Conservation Ecologist and founder of Wild Lakeland

As an ecological consultant working throughout the Lake District and Cumbria, Rob helps landowners identify and improve habitats that are good for wildlife and biodiversity.

In the Lake District a lot of valuable habitats are manmade. Upland hay meadows, species-rich pasture and coppiced woodlands are some of our most biodiverse. Grassland birds like skylarks, lapwings and curlew all evolved with human land management. Up on the fells the harder grazing by Herdwick sheep maintains a rough grassland, one species of which is mat grass, Nardus stricta, which is the sole food plant for the mountain ringlet butterfly. This has adapted to living on the Lakeland fells as part of a grazed landscape. A lot of the species we have today evolved alongside humans.

Rewilding is a very useful strategy for ecological restoration, with the understanding that it is still a human-controlled management tool as much as coppicing woodland or managing grassland is. Humans have been inhabiting the UK for about the last 900,000 years, and have always been an apex predator and an ecosystem engineer. It’s the technology we have created within the last 400 years which has switched us from being an ecosystem engineer to an ecosystem destroyer. Industrial use of pesticides and ploughing up huge areas of land and seeding it with single species are too big and too extreme for nature to evolve with. We have to value the beneficial things we’ve done for wildlife, and improve and protect those good habitats while improving those areas that have been ruined.

Small changes can do a lot of good. On a lot of farms, you can give away 10% of land to nature without having any impact on productivity. Hedgerows, riparian buffer strips (vegetated areas that help protect adjacent watercourses from the effects of agriculture) and woodland will be quite at home on marginal land such as steep or boggy areas. Often they already exist here as old relics, holding on but long-forgotten and neglected. When species become isolated they really struggle, so a network of habitats, something as simple as linking good woodlands with hedgerow, allows population mobility and makes a big difference.

Traditional farming’s been going on for 2000-3000 years and we only have to go back 50-60 years to see much higher numbers of corncrake, cuckoo and black grouse, which have suffered catastrophic decline. Hay meadows can have more than 200 species of plants, so a traditional farming system worked well for the wildlife we’ve had in the past. But a lot of farmers can’t go back to that if it means productivity drops and they lose money. They have to be supported.

Some of the large areas of common land where sheep roam are among the most severely degraded and tend to have been under greater pressure than land owned by individual farmers. These are probably the trickiest areas to deal with, as they have such a large scope for restoration works but getting everyone to agree to that is hard.

But because the Lake District is still predominantly a traditional farming landscape a lot of habitats have been preserved. If you get a map from the late 1800s, before a lot of agricultural intensification, the field boundaries and woodlands are still pretty much the same. It’s something to be proud of, with the potential to really improve habitats without making huge changes.