Jim Crumley
The latest “wildlife management” cull is another symptom of our destabilised ecosystem, says an enraged Jim
Highly acclaimed journalist and author whom many regard as the best wildlife writer currently working in Scotland. Jim, author of 30-plus books, is an avid advocate for the reintroduction of extinct native species. He’s been your resident wildlife expert for more than a decade. In this issue, Jim looks at the serious threat the raven faces from landowners.
THE entry for ravens in The Scottish Ornithological Club’s landmark two-volume The Birds of Scotland published in 2007 says, “At the start of the 21st century, Raven is benefiting from a more relaxed attitude of landowners and tenants, a general decline in the level of keepering, and legislation protecting raptors.” So that didn’t last long, then. Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), an organisation which exists to promote the wellbeing of nature in Scotland and advise the Scottish Government, has just agreed to license the killing over five years of up to 300 ravens. And with a misplaced generosity of trust that borders on the breathtaking, SNH has handed out the licences to gamekeepers in an area of Perthshire which has the reputation of being a Bermuda Triangle for eagles and other birds of prey – they disappear.
I wouldn’t give them licences to run a coconut shy in a funfair, but then I don’t work for SNH.
The theory runs that because nesting waders are in critical decline on Perthshire grouse moors, it is necessary to kill ravens. This astounding theory dismisses the essential truth that for thousands of years before the Victorians invented the grouse moor and set in motion a process that has created the most artificially manipulated landscape in the country, ravens and breeding waders and red grouse coexisted and thrived, and did so with the added complication of sharing the land with wolves and bears and much else besides, but not with gamekeepers.
There is another essential truth about a policy designed to rid estates of ravens: it’s impossible. Clear ravens from the land and you create a vacuum, which will immediately begin to fill up with more ravens. It’s like killing foxes. It never seems to occur to the fox-killers that they never get on top of the perceived problem, that the foxes they kill are immediately replaced by other foxes. So the policy does not work.
Yet still, the Scottish Government’s own advisors have bought it into it, and “the relaxed attitude of landowners and tenants” is a thing of the past.
I would go further. I think that the relationship
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between too much of the Scottish landowning industry has reached a nadir of intolerance not seen since Victorian times. This new cull of ravens is one more extreme symptom of that perverted relationship, one more grotesque manifestation of that phenomenon of our own times known as “wildlife management”.
In an extraordinarily thoughtful and enlightened book called Swampwalker’s Journal, the New Hampshire nature writer and artist David M. Carroll wrote: “The term ‘wildlife management’, often used in the environmental polemics of the day in reference to human manipulation, is an oxymoron. We should have learned long ago to simply leave the proper natural space, to respectfully withdraw and let wildlife manage wildlife.”
Yes, we should. But in the ears of too many of our estate owners and workers, that is the language of heresy. Yet while conservation thinking has begun to make imaginative strides in species reintroduction and habitat recreation and restoration aimed at something like ecological diversity, landowning practice is too often mired in a timewarp the Victorians would recognise.
Diversity is anathema to a culture that embraces the stink-pit, the ritual killing of mountain hares and foxes and birds of prey and that mysterious class of lowlife known as vermin, and the spreading of medicated grit for grouse to ingest to ward off ailments that might make them unfit for expensive London restaurants.
The practice of “wildlife management” implies that some species are more deserving of the right to life than others, and that only “wildlife managers” have the right to
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exercise such God-like powers. It reveals a doctrine of arrogance that also presumes all creatures in nature are subservient to human creatures, and that the land itself, and nature itself have no rights.
I met an elder of the Tlingit tribe of south-east Alaska once. He explained how his tribe was structured in “clans” – he used that very word, a Gaelic word, because it perfectly suited his case – that derived from one of two sacred symbols: Raven and Bald Eagle. He said that it was Raven who made the world, because of Raven’s wisdom. This very idea has an echo in Scots Gaelic, cited by Seton Gordon in a book he wrote 100 years ago, The Land of the Hills and the Glens: “Of all birds, the raven was – and is perhaps still – held by the Gael to possess the greatest knowledge. ‘Fios ceann fithich’ (the knowledge of the raven’s head) is a Gaelic proverb…”
The Tlingit elder told me that Raven in his wisdom considered his first task should be to create nature in perfect balance, so he made Bald Eagle, with a white head and a white tail and a black body, to symbolise perfect balance. Why would the tribe choose the raven of all nature’s teeming wildlife in Alaska if not because of the tradition of its wisdom?
