Earth might not yet be irreparably transformed in a short period of time but handled with care, so it could be handed down to others. This gives the Anthropocene a meaning not only for scientists – but for everyone.
—Christian Schwägerl1
It’s spring. Poet and self-taught naturalist John Clare heads out into the countryside around his village of Helpston in Northamptonshire.2 He revels in the life that the birds, the trees, the communal countryside bring to him – and the rural people whom he meets on his walks. By the standards of today, John’s bird notes err on the side of the romantic, but he also has an eye for detail – a remarkable eye.
John spots the nests of nightingales ‘lost in a wilderness of listening leaves’ in tousled hedges near his home. He observes the patience of a female yellowhammer, leaving her nest as local boys raids her eggs, only to return and re-lay the day after: ‘the yellowhammer never makes a noise, but flies in silence from the noisy boys.’ He angers a wryneck in a green woodpecker hole, as ‘the sitting bird looks up with jetty eye, and waves her head in terror to and fro.’ He observes how the cuckoo’s song tails off as the breeding season goes on: ‘when summer from the forest starts, its melody with silence lies.’ By night, he explores a ‘furze-crowded heath’ alive with nightjars and relishes the ‘fern owl’s cry’.
John was an extraordinary naturalist. His poems describe 145 species of bird and provide the most comprehensive catalogue of the life that persisted in Britain’s pastoral farmlands in the early nineteenth century. Now our giant elms, hay meadows, wrynecks and common corncrakes live on only in his poetry – and the shared farmlands of eastern Europe.
By the time John is writing his later poems, in the 1840s, however, we realise that the story of vanishing birds, and ever-quieter fields, is not a new story at all. Something chilling, destructive, is ripping the life from John’s countryside. Birds and flowers are vanishing. He is shocked at the senseless felling of an ancient elm:
Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be.
John Clare lived from 1793 to 1864, long before today’s Common Agricultural Policy. But what he documents is the start of a bird-removal scheme even more destructive – and long forgotten. Enclosure was on its way. John feels the pain of the landscapes dying around him, the trees being ripped out, the people being fenced out of shared lands by landowners sealing off the countryside for an ever smaller number of farmers:
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall be.
Animals John respected, such as moles, are found hanged in their droves under the new farmland system. Nightjars are killed for sucking the teats of goats – but John knows from observation that nightjars feed on insects. John’s rural paradise, his local birds, and his own mental state will be slowly eroded as the century goes on. John ends his life in an asylum. Over time, his mind wanders more and more. Yet even in his latest works, he never loses sight of the greatest sadness of it all: the derangement of the countryside itself.
The sharing arrangement between most birds, and most people, was about to end. It was the advent of industry. The countryside was becoming a commodity. It was the start of a new era in world history too.
The latest geological epoch, the Anthropocene, marks a time in which the most dominant changes to the planet have been brought about not by nature but by people. Many scientists recognise the start of the Industrial Revolution, around 1760, as the time when human action began to dominate the planet.3
In Britain, everything from our canalised rivers to contemporary climate change has been driven, largely, by human action. Since the Industrial Revolution, nature itself has come almost entirely under our control. From the 1760s on, a series of small-scale landscapes would give way to a country uniquely dominated by vast crops of cereals, cattle, sheep, timber, grouse and deer. This is the story of how Britain became a factory, unique in the world in terms of its intensity.
This is also, therefore, the most depressing chapter in this book. With each passing decade, you will see how much we had – and lost. But the purpose could not be more different. To restore our wildlife, we must remember what was ours. Only by doing so can we hope to bring it back – in our more educated and enlightened age.
Until the eighteenth century, much of Britain functioned under a system of open fields. A large volume of labourers worked small sections of land, side by side, under their landowners. These landowners were paid rent in terms of a share of the harvest, or tithes, and were entitled to a share of their tenants’ labour – but they didn’t sell on much of their crop. In open fields, crops were, as they had been since the Neolithic, designed to feed local communities.
You can still find open-field farming in Estonia, Poland, Romania and other eastern European countries, where a larger rural work force helps feed the local population. Small fallows, small meadows, small areas of corn, small areas of open soil, orchards and copses jumble together, in a small area, to provide a rich mosaic for birds. This paradise of variety is human-led, but recreates some of the richness of our original habitats.
We know from European studies that when the balance of these fields shifts, birds shift too. For example, studies of strip-farming in Siedlce, Poland, from 1999 to 2003 showed that red-backed shrikes were doing well in meadows – but, with a decrease in fallows, whinchats and corn buntings were temporarily in decline.4 Nothing around Siedlce, however, was vanishing for good. Everything was shown to cycle up and down, alongside the changing crops.
The open-field pattern is why, if you visit a strip-farming system in eastern Europe, you will see configurations of birds you would not consider ‘normal’ today. Lapwings and turtle doves, red-backed shrikes and whinchats – all living side by side. Landscape variety – and food – is the key to their success. This interplay of habitats, of small-scale grazing, of disturbed wooded grasslands, explains why a Romanian farm still holds more bird species, in greater abundance, than many British nature reserves.
Enclosure would remove such a varied landscape from Britain forever. By the early years of the eighteenth century, most of the common lands in western and southeastern England had already been enclosed.5 And then, starting in 1760, several Enclosure Acts were passed. These limited the amount of common land nationwide, for the first time. Land, once collectively owned and farmed individually, came under the control of an ever-decreasing number of landowners, with ever-greater estates.
In the older farming system, a decision affected a tiny strip of land – and a few pairs of birds. With light grazing, earth and trees, you had wrynecks. By putting a fallow there instead, you replaced them with corn buntings. Under the new system, one decision could affect whole populations. By planting one field where there had been twenty habitats before, landowners could turn a mosaic into a monoculture – in a very short space of time. And that narrative of simplification, a disaster for wildlife evolved over millions of years in diverse habitats, is what continues to this day.
In spite of the damages of enclosure, for both communal farming and many of Britain’s small-scale habitats, we have nonetheless inherited a few better legacies as well. One was the spread of the hedgerow. Hedgerows are the bushy expressions of enclosure: thorny barriers for keeping livestock from crops, and of marking where one large farm ends and another begins. Even before 1800, around 12,000 square kilometres – an area eight times the size of today’s Greater London – had been enclosed with hedges.6 Grey partridges, linnets and turtle doves all nest in the dense cover of traditional hedgerows, feeding on seeds and insects in disturbed soils close by. Victorian cereal farming, yet to decimate its insects and flowers, became a new kind of haven for such birds. Our native scrub mosaic, where seed-eating birds foraged in disturbed grasslands, and nested in dense bushes, was reincarnated in the hedgerow.
