Reflections: What Wildlife Needs and How to Provide it

‘If I were king for a day, Avery would be instantly installed as the benign dictator of conservation in the UK. If you love wildlife, read this, think about this, and act upon this.’

Chris Packham, broadcaster and author of Back to Nature

‘A timely, brutally honest, yet inspiring account on what has gone wrong with wildlife conservation, and how we can put it right.’

Stephen Moss, naturalist and author

‘Mark Avery has been a guiding light in conservation all my life; a constant north star. This important book bears witness to what we’ve lost, what we’ve done about it, what works and what we must do next. It is both a reckoning and a resounding call to real action, at the most crucial time of our lives – of all our wild lives. Here is hope, predicated on action. There is work to do; and we’d better get on with it.’

Nicola Chester, RSPB columnist and author of On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging

‘Reflections is a work of distilled campaigning wisdom, told with the irrepressible optimism of a passionate advocate for nature who’s spent decades working tirelessly for wildlife. With wit, verve and clarity of prose, Mark Avery lays out a strikingly radical set of proposals for how to turn around the decline of wildlife in these isles.’

Guy Shrubsole, environmental campaigner and author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain and Who Owns England?

‘Mark Avery has written a love letter to Nature. Yes it is well written and academically sound and all that you’d expect from a person of his track record, but the real pleasure of the book is that under all that patina of propriety and science you feel a Mr Darcy launching himself into the lake because nothing is more important to him than capturing our hearts with his passion. A real triumph.’

Sir Tim Smit, Co-founder and Vice Chairman of the Eden Project

‘Dr Avery must be congratulated on this important book. He hits the nail on the head. I found myself nodding my head vigorously while reading it. The time for action is now.’

Baron Randall of Uxbridge, RSPB Council member and peer

‘Mark Avery is uniquely qualified to write this immensely stimulating and thought-provoking book. Reflecting on his lifetime in conservation he discusses the successes and failures of the past, and draws important lessons for more effective conservation in the future.’

Professor Ian Newton FRS, ornithologist and conservationist

‘A clarion call for more nature in Britain and how we can get it. Wise, knowledgeable, provocative and good humoured – Mark Avery is a national treasure.’

Patrick Barkham, author of Wild Green Wonders and co-author of Wild Isles

‘A brilliant, thorough book full of insightful observation. A must read for those who care about natures future and wish to understand the character of our contorted relationship with it.’

Derek Gow, author of Bringing Back the Beaver

‘Deeply felt and clear eyed, this book admirably achieves its aim of being realistically hopeful about a wildlife renaissance and what it will take for us to get there. You don’t have to agree with all its conclusions. But the questions it intelligently explores, based on a lifetime of experience in conservation, of what sort of world do we want to live in? and what should I do about it, then? are the essential ones of our times. Read it and be both enlightened and challenged.’

Beccy Speight, CEO, RSPB

REFLECTIONS

REFLECTIONS

What wildlife needs and how to provide it

MARK AVERY

PELAGIC PUBLISHING

Published in 2023 by

Pelagic Publishing

20–22 Wenlock Road

London N1 7GU, UK

www.pelagicpublishing.com

Reflections: What wildlife needs and how to provide it

Copyright © Mark Avery 2023

The moral rights of the author have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Apart from short excerpts for use in research or for reviews, no part of this document may be printed or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, now known or hereafter invented or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78427-390-3 Paperback

ISBN 978-1-78427-391-0 ePub

ISBN 978-1-78427-392-7 PDF

ISBN 978-1-78427-447-4 Audio

https://doi.org/10.53061/UMDF3032

Typeset in Minion Pro by S4Carlisle Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Megan and Renée, great-grandmothers born in 1926, and James, their great-grandson, born in 2021

Contents

Preface

Some explanations

1Glimpses of wildlife

2The state of wildlife in the UK

3What is wildlife conservation?

4Wildlife conservation successes

5Why are we failing so badly?

