Commentary
The Government needs to recognise the complex, threefold issues of bird conservation and act on the evidence provided by scientific research to help our precious wildlife to thrive
IT would be much easier if conservation could go back to being simple. Until the 1980s, it was generally assumed that wildlife could only thrive where it was protected from the hand of man — in nature reserves. As with so many simple solutions, it was wrong. The RSPB-LED State of Nature reports are manifestations of this failure.
Nature reserves cannot possibly protect viable populations of a wide range of species in the long term, because they make up less than 2% of our countryside. Even if we add all the other designated conservation areas, such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIS), much of which are still working farmland, it is not enough. To truly thrive in our working countryside, these species need to live alongside man.
Our approach to conservation in this country has undergone a revolution quietly. Successive governments have funded a range of conservation schemes that farmers can use. Many of these options have been informed by research undertaken by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), so why are they not working well enough? When we ask those involved, we hear some common themes. These range from the shortage of advice available to farmers to the fact that payments only cover ‘income foregone’. This matters because if conservation measures do not contribute to farm income, we should not expect them to be seen as a priority.
Another theme of concern would be predation control. For decades, some large conservation organisations have been unwilling to discuss this but others feel it’s time to revisit the subject. Why pay a farmer to produce suitable habitat for nesting and brood rearing if the chicks are then eaten by a predator? Farmers are practical. They understand that production of food requires careful, ongoing management and protection. So, if they have witnessed lapwing nests being raided by crows, they might question the wisdom of putting lapwing plots in their fields unless crows are controlled during the breeding season.
The late Dick Potts, who led the GWCT for many years, identified three main causes of partridge decline: first, herbicides were killing all the weeds that encouraged the insects on which the chicks fed; second, there was a shortage of suitable nesting cover; and, third, uncontrolled foxes and crows were devouring chicks wholesale and generally wrecking the nesting process. He called this group of causes the ‘three-legged stool’, because all three problems needed to be remedied if the partridge — and with it a host of other creatures — was to thrive.
His thinking came from the GWCT Partridge Survival Project, now one of the longest-running farmland studies in the world, which he began in a Portakabin on the South Downs in West Sussex. Potts’ seminal paper Studies on the Cereal Ecosystem, which was written in 1974, was groundbreaking and contentious. He helped inspire a generation of ecologists to believe we could manage farmland to sustain wildlife as well as food for us. Many of the GWCT’S findings were incorporated in governmentfunded environment schemes on farms — but that’s only two of the three legs of the stool. The third leg, managing predators, has yet to be included. That may all change soon.
It’s hard to guess exactly where conservation policy will be heading in the near future but it’s a fair guess we will see the cessation of grants for providing habitat alone shortly. Former MP Richard Benyon highlighted the importance of supporting what works rather than what we like when he instigated a Westminster debate on curlew. He said, “our national approach to conserving species does not work well enough”. He called for a debate because curlew breeding numbers have declined by 46% across the UK in 25 years. The picture would be worse if they were not thriving on grouse moors. He explained the problem now is chick survival. Too many of their young are being eaten by foxes and crows. Interestingly, the adult population has been stabilised largely by farmland conservation schemes, which have halted previous habitat losses.
In his passionate speech, Benyon explained this is why the Irish have begun undertaking predation control alongside their curlew habitat management. He was frank about what needs to happen: “We should stop funding curlew conservation projects that do not include effective predator control options. We have to do what works, not what is popular.”
He explained politicians and large conservation organisations have become locked in a “doomed pact” over the years to achieve change through legislation and regulation alone: “To maintain their popularity, big membership organisations avoid acknowledging the approach they have been advocating does not work, and they do not like the approaches that do work.” The science is clear, he says: “After 20 years of studying curlew, we know enough to take action.”
The Government response was given by Thérèse Coffey MP, who said they would “include the use of predator control in all current and future projects that we fund. It is important to me that it is at least considered, and that reasons are given why it is or — equally importantly — why it is not included in a particular scheme.” After more than three years, curlew chicks are still waiting for this to happen. Perhaps it will soon.
Our politicians, once reliant on the European Union making decisions for them, must now face taking responsibility for doing all this on their own. As a result, there has been a blizzard of consultations on environmental issues, of which the GWCT has responded to a dozen in the past year. The question is, will they listen? The GWCT has undertaken some of the most detailed experimental, scientific research on the role of predation. The first irrefutable evidence that controlling predators can boost the nesting success came from the GWCT Salisbury Plain Study (1984-90). The impact was dramatic. In the experimental areas, the partridge population could be increased more than threefold in as many years. Later, the GWCT Upland Predation Experiment at Otterburn (2000-08) demonstrated beyond doubt that controlling predators makes the difference between annual increases or declines.
Those opposed to controlling predator numbers point out that the modernisation of farms caused declines — not predators. In most cases, this is true, but it misses the point. If the local population of a species falls to a low level, particularly for groundnesting birds, predators can then prevent recovery. Many have begun to accept this, but some now suggest we should investigate why we need to control predators. This feels like obfuscation. If further delay results in local losses of species, it will take significantly longer for them to recolonise an area naturally, if at all.
Perhaps it’s time for one of the new farm conservation packages being trialled by Defra to include a predator-control element. Designing and monitoring it won’t be easy, but Potts’ three-legged conservation stool could now become reality across swathes of our countryside. It has to be worth going back to what works. The opportunity to rebalance the support given to farmers for production and conservation has already been provided by the replacement for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Michael Gove MP seized the chance to start finding a UK solution while he was at the helm of Defra. Exactly how this will be achieved has yet to be agreed, but we can expect government budgets to come under pressure. It’s unlikely the taxpayer or the Treasury will think much of funding environment schemes that are known not to work well enough.
It’s 10 years since Rosaleen Duffy, a global expert on the ethical dimensions of wildlife conservation and management, wrote her book Nature Crime: How We’re Getting Conservation Wrong. She said that a key failure of the western-style conservation approach “is the assumption that people are the enemies of wildlife conservation”. Equally flawed, she said, is the belief that all those employed as conservation officers in big charities are automatically “wildlife saviours”. As Benyon has pointed out, these over-simplistic views are still widely promoted here in the UK. It’s an easy story to sell — and one the public find easy to understand.
Conservation is full of complexity. When pictures of the burning jungle were broadcast around the world last year, some compared it with controlled heather burning here in the UK. It was a simple story that was quite wrong. Our moorlands were created by burning small areas of ground. For thousands of years, this helped reduce fuel load, among other things. Unfortunately, when the wildfire broke out on Saddleworth Moor the same year, the fuel load was high because controlled burning had ceased. As a result, 7cm of peat was lost, along with 200 years of carbon sequestration, in one night.
It’s unfortunate the great British public don’t hold environmental activists to account. Let’s hope, for the sake of our wildlife, that our politicians will fund what works on farms, rather than be led by what activists like.
It’s unfortunate the great British public don’t hold activists to account