We now mourn the loss of hedgerows and their wildlife, yet these are a recent invention in the great scheme of things. This life-support system briefly expanded the scrubland empire of birds, whose declines have come back to haunt us as, two hundred years later, over half of our hedgerows have been removed once more.
In the Fens of the early 1800s, lekking ruffs glowed on soggy pastures, black-tailed godwits yodelled over damp fields and, until the 1850s, the nests of now-vanished floodplain birds such as Baillon’s crakes were being found around the Isle of Ely.
Between 1829 and 1835, the brick-red gleam of breeding black-tailed godwits faded from the Fens. Ruff vanished from Ely before 1840. In 1769, the naturalist Thomas Pennant had been ‘deafened’ by hordes of nesting black terns in Lincolnshire, but by 1850 these too had fallen silent. In spite of brief resurgences of some of these birds, we have never regained the freestyling beauty of our vanished flooded grasslands. To find the teeming terns, ruffs and godwits that we’ve lost, you must now travel to areas like Poland’s Biebrza, where rivers still shape the land, and birds move, and thrive, with the changing state of water across the season’s course.
In Britain, draining waders would soon become a national business. In the early nineteenth century, Richmond Park was greened not with parakeets but with lapwings. These had vanished by 1830. The same fate, across Britain, befell the snipe and, particularly, the redshank – species whose livelihoods depend on feeding in damp soil. Today, you must travel to places like the lovely island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, to find damp meadows where redshank, snipe and lapwing are the skydancing afterthoughts of tiny farms. Here, the late cutting of tiny meadows allows the wader chicks to survive, and the damp, insect-rich grasslands allow them to find food throughout the season. But how often now do we swerve to avoid lapwings as they pirouette across the road? Our desiccation of Britain has been terrifyingly efficient. Yet even two centuries later, the drainage of waders from Britain continues as you read this book.
In paintings of eastern England by Constable or Gainsborough, you can see scruffy wood-pastures with bare earth and a large amount of nothing going on.7 There are small sheep flocks, herds of five or six cattle, and disruptive village pigs. This oak, willow and apple-dotted earthscape, forgotten to us today, preserved a part of the grazing mosaic vital to one charismatic summer visitor: the wryneck.
Wrynecks were once so common they engendered several strange myths. Calling just a few days before the first cuckoos, wrynecks earned themselves the title of ‘cuckoo’s mate’. In Gloucestershire, they were referred to as the ‘cuckoo’s footmen’. The Welsh name gwas-y-gog, meaning ‘cuckoo’s servant’, came from the idea that wrynecks built the nest and hatched the young of the cuckoo. Across Europe, wrynecks were believed to hold powers of sexual magic – their head-turning able to turn the heads of wives back to ‘cuckolded’ husbands.
One thing, however, is guaranteed to remove wrynecks – and that’s removing anthills. Between 1750 and 1850, Britain’s human population tripled. More crops had to be sown, which meant there was less exposed soil. Lightly grazed wood-pastures gave way to more productive fields of corn. In 1820, the wryneck had begun to decline – and 150 years later it was effectively extinct as a British breeding bird.
The wryneck’s was a world where little was done with the land – a land of trees and scattered nibbling animals. The moment the earthy wooded jumble of southern Britain, with its little herds of grazers and diggers, gave way to a sea of crops, the wryneck’s farmed Serengeti would vanish. To this day, not one pair has returned to its original English haunts and you must again travel far east in Europe to find places where they call commonly in every village and farmyard each summer.
The great bustard, the world’s heaviest flying bird, appears to have been expanding its range as late as the fifteenth century. It was seldom recorded from earlier feasts, a good indicator of a tasty bird’s abundance, but was served at the Salisbury Assize by 1600. By the fifteenth century, Britain’s southern plains, on which the bustard roamed, were no longer under the custody of wild herbivores, but extensively grazed by sheep.
Much of the bustard’s habitat at this time was shaped by a forgotten agricultural method known as sheep-grain farming. Flocks of sheep, grazing on nutrient-poor heaths by day, deposited their dung on poor-quality arable land by night. These nutrient-poor grasslands, in a time long before artificial fertilisers, were quiet lands of an emptiness we might now scarcely imagine. This stony tundra rolled across the Brecklands of East Anglia, the southern downlands, and the Yorkshire Wolds – the low chalk hills east of York.8 By all accounts, these were featureless expanses, with no settlements or trees for many miles. The Wolds were described by one naturalist as ‘a desolate, grassy and stony sheep-walk’. That a bird as large as the bustard expanded its range on our island so late in our history attests to the thinly populated nature of southern England at this time.
Three hundred years ago, you could have walked for many miles across these wastes with only birds for company: skylarks and wheatears, stonechats on outposts of gorse, whinchats or black grouse near clumps of trees, and stone-curlews scuttling across the stony soil. These odd plains preserved treeless grasslands, perhaps unrivalled in scale since the elephant days. This was, after all, the low point for tree cover in Britain’s history.
The bustard’s fate, however, was sealed as soon as ‘sheep-wastes’ became the haunt of people too. In Yorkshire, it was hunted to oblivion. In Norfolk, conifer shelter-belts planted in Breckland fragmented its open plains. Some landowners tried valiantly to protect the species, but in ever more isolated pockets the birds were hunted down more often than not. Like the cranes of the 1600s, bustards were now deemed the ‘largest, noblest and most highly prized of birds’. As a result, they vanished soon after. In 1832, one of our last British bustards was killed on Salisbury Plain, though they have, inspiringly, been reintroduced there in the last decade.
Conspicuous species, targeted by hunters, like bustards and black grouse, benefit more than most from an absence of people. Today, even the southern wild they once haunted is gone from our minds. The Yorkshire Wolds, for example, now lie below rolling crops. We have found ways to fertilise our land – and colonise its soil. So our stony tundra plains have become as distant to our memory as hay meadows.
One thousand years ago, Viking warriors, who had pillaged their way across Britain, trembled below a mountain. Something wailed in the moonlit rocks above. In reality, the source of their fear was not an ogre, but a burrow-nesting seabird. For centuries, long before the Vikings arrived, the eerie calls of Manx shearwaters had haunted the mountain by night. The Vikings, for all their military rapacity, feared the sound of the shearwaters, because they thought the birds were trolls. That mountain, to this day, retains the name they gave it: Trollaval. It lies on the Isle of Rum, off Scotland’s west coast. Even now, Britain’s pocket albatross, the fluffy terror of the Vikings, remains the mountain’s dominant life force, long after its wolves, and Vikings, have gone.
Britain’s seabird cities are the jewel in our wildlife crown, and have survived amazingly well compared to our other vanished animals and landscapes. As far as we know, only one species did not make the journey to the present – and to our loss, it was a pretty good one.