6What wildlife needs (and how to provide it)

Recapitulation

Notes, references and further reading

Acknowledgements

Index

About the author

Preface

This book is about wildlife and wildlife conservation in the UK. It is grounded in the early 2020s but looks back over recent decades and forward to decades to come. Since I am in my sixties, I have more experience and action behind me than ahead of me, but the aim of this book is to give a nudge to a better future for UK wildlife by giving the reader an insider’s overview of the challenges facing those who wish to help wildlife to thrive. It is, in essence, a hopeful book, but a realistically hopeful book, which gives pointers to what needs to be done and some tips on the part readers themselves might play in delivering a better future for UK wildlife. There are no quick fixes; there’s a lot of hard graft ahead.

There is no way that a book of 85,000 words could be comprehensive in its treatment of the delights we find in wildlife, the problems it faces, and how we could give it more of what it needs. Well, if there is, such a book is well beyond my capabilities. Instead, I have tried to provide enough case studies and explanation in each chapter to carry the reader forward into the next wanting to know how the tale unfolds.

The book has six chapters, each including my personal reflections at its end. There is a narrative trajectory which starts with local observations of wildlife around my home as an introduction to some species and to some issues. My day-to-day relationship with wildlife in the house, in the garden and close by leads me to ponder the overall state of UK wildlife – that’s the subject for Chapter 2. There is no escaping the conclusion that our wildlife has been in long-term decline for many years, in fact for centuries. Maybe this is an inevitable consequence of human so-called progress, with our material wealth increasing as wildlife richness declines. If so, we ought to take a close look at the aims and objectives of wildlife conservation, an enterprise in which I have spent most of my life, because it doesn’t seem to be living up to its name very well. That is the subject of Chapter 3. How does looking after wildlife fit in to the way that we see the future? Lest this seems like a very gloomy road to travel, I believe that wildlife in the UK is far from doomed, and there are plenty of reasons to think that we can do much better over the next few years. Chapter 4 highlights wildlife success stories from conservation policy and practice which demonstrate the scope for a wildlife renaissance if only we get things right. Chapter 5 looks at ways in which we aren’t getting things right at the moment, and in Chapter 6 I set out my thoughts on what we should do to make things better. Wildlife decline is a problem caused by our society, and the achievement of a wildlife recovery will have to be a shared achievement.

Mark Avery

Some explanations

Wildlife or nature?

The distinction between nature and wildlife is a fine one, but my view is that nature is a broader concept that includes wildlife. Nature, for me, and there is support for this view in many dictionaries, includes landscape, geology and geomorphology, and that’s not what this book is about. Wildlife itself isn’t a completely clear and unfuzzy concept but, in this book, it refers to non-domesticated animals and plants, fauna and flora. And I haven’t used the term biodiversity because it’s a ghastly word.

If you were to search for the word ‘wildlife’ in this book you would find it over 1,000 times and discover that I refer to wildlife conservation and wildlife reserves where others might have used nature conservation and nature reserves. Search for ‘nature’ and you’ll find it fewer than 100 times, and those are mostly in names such as the Nature Conservancy Council and in phrases such as ‘in the nature of things’. ‘Biodiversity’ occurs only where others have used it and I am quoting them. There are a lot of instances of the word ‘wildlife’ in these pages, but it’s a pretty good word, I think. In meaning ‘living things that are in the wild’ it does a very good job in eight letters.

Species names

I have only very rarely used scientific names in this book. I just don’t think that telling you the scientific name for the Nightingale is going to make this a better book – so I haven’t. But it is Luscinia megarhynchos.

I have not stuck to any list of authorised species names. I’ve used whichever vernacular name I usually use in conversation. I don’t think this will lead to any confusion, but if it does – sorry! This means that I write about Nightingales but don’t refer to them as either Common Nightingales (they are getting rarer, after all) or Rufous Nightingales (it’s usually too dark to tell how rufous they are).

