra (the Dep-artment
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has to identify the most important
landscapes and involve all the farms within it. Only then will we get a
properly joined-up conservation effort.
The effectiveness of this approach has been proved by Oxford University’s
Wildlife Conser-vation Research Unit (WildCRU), which recruited a network of
farmers in the upper Thames Valley and observed the influence on moths.
These are good canary-in-the-mineshaft indicators not only for insects but
also for the birds and mammals that feed on them. The researchers found
something else too. Trees in hedgerows are even better for insects than
grassy field margins.
So here is another easy option — bring hedgerow trees within the
agri-environment schemes, from which by some oversight they are currently
excluded. This is not just a question of conserving what is already there.
Almost a third of the UK’s 1.8m hedgerow trees are over a century old, which
means a rising death rate over the next
25 years. This is why the Tree Council is campaigning to increase the number
of hedgerow trees across the country. In many cases it involves nothing more
than tagging natural saplings so that hedge-cutters can avoid them.
Reform of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), decoupling subsidies
from crop yields, should also encourage conservation. More importantly, 2009
sees a pivotal change in the UK BAP, shifting the emphasis from individual
species to entire ecosystems. All this makes good sense. But there is a
third force at work which in the short term we can do little to influence.
How we react to climate change — in particular, how we respond to the loss of
native species and the arrival of exotics — is as important a question as
any we face. On past form we have much to learn. England’s long campaign to
preserve the red squirrel from the invading grey has been an exercise in
futility. The grey — which, unlike the red, is happy to cross open ground
between trees — is much better adapted to the realities of an altered
countryside. It is also bigger, fiercer and wholly illiberal in its attitude
to rivals, and carries the squirrel-pox virus that kills the red.
As the climate changes, so more and more species will be forced to either
adapt or migrate, and we, the god-playing overseers of their lives, will
have some tricky calls to make. One of the most persistent demands is for
the reintroduction of lost species. Zoologists remind us that humans in
Stone Age Britain were outnumbered five to one by bears, which lingered here
until some time between the 8th and 10th centuries. Lynxes were thought to
have become extinct at the beginning of the fourth century, but bone
analysis now suggests that they survived in Scotland for another thousand
years. The last British wolf was killed near Inverness in 1743.
Without top predators the fauna is incomplete, which is why fundamentalists
want to bring them back. It has taken 10 years of campaigning to win
political approval, but in May this year, after an absence of 400 years, 11
European beavers were released into Knapdale forest, Argyllshire. Natural
England has declared that parts of England, too, might lessen their flood
risk if river flows were calmed by beaver dams. The response of the National
Farmers’ Union — a “costly luxury”, it said — shows that old suspicions will
not die easily. If the vegetarian beaver has had to wait so long for
admission, then what hope for the historic pyramid-toppers — lynx, wolf and
bear? For bear we can confidently answer: none. For lynx we can predict a
fair chance, and for wolf — well, maybe more than you’d think.
One point in their favour is that wolf and lynx both do what big carnivores
are supposed to do: they eat herbivores. In Scotland this would mean the
pestilential deer. In England, too, deer damage crops, woodlands, gardens
and vehicles. No official record is kept, but the best estimate is that deer
every year cause 34,000 road accidents in Scotland and 8,000 in England,
injuring more than 400 people and killing 10. Despite heavy culling, the
combined population of red, roe, fallow, sika, muntjac and Chinese water
deer is heading for 2m, and likely to increase by 10% annually.
But what to do about it? Lynx would certainly eat a few, but a few is all it
would be. Computer modelling suggests Scotland could support a population of
up to 450 lynxes, which would be enough to boost eco-tourism but not enough
to kill many deer. If the lynx is to be reintroduced, it will have to be for
its own sake, not for any benefit to the Highland ecology. Under European
law, the qualifying condition for reintroductions is that the original
causes of extinction no longer exist. In the case of the lynx this means
persecution, which is precisely why zoologists believe we have a moral duty
to bring it back. Unless we restore our own landscape, they say, we’ll have
no moral authority to lecture anyone else about theirs.
So the stage is being set for the biggest battle of all. There’s nothing new
about wolf-talk. It’s been going on for decades, with (mostly English)
zoologists arguing for the reintroduction of canis lupus to the Highlands,
and (mostly Scottish) sheep farmers querying their sanity. For years the
political wind has blown with the farmers, and not even the wildest
enthusiasts believed wolves could have a meaningful impact on deer. But the
ground shifted when the Royal Society published a study in 2007 based on
research in America’s Yellowstone and other national parks suggesting
earlier calculations were wrong. It may take a while — maybe 60 years in
Scotland — but wolves and deer would settle into a balanced predator/prey
relationship in which deer would be reduced by more than 50%.