Birds generally evade capture by means of flight. Flightless birds, therefore, have an outstanding track record of extinction. Great auks, it seems, were conscious of their less-than-aerial tendencies. They selected specific sites in the north Atlantic. Whilst smaller auks jump and fly, great auks would have jumped and flopped. So they chose islets, free from predators, with ramps where they could slide into the waves.
Being very oily, very tasty and very flightless, the great auk probably suffered a reduced distribution very early on in human history. Pleistocene fossils from southern English caves suggest it may once have been far more widespread. Six thousand years ago, there were perhaps millions of great auks across the north Atlantic: a 4,000 year-old burial site in Newfoundland contains two hundred great auk bones. The largest great auk colony of recent times, Funk Island, in Newfoundland, was once so thick with birds that sailors could barely put their feet on the ground.9 By the 1780s, however, the traveller George Cartwright watched men spend months on this island, harvesting thousands of birds for their feathers. He wrote, with prescience, ‘The whole breed will soon be diminished to almost nothing.’
What is remarkable is that we know almost nothing about the life of great auks on our own shores – only how they were wiped out. Just seven great auk colonies were known in recent times. Britain’s was on the formidable rock of Stac-an-Armin, St Kilda, with perhaps another on Papa Westray in Orkney, but it is clear these were depleted very early on. In 1697, the naturalist Martin Martin, arriving on St Kilda, was told the birds arrived in early May, leaving by mid-June, suggesting, tantalisingly, that great auks may have spent around forty days on British land each year.10
In 1775, the Nova Scotian government asked the British government to ban the hunting of the auks, which were being harvested worldwide at a terrifying rate. Our government agreed – but there was, of course, a clause. Fishermen were allowed to kill the birds and use their meat as bait. In 1840, three Kildan sailors from the main island alighted on Armin and took a great auk, tying its legs together; perhaps hoping it was a valuable prize. They kept it for three days, but in terrible storms, grew fearful of it. They condemned it as a witch – and stamped it to death. It was Britain’s last. Four years later, the great auk went globally extinct, the only European bird confirmed to have done so in historical times.
It is remarkable to think that such acts of ignorance, and fear of witchcraft, took place in the same era as the invention of the steam locomotive. Yet if our removal of our heritage can seem senseless, our ingenuity in bringing wildlife back can also be inspiring. The story of Britain’s penguin may, even now, be incomplete.
In 2016, the American research body Revive & Restore met with global ornithologists to discuss rewriting history.11 By editing the genetic data of great auks, sequenced from fossil specimens, into the embryos of razorbills, their nearest living relative, and planting those within another bird, capable of laying a great-auk-sized egg, it may now be possible, theoretically at least, to bring such a species back to life. History has proven that far-fetched proposals, like moon landings, can come to pass if both the method and the funding are sound. The Farne Islands have been mooted as one sanctuary for great auks, in the event of such a venture succeeding. Maybe, just maybe, riding a boat on a choppy sea, the guano cliffs looming up ahead, our grandchildren may once again espy Britain’s penguins on our shores – flopping ungracefully into the waves.
Before 1755, over half of Scotland’s people lived in the Highlands. By the mid-1840s, huge numbers of destitute tenants were ‘cleared’ by landlords who felt no longer able to support them. Many of their homes were taken down, often making way for sheep pasture. By 1851, at least 85,400 Highlanders had been displaced from their homes.
The depopulation of the Highlands consolidated one of the largest ‘empty’ areas in Europe. Drive from Aviemore to Ullapool today and you pass through areas of a relict human landscape, where cuckoos hawk in the rough grasslands that have swallowed villages. Nature has bounced back at great human cost. But this, one of the most depopulated areas in western Europe, also sets up remarkable possibilities for wildlife and ecotourism, which we will return to in Chapter 8.
In 1465, a visitor to London remarked on its clouds of kites and ravens, noting that both were heavily protected by law as invaluable scavengers of insanitary waste.12 Red kites once bred in almost every county in Britain, having been, until the Middle Ages, extraordinarily common. By the middle of the nineteenth century, kites would be relentlessly hunted down, as they often snatched poultry from farms. Having outgrown their social use, the last English kites nested at Ludlow, leaving just twelve pairs in Wales by 1900.
On the Volga Delta, in Russia, white-tailed eagles, which can tolerate one another as collective scavengers, can still be seen in their hundreds. Like bald eagles, they fulfil, in temperate wetlands, the function of vultures: a communal scavenger that fits perfectly into the temperate European ecosystem. Even in the early nineteenth century, the white-tailed eagle remained numerous across Scotland, where it flew not in tens but in hundreds. By the 1820s, however, those Tudor vermin laws were given an industrial twist. One estate in Caithness removed 295 eagles, plus 60 eggs and young, in just a few years. In the 1860s, bounty-hunters on the Isle of Skye killed an estimated 57 white-tailed eagles on one sheep-farming estate.13 On a Sutherland estate, 171 adult and 63 young eagles were killed in just three years.
Large, defensive of their nests and susceptible to poisoned carrion, white-tailed eagles proved devastatingly easy to eradicate. The last nest was destroyed by 1916, on an island, Skye, whose skies had, just decades before, been filled with eagles. So often, we now look back on such events with some misplaced idea that all of this was, in some way, inevitable. Yet, just five years later in Poland, a 1921 statute was raised to protect white-tailed eagles,14 and Polish eagles now number 1,900 pairs. This is a reminder, perhaps, that not every country went to such extremes – to wipe out what is, preferentially, a fish-eating bird with a penchant for scavenging meat.
Golden eagles fared little better at this time. You can visit old hotels in Scotland that still hold paintings of golden eagles sweeping lambs, sheep and occasionally children off the hills. These master predators are in fact specialised hunters of mountain hares and grouse. By 1850, under sustained persecution from shepherds, golden eagles had vanished from much of southern Scotland. William MacGillivray reported the destruction of ‘vast numbers’ on Iona and Mull in the 1830s. By the 1870s, just 80 eyries were known – compared to over 500 today.
The Domesday Book’s records suggest that 24 goshawk eyries were well known in Cheshire in 1086, whilst medieval Scotland had a ready supply for hunting, harvested from the wild.15 As the gun replaced the hawk as a means of killing game, goshawks went from admired weapons to dangerous competitors. The last known English female was shot out of Westerdale, Yorkshire, in 1893. It would be a century before goshawks would return.