When it comes to writing the English-language names for species, there are two options: capitalise species names or not. I have a marginal preference, and an ingrained habit as a result, of starting species names with capitals, as in Common Gull and Shy Albatross, for the reason that not flagging them up as species in this simple way can lead to people thinking that one is writing about all those gulls that are common and all those timid and bashful albatrosses (those are real examples). I fully accept that this is a personal choice, and one which different individuals and organisations differ on. I worked for the RSPB for 25 years and never capitalised a species name in all that time. I also accept that my preferred method leads to some ugly text on occasions where a list of creatures contains some species (capitalised) and some groups of species (not capitalised) – for an example, see a sentence in the second paragraph of the text about driven grouse shooting in Chapter 4. This issue may seem to be of Lilliputian egg-opening proportions but you’ll be able to see from the book whether the author was overruled by the editor/publisher combination.

Devolution

I am a fan of devolution, which has resulted in each of the four UK nations having power over many matters within its geographical borders. These include areas central to this book such as wildlife conservation, farming, forestry, fisheries and planning controls. And that means that since 1997 the details of laws and policies and practice have tetraverged (or maybe quadriverged) so that things are a bit, or a lot, different in different UK nations. This is a pain for someone writing a book, because one has either to explain all four situations or say that things are a bit different everywhere. I have tended to describe the situation in England, not just because I am English and live in England and understand the situation better for England, but also because 80% of the population of the UK live in England and it forms well over half of the UK land area. I have resorted to ‘things are a bit different elsewhere’ quite a lot, but I have also chosen, deliberately, to highlight certain areas where things are very different in the UK’s four nations, and to choose examples from outside of England whenever I was fairly confident that I knew what I was talking about – more commonly in biology than in politics.

There are five, not four, national governments in the UK: the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish governments and the UK government in London – because some matters such as taxation (most of it), defence, foreign affairs, immigration and some energy policy are not devolved – and what is essentially an English government which deals with the devolved issues in England, which is based in London too. Nobody really says ‘English government’, probably because the cabinet ministers around the table in Downing Street have a mixture of UK and English roles, so the same people are a UK government and an English one. I have tried to make the situation clear by the use of the word governments (plural) when I’m talking about all of them, and using the titles Northern Irish, Welsh and Scottish when I am talking about those in particular. When dealing with English matters I have tended to name the government department with responsibility, most often the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which has some UK responsibilities, particularly in international matters, and English responsibilities too.

Notes and references

The notes, references and suggestions for further reading at the end of this book have been given quite a lot of thought (so I do hope you glance at them). They provide links to sources of information used in the text here but also some places to go to learn more – and they occasionally contain comments on who deserves credit for successes which were achieved or blame for those which were not.

CHAPTER 1

Glimpses of wildlife

Our collective response to wildlife is the sum of around 68 million people’s relationships with wildlife. Some of that is played out in our own personal reactions to wildlife around us, whether we shoot it, spray it, put food out for it or ignore it completely. But, as we shall see, many of the critically important parts of our collective relationship with wildlife are at arm’s length, through the actions of government, businesses, local councils and conservation organisations. Those relationships are ours too because they depend on how we allow our taxes to be spent, how we spend our money on goods and food, and the extent to which we support conservation charities to do their work. The UK’s relationship with wildlife is not just about how many of us want to cuddle a Badger and how many of us want to cull one, but about whether the structure of agriculture as a whole is favourable to Badgers and a host of other species – and the same is true of forestry, fisheries, housing policy, transport policy and a plethora of other societal decisions.

I’ve been working in wildlife conservation for 35 years but have been passionate about wildlife for 55 years or more. That passion for wildlife remains undimmed over the decades and has suffused my working life. It is still with me, and every day is an opportunity to notice birds, plants and insects. Those continuing encounters with wildlife are still the emotional basis for much of my conservation work, and the same is true of many other wildlife conservationists I know. And so that’s where this book starts, with wildlife on my doorstep and in my neighbourhood. By telling you about my own experiences of wildlife I will begin gently to explore some wider issues and themes. But also, it seems wrong to start a discussion of wildlife conservation without a quick look – and this is my personal look – at wildlife close to home.

Herb-Robert

At 6 a.m. I’m usually making the first pot of tea of the day after spending an hour or so sitting at a computer. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll fetch the milk bottles, which arrived hours earlier, from the front door while the kettle boils.

