A RARE SPECIES
At waterside sites across the UK, the once-vanishing osprey can now be seen hunting and breeding, thanks largely to conservationist Roy Dennis. James Fair profiles the man and his heroic effort to bring this spectacular raptor back to our shores
We profile conservationist Roy
Dennis and his heroic work to bring spectacular ospreys back to our shores.
“Ospreys will usually renovate an old nest rather than build a new one from scratch”
You would have thought that ospreys would have learned to build nests by now. But as a young conservationist working in the north of Scotland in the early 1970s, Roy Dennis made a crucial discovery: they’re a bit rubbish at it. Or some ospreys are – young ones especially.
“We noticed that they were building poor nests in poorly chosen trees, and then they started breeding and the nest was blown down,” Dennis, now in his 80s, tells me on a Zoom call from his home in the Findhorn Valley in north-east Scotland. “We just thought, this is stupid – we can build better nests than that.”
And so they did. The story illustrates both Dennis’s can-do attitude and his acute naturalist’s perception. These two qualities have made him the driving force behind some of the most important British wildlife conservation successes of the past half century, which have now been properly told for the first time in his new book Restoring the Wild: Sixty Years of Rewilding Our Skies, Woods and Waterways.
But why would ospreys be bad at building nests? It doesn’t make sense. What you have to understand, Dennis explains, is that in the 1970s, ospreys were incredibly rare in Britain, with just one pair nesting at Loch Garten in Scotland; today there are at least 300 breeding pairs across the UK. In a healthy population, in contrast, there are old osprey nests dotted all over the countryside, and birds arriving back from migration will usually renovate an old nest at the beginning of the season rather than construct a new one from scratch.
Though to the casual observer, an osprey nest looks like a ramshackle construction of
twigs, it is in fact more complex, Dennis says. You must use dead (not green) sticks and you start at the base with bigger ones, gradually using smaller ones as you build the height up to about 60cm.
“You put dead grass and moss in it, then fill it up with leaf mould or rotted straw,” Dennis continues. The nest is not a cup but has a flat top, and when the male osprey returns, he digs a ‘scrape’ in which the eggs are laid. “Once the young are growing, they make it flat again because that’s easier for the young, who want to run around.”
And so Dennis and his colleagues built nests and protected them from egg thieves and the occasional pine marten. Their work helped the population expand across Scotland, but the birds stubbornly refused to move into England or Wales in any significant way.
FIRST SUCCESSES
So in the early 1990s, plans for a translocation programme of ospreys to Rutland Water in the East Midlands were hatched. It sounded like a great idea, but not everyone was enthusiastic. For a start, the conservation ethos at the time was mainly to record what was happening to species, not give them a helping hand. “And then the warden of Loch Garten said to me: ‘If you have ospreys nesting in Rutland Water, the English won’t be coming up to Scotland to watch them’,” Dennis recalls. Even today, he adds, some purists say that birds reintroduced to new areas aren’t ‘real’, unlike those that return of their own accord. Dennis clearly thinks such an attitude is all rather silly.
Despite those objections, the Rutland translocation did happen. Using a method developed in the USA, chicks were taken from Scottish nests, then raised in cages before being allowed to fly off, while still being provided with some food. In recent years, up to 10 pairs have nested around Rutland.
Two males born in Rutland subsequently set up home in Wales, and attracted birds from Scotland, while other Rutland ospreys have migrated to Kielder Forest in Northumberland and to the Lake District. Dennis has also returned ospreys to Poole Harbour and worked on a number of reintroductions in mainland Europe.
FLEDGLING CONSERVATIONIST
Dennis grew up on the south coast between Portsmouth and Southampton and from an early age birded his way round the New Forest, Titchfield Haven and Farlington Marshes. He went to the grammar school in Fareham but
felt stymied by an old-fashioned approach that treated biology as a second-class science. After doing work experience at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, he knew he didn’t like the idea “of being in a room all day”. Luckily, he was invited to be a temporary assistant warden at Lundy bird observatory in the Bristol Channel, and he was saved from a life of wearing a white coat in a sterile lab.
After six months on the island of Lundy, he was asked to go and work on Fair Isle, halfway between Orkney and Shetland, before going to help with the osprey project at Loch Garten. In the mid-1960s, he took up the post of warden on Fair Isle, moving there with his first wife.
The first of Dennis’s four children was born while they were living on the island.
Dennis believes his rural childhood has given him insights into birds and their wellbeing that science alone cannot match. He can look at a young chick and tell whether it’s healthy, unlike – he says – some of the people he’s worked with, from government agencies or conservation NGOs. “It’s the same with red squirrel translocations,” Dennis says. “Vets are supposed to take blood to make sure the animals are healthy. One time, a vet said to me, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing all this because you know whether a squirrel is fit or not.’ And I do,
“I know if an animal is healthy; I look at the eyes, at the pelage and whether it’s groomed”
because I look at the eyes, I look at the pelage and whether it’s nicely groomed. It’s a lifetime of looking after animals.”
For this reason, Dennis is delighted his 12-year-old daughter (with his second wife Moira) is an animal lover, caring for a guinea pig, two hamsters and frogspawn in the spring. “I was quite shocked when someone said to me, ‘Oh Roy, you’re not allowed to collect frogspawn now.’ I mean, where the hell are we going?”
OF EAGLES AND LYNX
With the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation responsible for bringing white-tailed eagles down to the Isle of Wight and looking into a possible translocation of Rutland ospreys to Suffolk, things are looking good for these and many other birds of prey, such as red kites – another species he helped to bring back from near-extinction in the UK.
But ospreys are his first love. “They’re so distinctive in the sky, everyone knows them,” he says. “In Findhorn Bay, you often see two or three of them in the sky, and to be able to dive 150 feet or so into the water and grab a flatfish on the mud…” He tails off – you know what he means.
Dennis would love to see lynx brought back to our shores, but politics in Scotland is currently set against the idea. “They could be back tomorrow, and no one would know they were here,” he remarks. Even beavers – regarded by most conservationists as essential to restoring ecosystems in Britain – are still viewed with suspicion by many landowners.
“If 90% of people are for them but a few farmers are against, why should a small minority be more important, especially since it’s the people in the cities who are paying the subsidies?”
There’s an obvious answer to this mix of nimbyism, bureaucracy and inertia that’s obstructing efforts to restore these long-lost species, of course: clone a few dozen Roy Dennises and reintroduce them to the key conservation battlegrounds. That would put the proverbial (wild)cat among the pigeons.