One shooting estate’s infamous record reiterates the sheer industrial scale of the killing. On Glengarry Estate, in the Highlands, between 1837 and 1840 alone, 27 white-tailed eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 275 red kites, 63 goshawks, 462 kestrels, 285 buzzards, 63 hen harriers and 198 wildcats were killed – the records meticulously noted by the gamekeeper who killed them.16 This estate was perhaps not exceptional, just exceptionally well documented, in the extent to which it removed our national heritage of wild animals. Glengarry’s records give, ironically, the final glimpse of how rich the Highlands once were for wildlife – and just how much we have lost. This was a heritage stolen from everyone, by just a handful of people, without any permission at all, or, in fairness, any true idea what scale of national robbery they were committing. But one statistic is most chilling of all. Those 198 wildcats killed, in four years, on one estate, would represent over five times the current British population.
Five thousand years ago, pollen records suggest the Scottish Highlands were a maze of native trees. The eighteenth century saw a tipping point for the remnants of these magnificent woodlands, which had themselves been cleared over centuries.17
Around the 1830s, a new fashion, deer-stalking, arose. Having cleared people to make way for sheep, a growing number of estates now cleared sheep to make way for deer. One observer succinctly wrote that ‘all one had to do was buy a large piece of hill land, build a suitable house on it, clear the ground of sheep and wait for the numbers of deer to build up.’18 In 1811, just a few ‘deer forests’ were managed for stalking. By 1873, that number had risen to 79. By 1900, 2.5 million acres, over 10,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Yellowstone National Park, had been converted to 150 deer estates.19
For over a century, meanwhile, ‘walked-up’ grouse shooting had quietly catered for a couple of expert marksmen stalking a moor, dogs at their feet, guns at the ready. Paintings of grouse hunting from the eighteenth century show black grouse fleeing hunters through a jumbled landscape of birch, quite similar to the uplands of Norway. But this was the Industrial Revolution. Grouse were now an industry too.
To feed red grouse to hunters en masse, the owners of grouse moors made a globally unique decision in the world of hunting. They created grouse farms. What is now known as ‘traditional’ burning, the muirburn, invented less than two centuries ago, was brought about to rejuvenate the heather fed on by red grouse. And now beaters, or grouse chasers, would drive grouse towards the waiting ‘guns’. Without the slog of having to work the moors, this kind of shooting appealed to those with cash to spare, but without the skill or inclination to master the stalk – now, the worst marksman could barely miss. Under such conditions, one Lord Walsingham personally shot over 1,000 grouse in a day’s shooting, including 94 in just 21 minutes.20
Burned treeless uplands developed. The purge of predators, threatening the prize animal on the farm, the red grouse, rose to new extremes. Before the 1830s, hen harriers ghosted across the rough grasslands of southern England, in places like Raventhorpe Common in Lincolnshire. They were also common across south Wales – but truly abundant on the English uplands and in Scotland.
Yet again, the reminders of abundance come to us through the scale of the killing. Between 1850 and 1854, as grouse production intensified, 350 harriers were wiped out in Ayrshire alone.21 So effective was the harrier cull that the species was soon banished from mainland Britain entirely, and would take decades to return from its refuges on Orkney.
By the 1870s, huge areas of Britain’s land were being preserved for a specific lifestyle choice embraced by a fraction of the population – the killing, in a particular manner, of farmed deer and canned grouse.
Until the 1880s, the rasping of corncrakes in our hay meadows was a quintessential summer sound. The birds were so familiar that they featured in Mrs Beeton’s cookery book. The first corncrake declines took place in the agriculturally wealthy south and east of England. Here, the horse-drawn mower was born. Meadows were now cut rapidly, from the outside in, killing the corncrake’s flightless chicks. The tradition of spotting nests on foot, whilst hand-cutting, was forgotten, and as meadows were now cut in a fraction of the time, escape routes for young birds in meadows were increasingly cut off. But the mower heralded the start of something else – the gradual decline of the hay meadow itself.
Hay meadows are human creations where nature then takes hold. Year on year, they yield ever more flowers and insects. They are cut late each summer, then browsed gently by livestock, before rebuilding their full glory the following year. A phoenix, the meadow is never truly dead.
The hay meadow was a place where we perhaps created something even more diverse than nature had intended. In Romania’s Carpathian hills, hand-cut hay meadows, for example, hold eight times more butterflies than adjacent grazed pastures, and can grow to hold 400 species of flower. Red-backed shrikes, long vanished from our own farmlands, remain one of the commonest birds in such places, often feeding on beetles exposed as the meadow is slowly cut in late summer. The fields are thronged with corn buntings, turtle doves and many other species vanishing elsewhere in Europe.
The horse-drawn mower and then, in more recent times, tractor-drawn mowing machines would slowly remove the hay meadow from the British landscape almost entirely. Since the Second World War alone, Britain has lost 97% of its hay meadows,22 but the narrative goes back more than a century. Only on the islands of the Uists, and the Inner Hebridean farmlands of Iona, Tiree and Coll, can we still enjoy the full bounty of hay meadows – and the common grating call of the corncrake. Away from the Hebrides, however, British hay meadows are now little more than ghosts: places of a richness we can scarcely imagine without travelling to the most ancient farmlands of Europe.
Whinchats, dapper songbirds that migrate annually from Africa to Europe, do not require sheep, and did not evolve beside them. Conservation management plans, though, often advise how many sheep whinchats require. This is really odd. Whinchats have graced our grasslands for many thousands of years. Sheep have not. So how did a migratory songbird from Africa become dependent on non-migratory sheep, from the Middle East?
Whinchats benefit from the presence of sheep because what is left, after sheep roam a hillside, is bracken, grassy ground and well-established trees. If you’re walking in the Brecon Beacons in summer, on the ferny hillsides known as the fridd, you may glimpse a whinchat watching you, its mate hidden away in a bracken tussock. By the 1890s, whinchats were shifting their distribution patterns alongside sheep, so dominant had this animal become.
Having expanded since medieval times, British sheep numbers had reached over 15 million animals before 1900. That number has since risen to 22 million, by 2012.23 In 1801, however, the majority of Wales’s 587,000 people were rural and still working in agriculture. There was, at this time, a semi-nomadic practice, now largely forgotten, called transhumance. Shepherds would move with their sheep and cattle, and the seasons, from a low-lying valley farm, a hendre, in winter, to an upland farmstead above the valley, a hafod, in summer. The same happened in Scotland, too. By the end of the nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Enclosed farms were established, rendering landowners independent, with ever-growing flock sizes and an ever-diminishing workforce. Only a small proportion of the Welsh population, even by this time, owed their survival to the land.
As early as the 1860s, labourers were moving to the cities, beginning a 160-year narrative of rural evacuation.24 Before 1900, the nomadic sheep-farming traditions had been replaced with new, stationary sheep farms. As sheep numbers increased, entire landscapes, once varied, gave way to the green lawns of grass, brown lawns of heather and single oaks that we have grown to accept as the uplands of Wales and western England. Yet these are some of the most denuded and nature-starved areas perhaps not only in our country, but on our planet.