Fios ceann fithich. We’ve come along way in 100 years from the revered wisdom of the raven’s head to putting its fate in the trigger-happy hands of people who think the raven is expendable, that nature owes them a living, and they have no debt to nature at all. They repeatedly use the argument of their value to the rural economy to justify killing species of which they disapprove.
Yet the debt our species owes to nature is colossal and growing. For uncounted decades now we have been putting ever-increasing resources of human ingenuity and money into distancing ourselves from nature, reordering or eradicating natural systems, rendering species extinct, and now we reap the whirlwind of a climate in chaos. But never mind, it’s good for the economy.
The thinking that approves a cull of ravens to save curlews while it ignores the consequences of at least two centuries of landscape-degradation-by-design and civil war against those species it finds inconvenient, has its holy ground in the “grouse moor” and the “deer forest”. I have chained up those expressions in inverted commas to symbolise the fact that these are captive landscapes, from which ecological freedoms have been banished.
There is no such thing as a “grouse moor”. There are moors, and where they are permitted to behave naturally they are lightly wooded, pooled, naturally drained, and their vegetation is diverse. Varying depths and densities of heather are achieved naturally and without muirburn that kills uncounted numbers of birds, mammals and insects every year. The “grouse moor” is an artificial stain on the land, the product of rituals invented by people and designed to produce “bags” of grouse. Not because anyone gives a damn about the bird – if they did, they wouldn’t force-feed it chemicals – but so that it can be harried and shot in suitable quantities by people with much more money than sense.
God alone knows what genetic mutations the red grouse has undergone and continues to suffer over the unrelenting regime of the decades.
With the red deer of the “deer forest” – and there is no such thing as a deer forest either – the genetic disadvantage of their situation is self-evident: their banishment from a wooded landscape to the open hill has long since created a race two-thirds of the size of their woodland-dwelling mainland European kin. The other felony is the failure to come to terms with centuries of
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over-breeding without an effective top natural predator to keep them on the move and maintain the herds at sustainable numbers and in good health.
The consequences engendered by the colossal mistreatment of native landscape by both those endeavours would take many decades to reverse if we started to unpick them tomorrow, and put back the wolf and settled the beaver far-and-wide the day after tomorrow. Instead, we are about to start killing ravens.
I used to know this raven nest that was built in the chimney breast of a roofless cottage deep in the hills. The advantages for the ravens were that the floor of the nest was solid stone, the chimney breast sheltered it on three sides and there was further shelter from what was left of the walls.
There was a never-ending supply of twigs from trees that lined a nearby hill burn and a rowan that stood before the cottage, and wool from too many sheep for the good of the land but the delight of the ravens.
I know they used that nest in eight successive years and that they raised young every year. But then the gable end collapsed in the winter and they moved on.
A couple of years later, I came across an almost identical site in Iceland, and there was a raven nest, unmistakable even at a distance. But then I realised this one had built the same nest of twigs – but there no trees.
I moved closer – the nest was unoccupied, it was early summer and ravens are the earliest of nesters – and took a good look with binoculars. Finally I saw: the entire nest was built from broken bits of barbed wire fence.
All that was required of the walls of the nest is a sound structure, and the barbs linked the pieces together perfectly. Once they had the structure, the birds just piled in the sheep’s wool and made a sumptuous cushion.
Later, when I went to Alaska, I met a university biologist up the Yukon, who had a colleague studying a group of ravens. This colleague reckoned ravens had the biggest vocabulary of any creature apart from humans. He also discovered that each bird had one sound that was unique. No other bird made that sound – until, that is, one of the birds went missing (it was later found shot) and every bird suddenly started making the missing bird’s call. They were looking for it and calling out its name. Fios ceann fithich, see? I now realise that I didn’t complete the quotation above from Seton Gordon on the subject of raven intelligence. It concludes, “…yet these birds often choose for their nesting site an easily accessible rock, where the nest can be harried or the young birds killed, while all around are great cliffs where they would be safe from the interference of irate keepers or shepherds.”
They didn’t like them that much 100 years ago either.