The scientists also tested public opinion. Approval was slightly stronger
among urbanites (who thought, wrongly, the principal risk from wolves was to
humans) than among country folk (who understood that the risk was to sheep),
but a significant majority were in favour of the wolf. Thanks to the skewed
economics of their industry, even farmers were less hostile than they used
to be. Without subsidies, sheep farmers would make a loss on every carcass
they sent to market. In the past, when the size of the subsidy was linked to
the number of animals, a lost sheep would hit the farmer directly in his
pocket. Now that subsidies are paid simply for grazing the land, a dead
sheep is no longer a catastrophe. If you factor in compensation and profit
from eco-tourism, then… Highland farmers are nothing if not canny.
Nevertheless, opinion is polarised and there is no possibility of wolves
roaming the Highlands any time soon. For lynxes, the odds are less daunting.
In a sober report on the state of Britain’s mammals, published last
year by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, Professor David
Macdonald, director of WildCRU, could see no practical or philosophical
barrier to their reintroduction, though caution dictates that numbers would
have to be small and the pioneer individuals neutered.
South of the border, things are very different. You would more easily
reintroduce the pillory than big carnivores to Middle England (though the
RSPB fully intends to reintroduce another avian predator, the white-tailed
eagle). If deer are to be kept down, and if wildlife agencies are to make
good their pledge to reverse the degradation of broadleaf woodlands, then
they will have to rely on fence and bullet.
Deer are not the only threat to good order. Nobody in 2009 is much surprised
to see a wild boar. Unlike the Kentish farmers who put up panicky notices
when it first appeared — These animals can kill! — we have welcomed Sus
scrofa back to the ancestral landscapes it last roamed in the 17th century.
Its breeding stock was mainly French — farmed animals imported for the
sausage trade which then escaped into the woods and hedgerows of Kent,
Sussex and Dorset, thence to spread through the Cotswolds, Forest of Dean
and the Weald. A few dogs have come off worse. Otherwise, though boars are
still legally “dangerous wild animals”, there has been no serious damage to
humans.
Woodland flowers are a different story. Bluebell woods are rare in Europe
precisely because boars have churned up the ground. In many areas of
England, boars already count as agricultural pests. By 2015 they could be a
serious threat to broadleaf woodlands, not only draining them of colour but
reversing the hard-won progress of dormice, butterflies and other species in
the process of rehabilitation. There will be demands for heavier culling,
the inevitable fate of creatures deemed to have abused their freedom.
Scientists like to prioritise plants or animals in order of vulnerability.
“Critically endangered” species get more urgent attention than the merely
“vulnerable”. But even this may be simplistic. Take the water vole, which
recently came close to extinction. What has saved it is the culling of
another species, the predatory American mink, which was launched, gung-ho,
into rivers by activists “liberating” fur farms. There was an even worse
example more than 40 years ago when hedgehogs were introduced to the island
of South Uist, off western Scotland. By 2000, the original colony of four
had multiplied to many thousands and spilt over onto Benbecula and North
Uist. For ground-nesting birds it was a disaster, their colonies devastated
by hedgehogs stealing their eggs. To save the birds, thousands of hedgehogs
were killed (at a cost of £340 each) or transported to the mainland. This is
the risk of eco-engineering, and we’re at it again.
Britain’s rarest mammal is the Scottish wildcat. It disappeared from England,
Wales and southern Scotland during the mid- to late-19th century, and
retreated to the far northwest of the Highlands. Professor Macdonald
estimates that by the early years of the 21st century the number of genuine
survivors — wildcats uncontaminated by cross-breeding with ferals — might
have been as low as 400. They will not recover unaided. To protect them from
miscegenation and disease, stray pets and ferals will have to be purged from
the Cairngorms, and some captive breeding may be necessary. Progress will be
slow, but Macdonald is optimistic that, with support from Scottish Natural
Heritage, some signs of recovery will be evident by 2015, and that the cats
thereafter might breed “pretty quickly”. In time, they might even find their
way back into England and Wales.
Pine martens, too, are pulling through. At the turn of the century, having
been hunted to near-extinction by gamekeepers and the fur trade, they were
so rare many people thought they were birds. Now they are not only
recovering in Scotland and Northern Ireland but have also been sighted in
Wales and the Yorkshire moors. As always with predators, there is
controversy. Few people mind that martens kill grey squirrels, but in
Scotland there is anguish about the capercaillie, which in places is losing
30% of its eggs to them. Martens are legally protected, but there may be a
case for controlling (in other words, killing) them where capercaillie are
vulnerable, an option Macdonald wrily describes as “ideologically
exercising”.
We will have to get used to such problems. Plants and insects are far more
sensitive to climate change than humans are, and where they lead, the rest
of the ecological pyramid will follow. Left to itself, nature will shoo some
native species off the stage and usher some debutantes on. Our
“ideologically exercising” dilemma will be how to respond. We might
anticipate a “no” to the malarial mosquito and “yes” to the hoopoe, but many
more questions will be asked than have easy answers.