As I open the front door, I get my first feel of the outside world. If cold or wind or rain doesn’t immediately drive me back indoors then I usually pause, and look at the sky, listen for birds and take another four paces to the curtilage of my property and look right to the church spire to the north, forwards down Clare Street and left along the road. In late spring I look left and down and see a Herb-Robert plant growing from the crack where my short wall meets the pavement.

Herb-Robert grows there most years, not quite every year, but most years. Every year there are Forget-me-nots, and this year there is Groundsel too, and a non-native but naturalised Red Valerian. The Herb-Robert is my favourite.

Herb-Robert is an annual or biennial native flower with five red petals and jagged leaves. It’s a geranium or cranesbill. The Woodland Trust describes it as a ‘low-growing plant with pretty red flowers’. Spot on! They tell me it’s often found ‘growing in the shade of woodland edges, next to walls and in other darker spots’, so they seem to know their stuff. But the Royal Horticultural Society describes it as a weed and goes on to denigrate it some more by stating that ‘it can be a useful ground cover but its tendency to self-seed can make it a nuisance as a garden weed’, and that the time to ‘treat’ it is spring–autumn (which is pretty much all the time it shows above ground).

We have here a real dichotomy in how we view wildlife. Some regard it as a boon, others as a bane. Some look to wildlife as a wonder, others as a nuisance which should be ‘treated’. That the allegedly plant-loving RHS’s website is littered with name-calling of native plants, and advice on when and how to ‘treat’ them, is one of the more striking examples I have come across of different perspectives on the native wildlife around us. To be fair, we all have something of this dichotomy in us, we’re strung out on a continuum, but the RHS, I now notice, is much further towards one end than I would have expected.

Later in the day I visit the post office, and use that as a chance to search many neighbouring streets for Herb-Robert. I walk with my head down and that is unusual for me, a birdwatcher, but I am searching the pavements and gutters for Herb-Robert. These are the quiet streets of a former shoe-town, Raunds, where there were, from Victorian times until the 1980s, many small workshops and factories producing footwear. Now the shoe works have gone, the shoes are made in East Asia and Raunds functions as a dormitory town for workers in Northampton, Peterborough and Bedford. The post office is in Brook Street, where there is indeed a brook, although most of its course is invisible and underground. It is the main street, where as well as the post office there is a Methodist chapel, a charity shop, a Co-op supermarket, a newsagent, a Chinese takeaway and more, but no Herb-Robert that I can see.

I turn, just before what is alleged to be the shortest pedestrian crossing in the country, and by the best fish and chip shop in town, and climb Hill Street before turning back into my street, and look at the other house fronts where they join the pavement. Some are plant-free, but one has a good line of Thale Cress and several have Shepherd’s Purse. My neighbour has mostly Forget-me-nots and a Red Dead-nettle, but no Herb-Robert. There really are no Herb-Roberts along the other frontages. Mine is the Herb-Robert house in Lawson Street – a fact about which I am ridiculously pleased.

The quiet wood

I had meant to visit a few days earlier, but the weather forecast put me off. As I park by the wood, the rain has stopped and there are no other cars. There are no other cars because this wood, locally renowned for its Nightingales, has not heard the song of the Nightingale in two of the last three years, and nor have they been heard, so far, this year. As I walk into the wood, my bat detector tells me that the bat feeding above my head is a Soprano Pipistrelle, and my ears tell me that there are Song Thrushes, Blackbirds and Robins singing.

This is a wildlife reserve of the local Wildlife Trust and it looks to me every bit as suitable for Nightingales now as it did in the 1980s, but admittedly I am no Nightingale. I have come here with my parents (and Dad died over 25 years ago), with my young children, and with those same offspring now that they are adults. It has been a part of my life and a part of our family life for all that time. It has been a milestone of the year – hearing the Nightingales.

I wonder how long the Nightingales have sung here. Peter Scott was at school in the 1920s in nearby Oundle, an easy cycle ride away, and a line drawing from his early years was of a Nightingale singing. I wonder whether he had this wood in mind when he drew it, and whether he made the journey here, and stood near to where I am standing now and listened to Nightingales throwing their songs into the wood as day turned into night.