In 1801, when black grouse bubbled on Bodmin Moor, the English population was 10.5 million. By the next census, in 1841, it had grown to 15.9 million. By 1901, it had almost doubled to 30.5 million people – compared to 55 million living in England today.25 The full effects of our growing demand for food, however, had yet to impact something special: the little lives of the grass.
In the early twentieth century, spotted flycatchers were one of our commonest migrants. Whinchats and nightjars bred around the scruffy edges of our villages. Wrynecks raided anthills in Kentish gardens. Colonies of marsh warblers thrived in river valleys, from Sussex to the Severn. Cirl buntings chattered on Wimbledon Common. The birds of weeds and seeds, grey partridges, turtle doves and tree sparrows, could be found in their droves. Cuckoos were noted on their arrival in newspapers, across almost all of our villages. Nightingales blasted out their songs across southern England. Britain was a tamed land but fizzed with insect life. In the first decades of the twentieth century, insectivorous birds were still to be found everywhere: the pretty afterthoughts of rural life. Butterflies, we know, still flew in their thousands. Many birds, adaptable to our every change, sang beside us in numbers no one alive can now remember. We had yet to tidy up the insects, flowers and weeds – the bits in between. In the coming century, however, the final act of taming would begin.
Between 1914 and 1918, Britain lost just over 700,000 young people on the battlefield,26 and by the end of the war the country was close to financial collapse.27 Birds, however, have a curious habit of capitalising on human disaster.
The wartime government, realising that food supplies were running short, called for wood-pastures to be ploughed up and replaced with new cereals, but there were fewer hands on deck and the wartime countryside lapsed into a degree of depopulated scruffiness not seen for decades. Marshy farmland came back: birds like snipe, suppressed by centuries of drainage, drummed over a silent England. Buzzards, relieved of direct persecution, began to recover in numbers, and spread to eventually recolonise the whole of rural Britain.
Deep in the heart of Abernethy Forest, in the Scottish Highlands, stand some very special trees. These dead pines have woodpecker holes drilled into their trunks. But if you wait long enough, you’ll realise these holes are no longer home to woodpeckers. If you are very lucky, you will see a far stranger sight.
Once or twice a day a bird comes down from the sky. It has flown over gorillas in the Congo and camels in the Sahara and now, for just a few months, it flies at dizzying heights over our own heads, outpacing peregrines in level flight. It is a relic of our ancient, largest trees: the swift.
These Abernethy trees are the last reminder we have in Britain of how swifts lived before there were houses.28 Swifts, evolved to nest in trees, and crawl downwards into holes, have since adapted to nest in buildings, and crawl upwards into nooks. They have become masters of architectural yoga.
Swifts had declined across the nineteenth century,29 but conservationists pin their recent downfall to one year, 1919. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 would see over 200,000 homes built in just a few years.30 The order of the day was quantity. From this time on, haphazard old houses, with their loose stone, slate or brick roof tiles that, for swifts, act as man-made trees, would not be seen again. It is believed that 10% of all homes built before 1919 are able to harbour swifts. For houses built after the Second World War, however, that figure falls to just 1%.31 And the number of swifts in Britain continues to fall each year.
In the wake of the First World War, the Forestry Commission was born. Faced with a new low in British woodland, covering just 5% of the country after the war, the Commission was founded to increase the production of timber. By 1929 it managed 600,000 acres (243,000 ha), planting 138,000 of these (56,000 ha) with new trees.32 The effects of this planting are still being felt, preventing life in the deciduous wooded landscapes where we should have most life of all. In the 1920s, the order of the day was bulk. Softwoods that grew fast were desired, and so non-native, fast-growing Sitka spruce, suited to unfertile, acid soils, heaths and bogs, became the favourite.
In their quest to turn our woodlands into timber factories, the government imperative of the time, the Forestry Commission would not only colonise huge areas of peat bogs and heaths with plantations, but destroy 38% of Britain’s ancient woodlands, to replant them with conifers.33 Whilst ecosystems from Brazil to Indonesia have been wrecked by felling trees, Britain’s wildlife has often been smothered by planting them. In our largest afforested area, Galloway Forest Park, covering 770 square kilometres, we find just 6% of native trees. In Kielder Forest, an area of 610 square kilometres, the figure is 7%. The list goes on and on across our forest parks.34
Whilst the big march of forestry happened after the First World War and led to the picture described here, the now-forgotten desecration of many of our finest woodlands had taken place long before this time. In the first half of the nineteenth century, an enchanted national monument stood in the New Forest. It was called Old Sloden Wood. One writer described it beautifully:
Hollies, yews, and whitebeam of the largest growth stood singly or in small groups at intervals, for the full appreciation of their form and colour, and for glimpses of distant landscape. Here and there a shapely oak or beech overhung the evergreen clumps, and aged birches or hawthorns studded the open spaces.35
A few decades later, the Journal of Forestry and Estates Management described it once more:
By an Act passed in August, 1851, the Commissioners were empowered to remove the deer, and to plant trees other than oaks ... This power has been exercised in the most barbarous and destructive manner imaginable ... The Commissioners pounced upon the richest and most picturesque parts of the forest, cut down the ancient trees – the living mementoes of bygone centuries – tore up with the plough the rich greensward that had existed for ages, and reduced some of the loveliest bits of landscape scenery to gloomy and monotonous plantations of black fir.
It’s worth noting that the forestry practices considered normal by the standards of today were, by the standards of the 1850s, a disgrace to the foresters of that time. Whereas our ancestors could marvel at Sloden’s cathedral yews, we must walk instead through Sloden Inclosure. Growing in straight, planted lines, the New Forest’s plantations have swallowed something infinitely richer – and this story has played out, unchecked, across our country.
Such planted forests have radically altered the woodland landscape of the British Isles. Whilst conifer-loving goshawks, crossbills and siskins have all been able to recolonise Britain as the crops have matured, and such forests are not entirely lifeless, these dark silent places, alien ecosystems for most of our native wildlife, are one of the greatest deserts in our country.
By the 1940s, the Forestry Commission was the largest landowner in Britain, but nowhere in the annals of wildlife recording do we find a resurgence in most of our native woodland birds. Today Britain faces the fastest woodland bird declines, and the most imminent woodland bird extinctions, of any European country.
The basic system of crop rotation was developed 8,000 years ago in the Middle East, long before soil chemistry was understood.36 Until the 1930s, rotation was trundling along and its premise was simple. Your soil can only provide so much. Growing the same crop in the same place depletes the soil’s nutrients.
