#derek-gow
Britain once hosted a broad range of great beasts. We slaughtered the bears, elk and lynx many centuries ago. The wolves lasted longest. Now, only the names of their crags, hills, meres or the ubiquitous deep pits where we caught them and bound them for torture recall their once being. Like the aquamarine blue moor frogs, black storks and night herons, we were the end of them all.
Bison will, in short, do some things that cattle are not capable of doing and others that cattle don't do very well. This is of course hardly surprising, given that ten thousand years' worth of preparation for domestication has profoundly altered the shape, biology and behaviour of cattle, while bison have retained their wild being intact. #domestication
Ideas take time to form. To swirl and amalgamate. Nothing that clear quickly is ever right. Considered moments when you look back and think are critical. Deciding what to do in response requires care. Lingering overlong before acting is, however, a serious fault as decisions postponed for too long will one day for sure come too late.
Stated simply, frogs at every one of their life stages from spawn to adult hopper are, like fish and insects, the cornerstones of food pyramids for a plethora of predators. It's their natural function. #ecology
It takes real determination to annihilate small species from a landscape as large as our island. With hatred in depth. In Britain in times past, we did so repetitively. The big carnivores, such as the bear, lynx and wolf were the first to go, with the smaller wildcat, polecat and pine marten diminished thereafter. We reduced the golden eagle to a much-restricted range, where it remains to this day, and, until the 1970s when its reintroduction from Norway began, the great white-tailed eagle was extinct. All of the other birds of prey, from the osprey to the slate blue merlin, were knocked back to near nothing. Otters and badgers, though now recovering well, declined significantly in the past.
Though a predator of small statues, wildcats have a big reputation which could easily become emblematic of restoration of life after ruin.
White storks have so long been associated with renewal and rebirth that in some countries like Denmark, where their population is still very low, some householders continue to erect elaborate homemade nests on their house roofs in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they will attract a bird long gone. When I discussed stork reintroductions with those involved in Europe, I asked if there had been any problems. No one said yes.
Roy Dennis wrote a splendid response: Long ago in Britain, the annual migrations of big, easily identifiable birds such as white storks and cranes would have held a deep significance for our ancestors. Acting as the punctuation marks in their year, they remain with us in legend, place names and carving, even though the busy pace of modern life has largely lost that ancient rhythm. In this era of a monstrous loss of nature, when it appears impossible to restore on a large scale the common species of my childhood such as the yellowhammer, grey partridge, poppy and water vole, we can succeed with some large species, especially those killed out by earlier generations for food or other practical purposes. It was only when I joined my daughter on field surveys in western Kalimantan that I could see how determined people could catch every large water bird for food when they desired, just like our hungry ancestors here when they were hungry. Removing human persecution is the key and explains why our projects on the osprey, sea eagle and red kite have been so successful, and why cranes and beavers are also on their way back.
I thought once that the conservation of wildlife on this wealthy, ordered island would be a competent and organised endeavour. I thought that organisations, both voluntary and government based, tasked with the conservation of our natural world would work hard for its salvation. I know now that this is not so.
If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you wish, on the other hand, to restore fading species for nature conservation purposes, then you have to fill in 90-page documents which will be thoroughly scrutinised eventually and returned to you with a further suite of impossibly complex questions. Why is it, when nature's ebb is so low and when so many good people want to do good, that there is no easy "one-stop-shop" that tells you what is best to do with your land, or your money, or your time to help. Why can't you just cultivate endangered plants and grow them in your garden, buy packets of glowworms and distribute them with glee, release pool frogs in your pond or adders in your meadow. Why does everything have to be so slow? Why can't systems be developed to move things fast?
While other farms of a similar size to Knepp, former grouse moors, the land holdings of water companies, the Defence Ministry and the great feudal estates could all assist with this sort of reshaping at scale to create nature space, it is entirely desirable that smaller land parcels should be reprofiled as well.