This evening, the Song Thrushes are on good form – they almost always are. I’ve sometimes noticed visitors leaving this wood after listening to a wonderful Song Thrush thinking they have heard a wonderful Nightingale and have considered whether to advise them to hold on a bit longer but decided, as much through shyness as kindness, to let them pass in blissful ignorance. Normally, the two species overlap in time, almost as though the Song Thrushes are handing over to the Nightingales for the nightshift.

In earlier years, it was a common experience to wait and wait for the Nightingale only for one to burst into song, loud song, within a metre of where we were standing. Suddenly a bramble thicket, which had been brown and green when we arrived, but was now black in the fading light, would reveal that it held one of our finest songsters. But not tonight. As the Song Thrushes subside into quietness nothing comes to replace them except a Woodcock flying over calling.

I feel this loss personally – these have been our Nightingales. Yes, we have shared them with many others, and gladly, but they have been ours. We have built them into our annual calendar and they have been a shared experience in our family. It looks as if I won’t be bringing my grandson, James, here to hear them as his mother and uncle were brought here. And since he currently lives further north, in a county with Ring Ouzels but no Nightingales, I’m not sure who is going to provide James with his dose of Nightingale culture. There will be other wildlife experiences for him, but this thread, a family thread, is broken. And that makes me sad. It makes me much sadder than I would have expected.

Eventually, long after I would normally have heard the song if the birds were here, I give up and leave. Everything has seemed just the same as usual except for the absence of the star bird. The dusk chorus was just as usual, and as it subsided it became easier to hear the cries of lambs in the fields outside the wood and the distant calls of Tawny Owl, Pheasant and Muntjac Deer inside it. But the star bird was absent, and this has turned from being a possible one-year blip to a new reality. We can cross this wood off the list of Northamptonshire woods with Nightingales. And the same is happening in a growing number of other woodlands across England. Nightingales are slipping away, maybe not terminally, but seriously.

Red Kites

When I first moved to Raunds, about 35 years ago, the sight of a Red Kite would be hot news. Now, they are seen every day that one looks. It is a comeback, a recolonisation rather than a colonisation. In the avifauna of Northamptonshire, published in 1895 by the fourth Baron Lilford, the Red Kite was described as having been lost from the county due to habitat loss and the (then legal) activities of gamekeepers. Lilford recalled, as a young boy, so this was probably in the late 1830s or early 1840s, standing on the lawn at Lilford Hall and seeing three Red Kites overhead – but that was a rare sighting by then. Now, if you drive east from here towards Oundle, you will see Red Kites over the fields around Lilford as a commonplace.

As a teenage birder living near Bristol in the 1970s, I would not have imagined sitting in a Northamptonshire garden and getting great views of Red Kites flying overhead, and hearing them calling, every day. Back then, there were around 50 pairs of kites nesting in the UK and all were in mid-Wales in the upland sheep country of counties that are now Dyfed and Powys. We holidayed in mid-Wales more than most, since my mother is Welsh, and so eventually I saw my first Red Kite, floating in the far distance over a Welsh hillside, and I watched it through my first pair of binoculars until my eyes watered, so that I could be absolutely sure that what I thought was a forked tail really was properly notched. I couldn’t see that the tail was orange, nor that the underwing had white and black patches, but I could see that the bird flew differently from a Buzzard, with its longer wings drooped rather than upturned and with an air of ease and mastery of the skies which made a Buzzard look a bit stolid. Now I can often see orange tails, without binoculars, by glancing up when a Red Kite flies over my garden at rooftop height.

Red Kites were brought back to English and Scottish skies, and subsequently to Northern Ireland too, through a chain of reintroduction sites from the north of Scotland to the Chilterns of England, one of which was in Northamptonshire. They prospered, and that’s why I see them daily.

My children, now adults, are from the first generation of Northamptonshire kids in about two centuries to grow up with Red Kites as an everyday part of their lives. The kites seem attracted to playgrounds at break times, and there can be very few young adults who