Balancing act
Can one of England’s great lowland estates, Holkham in Norfolk, support agriculture and shooting, as well as wildlife? We meet Jake Fiennes, its head of conservation, to find out.
Jake Fiennes’ pick-up truck bumps down a track across marshy meadows, as we follow the low dash of a female sparrowhawk. A buzzard squats in a hawthorn, and a marsh harrier glides over the reedbed. In the space of five minutes, there’s also a quivering kestrel, a red kite, a grey heron, two brown hares, a Chinese water deer and the swirling majesty of 5,000 honking brent and pink-footed geese choosing a place to land.
This uplifting abundance of wildlife has made the 9,000-acre nature reserve at Holkham a justly popular place of pilgrimage on the North Norfolk coast. But Holkham is not simply a paradise for wild birds and a mecca for 800,000 annual visitors – about eight times more than the RSPB’s celebrated Minsmere reserve. This 25,000-acre estate also includes one of lowland Britain’s biggest farms, with a long history of innovation.
Thomas Coke of Holkham pioneered crop rotation in the 18th century. Holkham also invented the driven shooting that is the scourge of many nature-lovers today. But is this grand estate in the vanguard of a new environmental revolution?
The current Thomas Coke, the eighth Earl of Leicester, has recently hired Jake to spearhead the conservation effort at Holkham. Jake is an influential conservationist and estate manager, acclaimed by the nature writer
Mark Cocker for transforming the Raveningham estate in South Norfolk into a wildlife paradise. He is part of the government’s review of national parks, and also sits on the National Farmers’ Union Environment Forum.
Future of farming
British farmland will undergo seismic change after Brexit. Does Jake’s appointment indicate that Britain’s biggest landowners are drastically changing direction to favour naturefriendly farming? Could our great estates even embrace rewilding?
Jake is fresh from discussing these and other matters with Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Jake was wearing a Holkham badge when they met. “‘You’re the beach, aren’t you?’” Jake recalls Gove asking. His reply: “No, I’m not!”
Though, to be fair, Holkham is indeed renowned for the epic sweep of its sandy beach. Ironically, one of Jake’s two famous actor brothers, Joseph, is partly responsible: he starred in Shakespeare in
Love, a film that featured Holkham’s beach and pinewoods. Ever since, it has become increasingly popular with visitors, and managing that popularity is a significant challenge for the estate.
Jake has always loved nature. During his rural childhood, he kept slow-worms
and anaesthetised wasps and hornets by putting them in the freezer. “We were having Sunday lunch and I’d put my display of insects on the dresser. Suddenly, this hornet warmed up and began flying around with a pin stuck through it.” His parents didn’t mind. “My mother was always encouraging all of us, whatever we did,” he says.
As a teenager, Jake eschewed a glamorous spell working for a London nightclub to labour for his old friend Charlie Burrell, who farms the 3,500acre Knepp Castle estate in Sussex. At the time, Charlie was running a conventional farm, and losing money. Charlie has since rewilded Knepp, and his resurgent farm is a hotspot for wildlife, while also earning good revenues from ecotourism. Other landowners are beginning to follow suit. Is Holkham going to become one of them?
The answer is: not exactly. Knepp’s heavy clay soils are terrible for growing crops, whereas Holkham’s sandy loam is famed for its barley and excellent for cultivating vegetables. “My basic principle is: we have to feed 66 million people in this country,” says Jake. “Where we have productive land that produces economic yields, we must carry on trying to produce food. Where we have land that doesn’t do that, it’s uneconomic and you convert that into nature conservation. We can’t go back to the 1960s – before the intensification of agriculture – but we can readdress nature in the landscape in a 21st-century way.”
Room for nature
This vision became a reality during nearly 25 years at Raveningham, where Jake combined conventional intensive farming with nature conservation. For instance, he took on one neighbouring 500-acre farm and only farmed the best land, devoting 40 per cent of once-cultivated land to nature. “That farm has been in super-profits for the past three years. We all get embarrassed by profits but they enable us to invest – in the farm or in nature conservation.” This practical example of ‘land sparing’ excites some rewilding theorists, because it could allow areas to be rewilded without reducing food production.
Jake’s first steps at Holkham include allowing its tightly cut hedges to grow into more wildlife-friendly forms. The estate
is also exploring species restoration and is being helped by Knepp’s advisers, including Derek Gow, who has brought back the beaver to various other locations in the UK. The North Norfolk coast is perfect habitat for white-tailed eagles but a reintroduction proposal in East Anglia was scuppered a decade ago, so Jake is making no rash pledges.
“I want to have a conversation with everyone,” Jake says. “I’m not going to shut someone down because they want to reintroduce lynx. Let’s thrash out the practicalities.” His boss, Lord Leicester, is particularly keen to reintroduce red squirrels, which clung on in Norfolk until the 1990s. “We’re looking at it, though I think it would be quite hard to achieve,” says Jake with caution.