All crops draw on nitrogen, potassium and phosphates for their growth. Traditionally, to put those nutrients back in, farmyard manure was spread before the planting of a nutrient-hungry crop, such as corn. In addition, planting the same crop in the same field over two consecutive years risked, in a time before pesticides, the crop falling prey to disease and pests. To get around these problems, pre-war farms would often rotate their crops, sometimes on a four-to-five-year basis. Crops such as peas, beans or lucerne were of great use, sucking nitrogen back into the soil, and so improving conditions for the next crop planted on the land. At a season’s end, the remnants of these crops were ploughed into the soil, further improving its productivity. This was the only way, traditionally, that nutrients could be restored to the soil.
The side effect of crop rotation was promoting bird diversity. Birds benefited from a range of food and nest sites, because whilst one field was doing one thing, another was doing something else. This increased the variety of the menu on offer across the year, and promoted the small-scale mosaic of habitats in which many of our scrubland birds evolved in the first place.
From the 1880s to the 1930s, it was boom time for arable birds. This may have been the best time in history to be a grey partridge or tree sparrow. Infinite stubble. Infinite hedgerows. Infinite insects. Infinite weeds. These weedy seedy birds thrived beside us in cereal farms, in part because Britain’s fields ‘rotated’ side by side. If you live in Britain year-round, you need food year-round. For what are now farmland birds, winter is about stubble, and stubble is about seeds. Summer is about insects – building proteins to lay eggs, feeding your chicks and your chicks learning to feed themselves. Provided you have seeds, insects, and a safe place to nest, life is good.
From the 1930s onwards, a word now indelibly associated with farming – fertiliser – became popular. Inorganic fertiliser rigs the productivity of soil. With fertiliser, you no longer need to rotate your crops, because you can restore the nutrients artificially. Pesticides, meanwhile, allow you to head off the problems of disease. This means you can plant the same crop, in the same field, year after year. But while you can rig productivity for farming, you can’t rig a food chain for birds.
Fertiliser leads to your starting over each season – not just with crops but with plants. The buggy and weedy complexity of a field is replaced with a blank slate. The sterility of this field only increases over time. Each year leads to fewer flowers, fewer insects – and fewer birds.
In combination, fertilisers and pesticides compromised a cycle of insects and seeds that had worked in sync with farmland birds for tens of thousands of years. They infiltrated landscapes, and still do so today, promoting the rapid development of species-poor grassland, of the kind you often see at the edge of our roadsides. From the late 1930s, grey partridges and tree sparrows started to decline. Cirl buntings began a retreat at the edges of their range. For the first time in over 830,000 years, we had the tools to turn on the plants and insects that had kept so many of our birds alive, against the odds, for so long.
The Second World War ravaged Britain, but as huge numbers of people left for the front line, more birds quietly drifted back in. In 1939, hen harriers floated back into the Scottish Highlands from their refuges on Orkney, and continued to expand until, by the end of the war, they had reached southern Scotland. With the conversion of sheep estates to deer forest, golden eagle killing had reduced in Scotland by 1900. Across the war years, eagles recolonised many of their Highland homes.
If there are any ecological lessons to learn from this harrowing time in our own history, it’s how quickly wildlife can bounce back, how quickly landscapes can be retaken by nature, and how, in an age where conservation has defined itself by management, we’ve forgotten quite how many birds thrive best on peace and quiet.
Aerial photos from the late 1940s show a rambling Britain, filled with non-woodland oaks and oodles of hedge. Now hedgerows, the relics of enclosure, would themselves become obstructions to ever-larger farms.
A hedgerow made of bushes is a habitat. A hedgerow with trees is a highway. From a bird’s perspective, an ancient hedgerow is the continuation of a wood. Ancient hedgerows with oaks don’t just increase feeding and nesting sites. They connect woodlands to one another, allowing birds to move across landscapes. If you rip wooded hedgerows from a landscape, you’re destroying not just homes – but highways. Even in a countryside devoid of large woodlands, small copses, connected by hedgerows, can function as big woods. Many birds, including marsh tits, do not seem to notice that their hazel woodland has become synthetic, long and thin. Nor do Britain’s dormice. Then again, they were probably asleep.
On average, Britain has lost 50% of its hedgerows since the war, and many arable counties, especially in eastern England, a great deal more.37 In the absence of our wooded grasslands, hedgerows kept our remaining trees connected and alive. This is why ancient hedgerow removal is so devastating – and one reason why isolation is such a crushing problem for our woodland birds. From the 1950s, the highways of the countryside were closed. Countless lines of open-grown oaks, Britain’s cornerstones of life, were ripped out forever.38
The post-war years were probably the last time people could take for granted teeming multitudes of grasshoppers and butterflies, and hordes of moths on a summer’s night. For many of us, our grandparents were the last generation who could scatter grasshopper clouds from below their feet – or doze under a drone of bees. Younger people may smile indulgently when an elderly relative describes clouds of butterflies, yet records and collections show that these were real.
In the 1950s, cuckoos, specialising in hairy moth caterpillars, began declining in eastern England. Butterfly- and bee-specialist spotted flycatchers were monitored from 1965 by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Common Birds Census. Between 1965 and 1976 alone they declined by 50%. Familiar birds of our open wooded lands, cuckoos and spotted flycatchers had dovetailed into villages, farms and the countryside at large until this time. But these birds are deceptive – they have specialised diets: diets that, before the 1960s, nobody would have had cause to notice at all. Chapter 3 will reveal in greater detail what has happened to our insects and our birds since this time. But for now, one fact will suffice.
Back in 2004, the RSPB organised a ‘splat test’ to ‘see if insects were really in decline’. This survey yielded one truly chilling result. As car owners drove through our countryside, assiduously counting ‘splats’ on their registration plates, they recorded, on average, one insect death – for every eight kilometres.39 If there is one statistic that tells you why shrikes are extinct in Britain and spotted flycatchers are forsaking your village, you need look no further. Having eliminated the top end of the food chain centuries ago, we are very close to wiping out the life at the bottom. The birds, caught in the middle, vanish around us every day.
If those Tudor grain acts seem barbaric to us now, future generations will surely look back on the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as one of the greatest extinction policies ever created and carried out for wildlife. The CAP, conceived in 1962, aimed to squeeze every last inch of food from the western European landscape. Reading this history, you’ll have realised that agricultural practice has intensified not over decades but over centuries. The CAP, however, was its crowning glory.
