Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
On reading a book about rewilding, it is possible to disagree with a number of points made by the author but still find it an absorbing read
We gave up on the idea of risking cancelled flights to go somewhere hot this year, and opted to stay at home and take things easy instead. It never quite works, but I did catch up on some reading, which is always a rare sign that the work-life balance is in kilter.
Benedict Macdonald kindly sent me a copy of his latest tome Cornerstones,
Wild Forces That Can Change Our World. I profoundly disagree with many of Macdonald’s attitudes to farming and conservation but that doesn’t stop me enjoying his work. His previous book Rebirding had some good stuff in it and chimed with many of my own thoughts on conservation. I liked his diagnosis of what is wrong with Britain’s highways and byways, namely what he calls ecological tidiness disorder (ETD), a condition that manifests itself in neatly mown verges and butchered hedges with a consequent lack of nectar and fruit. And he is good at explaining how the desiccation of Britain has robbed so many birds of their habitats.
Here, where we are digging ponds wherever we can, we are seeing it in reverse. It is remarkable how nature has responded with aquatic plants appearing from nowhere along with dragonflies, amphibians and many more birds. There is no doubting that there is a biodiversity crisis and what we need to do. The wilding movement, irritatingly self-righteous and utopian as much of it is, has furthered our knowledge of ecosystems and provided some good ideas among the Marxist nonsense.
Free-roaming cattle
Cornerstones provides an interesting look at the ecosystem engineers: those animals who shape the environment so that a rich diversity of life can flourish. I was pleased that he included cows, the descendants of the primordial aurochs. With environmentalists, the subject of cattle is a sensitive one as they are the chosen scapegoat for global warming. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say “the more cattle the better” on British farms but confined himself to hoping wistfully that cattle might roam free across a wooded landscape once more. Although he did concede that at one time Britain’s floodplains would have been “blackened by aurochs” grazing. Our ecosystem here has been transformed by having up to 1,000 cattle grazing in tightly controlled mobs and moved every day, which means we have given up using chemical wormers. The resulting increase in lapwings, starlings and other birdlife has been startling.
Macdonald is also good at explaining how trophic cascades work. In wellregulated ecosystems apex predators take out mesopredators, allowing smaller birds and mammals to flourish in the numbers that nature intended. There is no doubt that we need more whales around our coastline to control the seals so that salmon stocks can recover. And there isn’t a grouse-moor owner in the land that would not dearly love to have eagles and eagle owls regulating buzzard and hen harrier numbers. When one of them applied for a licence to release eagle owls he was stopped by a certain bird charity. Funny that. Personally I could live with wolves and lynxes, as long as there was a proper compensation scheme for any calves or sheep lost. Macdonald is honest in acknowledging that whereas in Scotland badgers average “eight individuals per square kilometre”, in Eastern Europe, where there are wolves and lynxes, there are 30 badgers per 100km².
This is the great faultline between conservationists like me and environmentalists like Macdonald. We should do all we can to encourage apex predators but in the meantime, and where that isn’t possible, it is essential that foxhounds and gamekeepers are allowed to replicate their jobs so that the trophic cascade still functions to avoid the extinctions of ground-nesting birds and other vulnerable species. He is strangely silent on the issue.
“There isn’t a grouse-moor owner in the land that would not dearly love to have eagles”
Jamie Blackett farms in Dumfries & Galloway, his latest book Land of
Milk and Honey, Digressions of a Rural Dissident is out now.