There’s one last hope for our vanishing wildlife
Three years ago, I had an unforgettable but very poignant experience. In a golden evening light, I sat for an hour transfixed by the sight of the cloudless sky above the Italian hill town of Arezzo almost darkened by the wheeling of countless thousands of swifts and swallows. This was poignant because it was years since I had seen anything remotely similar in British skies – as I recalled two months later to a conference in London, when I spoke about what I described as one of the greatest tragedies of my lifetime.
Having had the good fortune to grow up in the Forties and Fifties in the heart of the English countryside, I know that no one under the age of 60 can now have any real idea of just what richness and diversity our wildlife has lost. In 1967 I visited a stretch of chalk downland near my Dorset home where, to the din of grasshoppers, I counted 25 different species of chalk flowers and 16 different species of butterfly. The next year I returned to see that the entire hillside had been reseeded with sterile rye grass, with only one forlorn little cabbage white in sight.
Witnessing decade by decade the disappearance of so many sights and sounds familiar in my childhood has been a source of infinite melancholy: those vanished clouds of butterflies, the sound of cuckoos and nightingales in spring, the chirping of grasshoppers, otters and water voles by the streams, hedgehogs snuffling across the garden by night.
Some of the reasons for this disaster are widely recognised, such as the methods of modern farming: not least the pesticides and herbicides that have been so devastating to our insect life, on which so much else, from birds to bats, depends. Others, such as the catastrophic decline in our migrant Lost: the abundance of wildlife Britain once enjoyed has vanished over the past 50 years. Conservationists need to manage the countryside intelligently to keep it in balance birds, are much less understood.
But that packed conference, attended by leading naturalists and several well-known politicians (with even a congratulatory video message from the Prince of Wales), focused on another side of the story. Its purpose was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of a remarkable little charity, the Countryside Restoration Trust (CRT), which was launched in 1993 with the aid of to show how effectively some of this damage can be undone.
Set up by farmer Robin Page, the wildlife artist Gordon Benningfield and the writer Laurens van der Post, the CRT had begun by buying a vast, lifeless “prairie field” in Cambridgeshire, to turn it into a mixed farm, today criss-crossed with hedges and trees, to which the wildlife has miraculously returned – barn owls, otters, voles, butterflies, masses of wild flowers. Yet it still provides a good living for its farming tenant. And the CRT now owns eight more farms and smallholdings, all similarly thriving.
One particular battle long fought by Page, not least through his decades of contributing to
and his years on the National Trust council, has been against all those supposed “conservationists”, such as the RSPB and the BBC’s who consistently turn a blind eye to the incalculable damage being done to our diversity of wildlife by the explosion in the numbers of predators – from the magpies, crows and birds of prey that feast on smaller birds to the badgers that have been a major cause of the 90 per cent decline in our numbers of their favourite food, hedgehogs.
What genuine conservationists realise is that a truly thriving countryside has to be intelligently “managed”, by those who know how all the different bits of the infinitely subtle mosaic of nature can be kept in some kind of balance. The ruthless practices of modern industrial farming, often encouraged and even enforced by government policy, are one thing. But restoring the proper control of our now too easily sentimentalised predators is very much another.
What the CRT in its own small way has shown is that it is still quite possible to make a reasonable living from farming while at the same time doing something to reverse that immense disaster we have in the past 50 years wrought on our countryside: a tragedy not just for my lifetime but one which, whether we know it or not, has impoverished the lives of all of us.