Good intentions and stony ground

How can wildlife and its habitats compete against bureaucratic diktats and the demands of food supply, asks Robin Scott

There’s not a lot on television that interests me greatly, but every now and then I stumble on a nature documentary or farming programme that does hold my attention.

The other night I found one looking at the plight of so many farmland birds and how stewardship subsidies through set-aside land was helping to steady or slow their decline in different parts of the UK.

Wild bird cover was playing its part but “hand in hand with this we need to reinstate old hedgerows and plant many more new ones”, said a government minister, which sounded sensible to me.

“At the same time we need to do it in ways that won’t affect the level of food production in our countryside,” he added. But he didn’t give a single idea or example of how that balance was to be achieved. What he probably meant was that a postBrexit government will dream up some grand plan or other, then shovel the responsibility for making it work on to farmers.

Conservation

The trouble with so many “grand plans” for countryside management is that they often lack joined-up thinking. Where’s the sense in planting more hedges when untold miles of berry-laden farm hedgerows are already being cut at the end of summer, just because the rules say they should? Where do the needs of songbirds struggling to survive winter fit in with that particular diktat? They don’t. They die. And many more would, too, if not for the thousands of acres of game cover crops planted outside stewardship control by shooters, at their own expense. Were it not for shooting and all the conservation good it does, many more wildlife species would be staring into the abyss.

Equally, apart from taking land out of production, what do set-aside grass headlands around our fields actually bring