Country crisis

Chris Packham’s initiative to carry out a nationwide audit of the country’s wildlife (The Scotsman, 17 April) is to be applauded, especially as the countryside is so bereft of sights and sounds which we have all taken for granted.

I expect that as he tours the countryside Chris will see plenty of crows, jackdaws, jays, magpies, buzzards, grey squirrels, and perhaps at night, badgers and foxes. I will be surprised if he sees many garden and farmland birds like skylarks, yellowhammers, curlews, lapwings and oyster catchers as these are all in serious decline, while the former group have expanded dramatically in both numbers and territory in recent years. The balance between predator and prey species is now totally out of kilter in favour of predators.

Farmers tend to be blamed for the reduction in our wildlife due to loss of habitat and modern farming methods. This assumption is false since farmers have done more than anybody to improve the countryside for our wildlife. Over £700 million a year is spent on environmental schemes. Our hedgerows have increased by 11 per cent since 1990 and our woodland has doubled since 1920. All this habitat improvement should be helping our endangered species but that is just not happening. In the space of just one lifetime

numbers of skylarks and sparrows have crashed by 70 per cent while hedgehogs and red squirrels have crashed by over 90 per cent.

Chris is quite right to say that it is “not enough” just to have wildlife in nature reserves. It should be evident throughout the countryside – but until predator control becomes an accepted part of environmental management and the balance of nature is corrected, it remains likely that the wildlife which we used to see in the countryside will be restricted to nature reserves.

I hope that when Chris has completed his audit he will not only come up with valid reasons for this decline in our wildlife but also innovative, practical ideas on how to reverse this trend.

COLIN STRANG STEEL

Trustee, Songbird Survival

Threepwood, Galashiels