The CAP incentivised farmers to produce more food by subsidising them, keeping prices artificially high. By 1999, the CAP was costing the EU taxpayer more than 40 billion euros per year: over half the total EU budget. In England, in 1998, the situation was so extreme that farming income was £2.17 billion, whereas subsidies made up an additional £2.67 billion.40 With a rigged market and unable to fail, farmers were paid to perfect Factory Britain. Land drainage, hedgerow removal, conversion of pastures into crops and increased agrochemicals and pesticides had all been in play before this time. Now they were wheeled out everywhere – at once.
If there is a choice within a system, there will be variety. Some farmers will maintain scruffy farms, some will practise rotation, others will leave fallows. Some will prize old orchards or veteran trees; others will not worry about taking out hedgerows or draining every field. Each farmer has, given a choice, a slightly different method of farming – and a highly individual tolerance of nature. But if there is one paid directive to remove all these things – they get removed. 1532: remove the kites and wildcats. Get paid for each one. 1962: cleanse the countryside for yield. Get paid for every square centimetre you put on the market. Get paid a huge part of your income to turn your land into a factory.
The ‘green revolution’ of the CAP, in fairness, achieved what it intended to do. Against a backdrop of continual population rise, by the 1990s Britain was producing 25% more food per head than thirty years before. As of 2015, the UK is three-quarters self-sufficient in food such as homegrown crops, and 62% self-sufficient in all food. However, because of what we export, we actually only supply 54% of our own food in total. The rest, we still import.41
That 25% increase in food per head, however, has not wrought a 25% reduction in our wildlife. It has wrought a total collapse, the worst in Europe. In the past four decades, we have witnessed approaching local and national extinctions in many birds of the countryside, which show no sign of reversing at all. Here’s what we know so far.
If the British Trust for Ornithology were to invade another country, it would be a ruthlessly logical affair, conducted one kilometre at a time by dark green volunteers armed with notebooks. Fortunately for other nations, the BTO has confined itself to acting as our leading research institute for birds.
In 1968, the BTO initiated the fieldwork for an atlas to record the breeding distributions of all the nation’s birds, and published it in 1976. Since then, it has produced two further atlases, the last (covering 2007–2011) in 2013.42 So over the last four decades, we know exactly how, and exactly where, our birds are returning and vanishing – in grids of every 10 square kilometres in Britain.
It is partly because of the success of these atlas statistics that 1970, not 1760, has become the benchmark for modern bird decline. It is to the 1970s we look, misty-eyed, for a time with more tree sparrows – yet a time long after many birds had already lost most of their populations and abundance in our country.
Since 1966 alone, Britain has lost a minimum of 44 million individual birds. Twenty million of these have been house sparrows, as their insects, seeds and bushes have been tidied out of farmland.43 This leaves 24 million individual birds of a wide range of other species. Almost all of these are, however, the insectivores or seed-eaters of our vanished wooded grasslands or wet meadows: birds that adapted to farming over time, gambled on its food supplies – then lost.
In recent times, turtle doves committed to the weedy margins of arable fields. In the late 1960s, as many as 250,000 of these birds bred across Britain. Older Norfolk naturalists recount them smothering telegraph wires as they prepared to migrate each autumn. Fewer than 4,300 pairs remain at the time of writing – next year, there may be a thousand fewer.44 With their weed seeds sprayed into oblivion by herbicides, turtle doves have starved, halving the amount of chicks they are able to raise. They’ve crashed by 96% since 1970. By 2021, they could be gone.45
Since 1970, corn buntings have declined by 90%. Since the 1930s, second to house sparrows, we’ve lost more biomass of tree sparrows than any living bird: 97% have vanished since 1970 alone, and for every tree sparrow we see today there were 30 in the early 1970s. These birds’ dual diet, of summer invertebrates and winter seeds, has been cleansed from modern farmland all at once. Since 1973, we’ve lost 93% of our grey partridges. Herbicides, again, have starved their chicks, which now have just a 30% chance of survival.46 The story goes on for all of the birds that survived in our mosaic farmland – whose seeds and insects the CAP has, for four decades, paid farmers to remove.
The last relics of our wet grassland bird communities continue to drain out. With only isolated populations left, intensely vulnerable to predators, their decline is remorseless. Since 1960, lapwings have tumbled by 80%. Since 1970, yellow wagtails have declined by 60%. And 62% of snipe vanished from our wet grasslands between just 1982 and 2002. These are the birds of damp soils, and small herds of grazing animals. Soil compaction, insecticides and herbicides destroy their prey base. The CAP, since its inception, has actively encouraged land drainage, drying out the soil in which wading birds feed – but it is the increase in cattle herd sizes since 1970 that is perhaps even more striking.
If there is one number that explains the lack of buzzing meadows and yellow wagtails in Britain, it’s 142. That was the size of your average British dairy herd in June 2015.47 As recently as the 1970s, the average herd size was 30. In Poland today, that average herd size is still no more than five.48
British livestock farming now bears no resemblance to the way in which original grazing animals once shaped the land. The pea-green dairy fields you drive past are by and large devoid of life. Their open lawns afford nowhere to hide – and nowhere to feed. Cattle in their hundreds, confined in fields, create compacted lawn. Their medicated dung recruits no insects in the soil. The once soggy, buggy cattle field, amenable to wet-meadow birds like yellow wagtails, has become a desert. Many are too dry, hard and insect-poor for ground-feeding birds to survive.
The starling’s habitat is unsprayed pasture, teeming with juicy leather-jackets below the soil. Across Europe, RSPB scientist Dr Richard Gregory has calculated that starlings have vanished at a rate of 150 per hour since the 1980s. In Britain, 80% have been lost since 1980, and more from countryside landscapes than from our towns.
Scrub, for farmers and conservationists alike, has often become the prime candidate for removal in our countryside. The figures are now in on how devastating this has been. Nightingales have declined by 90% since 1970; we have lost nine of every ten. Willow tits have declined by 88% between 1970 and 2006, and now race towards extinction. They are our fastest-vanishing bird. The dank jumble of elder, used by willow tits, or the outgrown blackthorn of an old hedge, used by nightingales, are two such details that have en masse been tidied out of Britain. Scrub has been removed as hedgerows and margins, from our brownfield ‘wastelands’ and from our nature reserves. Many scrubland specialists are now red-listed. At the same time, our wood-pasture birds – those adapted to the spacious, climax vegetation of the British Isles – have vanished for different reasons.
Hawfinches rely on a diversity of mature, light-loving trees now rarely seen in one place: apples, cherries and oaks in the summer, hornbeams or beeches for their seed in the autumn. Hawfinches need entire wooded landscapes to survive, using each area in different ways across the seasons. With our shady woodlands no longer opened by either cattle or coppicing, light-loving apples and cherries have vanished. Only in rich varied woodlands like the New Forest do hawfinches now find their varied menu of ancient trees.