An official study in 2005 counted 2,721 “non-native” species in England,
though many of these were harmless and included such established,
ineradicable invaders as sycamore, horse chestnut, evergreen oak, rabbit,
brown rat and grey squirrel. Others had arrived more recently, with a
significant number deemed harmful either to habitats or to the resident
species with which they competed. The question now arises: how much effort
should we invest trying to fend off the likes of the American ruddy duck,
harlequin ladybird, slipper limpet, Chinese mitten crab, signal crayfish,
topmouth gudgeon, Hottentot fig, Japanese knotweed, floating pennywort,
Himalayan balsam, monk parakeet, muntjac and the rest? How afraid should we
be of new pests and diseases?
Immigration is as ticklish an issue for ecologists as it is for politicians,
but the open borders of sea and sky — never mind the free rides via hulls
and ballast-water of ships, and the escapes from zoos and gardens — are
somewhat harder to police, and a changing climate can only widen the
floodgates. We know that the climate-change objectives declared at the
beginning of the century cannot be met, and that the EU biodiversity targets
for 2010 will be missed by a wide margin. The temptation to meddle has never
been stronger; nor, perhaps, has the call for restraint. We know from bitter
experience that micromanagement is not always the best answer. Following the
Great Storm of October 1987, when 15m trees fell across southern England, we
now understand that fallen timber and rotting bark are the natural
feedstocks that keep nature alive. Not everyone loves fungi and beetles, but
most people love the feathery and furry parts of the ecosystems they
underpin. We have learnt that nature is its own best healer, but we
understand also that we need to return some of what we have taken away.
Backed by the RSPB, the Environment Agency, English Heritage and the wildlife
trusts, Natural England is spearheading an effort by 2015 to create 1,900
hectares of new reedbeds, and restore 1,500 hectares of fen and 1,000 of
raised bogs as part of a “50-year vision” for wetlands. Albeit still on too
small a scale, restored hedgerows are replacing some of the connective
tissue of the ancient wildwood, creating a cross-country network of
corridors along which species can move.
Small improvements can yield big returns. At Hope Farm, near Cambridge, the
RSPB runs a con-ventional arable farm that stands in blunt contradiction to
anyone who thinks efficient agriculture and healthy wildlife are
incompatible. Tiny refuges left in the middle of fields soon doubled the
population of skylarks. Grass strips round the margins grow bumper crops of
the small rodents and insects that predatory and insect-eating birds need to
feed on, and a few small “sacrificial” plots of uncut kale, quinoa, barley
or wheat keep the seed-eaters alive in winter. Barn owls are no longer a
rarity. Brown hares keep their appointment with madness in March.
Yellowhammers billow like pollen from the hedges, and dusk increasingly
means the flicker of bats.
With little or no change to cropping and spraying regimes, with goodwill and a
modicum of fiscal encouragement, this could be the dominant pattern of rural
Britain. Could be. Then again, we could enhance the countryside with
beautifully designed, well-planned housing developments sensitive to local
need. If we can’t manage our own habitats, by what stroke of blind optimism
do we hope to manage others’?
Butterflies are particularly vulnerable. A hundred years ago, when coppicing
still let sunlight into woodland floors, they swarmed in blizzards so thick
you couldn’t see through them. Not any more. Lepidoptera are sensitive to
the point of neurosis. Grassland species need exactly the right plant mix,
and sward at exactly the right height, and what is right for one species is
wrong for another. Woodland and garden types similarly need the right
combinations of food, light, moisture and temperature — a fragile balance
increasingly disrupted by climate change.
If agri-environment schemes can be made to work on the scale of whole
landscapes, and if voluntary efforts to preserve and extend woodlands
succeed, then it is possible to imagine some species finding new habitats
further north. The pearl-bordered fritillary, Duke of Burgundy fritillary,
wood white, speckled wood, Essex skipper, orange tip, peacock and ringlet
are some that might benefit. Others will come under increasing pressure and
some will not survive. Meanwhile, across the Channel, a handful of species
such as the black-veined white (extinct here since the 1800s) and Queen of
Spain fritillary might be ready to join us. New avian species, too, will be
drawn northward on currents of warmth: hoopoes have already been spotted in
the south, escaped parakeets are enjoying life in London, cattle egrets and
spoonbills are expected soon. As Macdonald says, even if new arrivals are
driven here by climate change rather than deliberately introduced, the
displacement is still the fault of humans. There is nothing we can do about
it. This is nature doing its stuff.
Now it is up to us to do ours. Our relationship with wildlife is spiritual as
well as physical, and necessary. In these straitened times, it would be
folly to imagine that the ecosystem is a dispens-able luxury ripe for budget
cuts. In myriad ways, from the efforts of nature-loving gardeners and NGOs
to the policies of government, we have the means to adapt. The spectacular
recoveries of red kite, osprey, bittern and avocet have already shown what
might be achieved. We have heard what the environment is telling us. It is a
slow process into which lynx and wolf may intrude with untypical drama.
Never before have we needed to be so careful in what we wish for, but more
beetles and dormice might be a good place to start