He is effusive about one tenet of rewilding – rewetting landscapes. Holkham has been returning arable fields to wet meadows for several years and he is keen to see more temporary pools for winter wading birds. An immediate priority is to reverse lapwing declines. Lapwings require wet fields in which their chicks can feed on mud-dwelling invertebrates. Holkham’s pasture has dried out too quickly in recent years, so now there are new walled sections to better retain water.
But the best interests of lapwings clash with another tenet of rewilding. If Jake allows more scrub to develop around the meadows, this will provide perfect vantage points for carrion crows and other chick-munching predators. He is open-minded: he’s going to watch, wait, and see how such scrub is used.
Managing numbers
Jake is open, too, about another ingredient required to revive the lapwing: fox control. He pities conservation bodies such as the RSPB that come under fire for predator control. “It’s recognised there needs to be some species management to benefit other, more vulnerable species. I’m not saying it’s a long-term view, but that is where we are today,” he says.
Some predator control can be nonlethal – ensuring habitat isn’t foxfriendly, for instance – and Jake also favours the continental idea of giving consideration to the seasons when controlling a species. “You don’t have to kill everything, 365 days a year,” he says. Fox control is best undertaken over winter. “If you haven’t controlled your foxes by mid-March, it’s too late. After then, it’s not ethical, because you’ve got adults bringing up young.”
While Jake is relaxed about the need for species control (including reducing numbers of the cute but ravenous flora-munching muntjac deer in the pinewoods), he hurriedly rewrote Holkham’s guidebook on conservation because it mentioned the ‘destruction of vermin’. The estate does have baggage, despite promoting wildlife tourism.
In 2000, a Holkham keeper was fined £850 for killing three kestrels; two other employees were convicted of allowing a gamekeeper to illegally store poison. In 2011, its head gamekeeper was charged with killing a protected wild bird; though this charge was later dropped, he lost his job. “I took on this position to make a difference, but that particular change has already happened at Holkham,” argues Jake. “Grouse moorland has all its issues but I think lowland persecution of raptors is a real thing of the past. Just look at the skies above you.”
Holkham’s gamekeepers come under Jake’s remit. Raptor persecution is “just not acceptable, it really isn’t.
There is another species Holkham might have to control: humans.
That’s the opinion of everyone,” he says. Gamekeepers’ roles are changing, explains Jake – they spend a lot of time attending food fairs and Jake is keen to enlist their help with the supplementary feeding of songbirds, bird identification and even butterfly recording. “I would seek to make them be more involved with the delivery of environmental goods, as other keepers have done throughout the country.”
Could Holkham be a real pioneer and stop shooting altogether? “I don’t think driven game shooting will stop at Holkham any time soon, but we need to be more pragmatic about how we go about it. The industry has to get with the times and understand what is right, ethical and sustainable – a reduction of bag sizes [shoot yield], let’s be more wild, let’s put in habitat that has significant benefits for other species.”
A typical day for 8–10 ‘guns’ at Holkham is shooting a bag of 60–70 birds, not hundreds, and all shot game is used for food, including in the estate’s pub.
Jake shoots himself. Does he object to shooting woodcock, given its rapid decline in Britain? “Holkham still shoots woodcock, but it’s much more selective than it was,” he says. He supports the existing system of voluntary restraint when numbers of migrating woodcock are low, and is keen that shooters are educated. “My personal view is if you’re shooting reared pheasant, you don’t shoot wild woodcock coming through as target practice.”
Popular with people
There is another species that Holkham might have to control: humans. Many more visitors than Minsmere means that shoreline nesting birds, such as ringed plovers, are virtually extinct on Holkham’s 6.5km beach. This winter, Holkham erected a shorelark and snow bunting enclosure on a section of beach for the first time.
But should Holkham get tough and ban dogs? “We have the most dog-friendly beach cafe in the UK and we’re trying to conserve nature, which is really susceptible to disturbance at breeding times,” he says. “We need to welcome dog owners, but we need the right information out there that is easily understood. We might say ‘dogs on leads within the pinewoods’ – that’s a reasonable ask.”
Jake points out that a vast acreage of saltmarsh Below: Holkham’s popularity means that the needs of visitors and wildlife can come into conflict. is inaccessible to visitors, who are instead funnelled into Holkham’s new visitor centre and cafe, The Lookout, with views of a purpose-built wading pool. “We have areas of tranquillity and we sacrifice areas for the benefit of the public,” he explains.
Jake may combine the pragmatism of a farmer with the diplomacy of someone working for a Lord, but more radical ambitions may well lurk within. How will Holkham look in a century? “Better shape than now,” he says, as quick as a flash. “I know in the next 20 years Holkham is going to get significantly better.” So, will he add wildlife to farming, as he did at Raveningham? “I don’t want to just do what I did at Raveningham,” he says. “I want to change the world.”
PATRICK BARKHAM is from Norfolk and writes about natural history for The Guardian. His latest book is Islander (Granta, £20).
FIND OUT MORE
Visiting the Holkham estate holkham.co.uk
“Holkham still shoots woodcock, but it’s much more selective than it once was.”