Lesser spotted woodpeckers thrive where caterpillar-rich trees such as oaks, willows or alders are left to rot in peace. Copses, riverside trees and outgrown hedgerows benefit these deadwood birds, which require huge areas of such trees to survive. Since its inception, the CAP has paid arable farmers to take trees from the landscape, along with three-quarters of our lesser spotted woodpeckers. These birds have also starved in their nests, as caterpillars have vanished from our woodlands.
Our vanishing wood warblers are oak caterpillar specialists. In eastern Europe’s woodlands, they remain a common sight. In Britain, they face extinction. In recent years, our native great and blue tits have moved their breeding cycle forwards with the earlier spring, taking advantage of the earlier emergence of caterpillars due to climate change. Wood warblers, arriving from Africa, cannot do the same. Now they not only arrive late to the party, but to an ever-poorer banquet. As our woodlands starve of caterpillars, such delightful summer visitors have been the first to lose out.49
Britain, one of Europe’s least wooded countries, its woods mostly alien conifers, or growing as isolated islands, could not be worse placed to avoid a mass extinction of its woodland birds. And whilst the return of predators like goshawks is exciting, as they colonise our plantations and hunt our grey squirrels, they tell us little about the state of our ecosystems. A lesser spotted woodpecker, however, tells you that a landscape is rich in native trees, maturity, insects and diversity. Its disappearance tells you that those things have gone.
The phrase ‘tipping point’ refers to a series of events that may spell a point of no return for our planet’s environment. Professor Tim Lenton, a leading climatologist, has outlined what such tipping points could be.50 One example he gives is Antarctic sea-ice melt. The world’s seas would rise by 7 metres if Greenland’s ice cap melted. But if Antarctica melted in its entirety, it would add 70 metres to our oceans. The melting of the Arctic would be disastrous. Antarctic melt could, without exaggeration, signal the end of civilisation as we know it.
Lenton cites boreal forest die-back, and Amazon rainforest die-back, as two other tipping points for the planet. In this case, the world’s lungs would cease to work. Overheated forests are less able to take in carbon dioxide or expel oxygen. In both cases, the world’s natural systems are pushed past what Lenton calls a ‘critical state’.
Since the 1970s, what we have seen in western Europe has been a new tipping point for our native wildlife, as the relics of lost ecosystems have finally collapsed. When you reach a tipping point, things go horribly wrong. All the problems that have been building up don’t ease off. They intensify.
Carried out yearly since 1994, the BTO’s Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) monitors the status of our ‘countryside’ birds every year. Given that since the late 1700s, our birdlife has been in rapid decline, you would have thought that by 1990 we might have reached the bottom. Indeed, the worst practices of farming had wound down by such a time. Yet BBS shows that between 1994 and 2011 alone, turtle doves have fallen by a further 90%, willow tits by 79%, wood warblers by 65%, whinchats by 57%, nightingales by 52%, spotted flycatchers and starlings by 50% and curlews by 48%. These are resident and migrant birds alike. These birds have not ‘declined’: they are declining.
In the early 2000s, my father and I would drive to Norfolk in winter, and compete on who could count the most kestrels between Wisbech and Peterborough. In 2004, we counted nineteen. In 2017, driving the same road at the same time of year, I counted two. Such personal memories are sadly supported by hard national facts. British kestrels declined by 20% between 1995 and 2008, but by a further 36% between just 2008 and 2009. Declines are speeding up in many birds, not slowing down.
The British landscape reels. Temperate ecosystems are extraordinarily resilient, but as a child in my garden, in the 1990s, I never contemplated a world without honey bees, or a garden without starlings. We have now pushed things too far. Pesticides, herbicides, monocultures, drainage, isolation, invertebrate decline, the loss of oaks; the tidying of scrublands; intolerance of the kestrel’s grassland haunts. It is the collective force of sterilisation that has starved and isolated wildlife populations, which now free-fall to extinction by themselves.
In July 2010, Norfolk birder Connor Rand and I crept into the Washington Hide of Norfolk’s Holkham Freshmarsh. Rumours were rife. Something was afoot. But the Norfolk grapevine was full of rumours that summer. Murmurs of hawk owls in Breckland. Whispers of a colony of hoopoes near Cley. In the British capital of birding, we all wanted to believe there was more life out there than any bird atlas could unearth. So we followed one more whisper, and sat quietly in the hide at Holkham on a hot summer’s evening. And then we saw it. A spoonlet.
A newly fledged spoonbill chick is perhaps the most adorable thing on the planet. It’s white, fluffy, doddery on its legs and born with a spoon in its mouth. It was mooching around in front of the hide. As we watched, not one, not two, but five adults came drifting in to the stand of willows above. There was something brazen about it, as if they’d been doing it for decades. To set eyes on a spoonbill colony, the first in Britain since 1620, was a moment I will never forget. That year, under the careful eye of Natural England, four pairs of spoonbills fledged six young. At the time of writing, over fifteen pairs are now breeding on Holkham’s marshes.
In recent decades, the story of birds returning to our wetlands is inspiring. Cranes, drifting over the derelict drainage mill at Horsey Mere, in Norfolk, must be one of the most triumphant sights in the world of British wildlife. History here has not moved in a straight line but a circle. The crumbling windmills that drained cranes from Britain have come and gone. Cranes, symbols of long life, have outlived them.
Bitterns, on the brink of extinction in the 1990s, now outnumber grey herons in the marshes of Somerset. An army of other herons has capitalised on warming global temperatures and our expanding reedbeds. In 2017, ten pairs of great white egret, five pairs of cattle egret and a family of night-herons all raised young in these marshes. Mediterranean birds unthinkable in my childhood, like glossy ibises, are moving in. Black-winged stilts are nesting in our eastern marshes.
Yet it is in the bipolar ratios in Britain, between managed wetlands, returning birds of prey and the rest – the dying organism of the countryside itself – that we find the most damning verdict on the health of our countryside.
We have more goshawks in silent spruce crops than godwits in wild river valleys. We may soon have more white-tailed eagles than turtle doves, and more bitterns than functional woodlands. At current rates of decline, the next generation will see more birds of prey than caterpillar-eating cuckoos. We have more avocets, a specialist of gravel, and more peregrines, an apex predator, than hawfinches, drawn to ancient oak woodlands – our once commonest habitat. And that – is a mess.
In 2017, a bulletin from the Somerset Ornithological Society lamented that 80% of bird records submitted came from the Somerset Levels alone.51 It is not hard to see why. Concentrated within the Avalon marshes is excitement – the thrill of life itself. Bugling cranes. The boom of a bittern in the mist. Families of otters. The emerald flash of a kingfisher, its nest hole plumbed into a bed of peat. The bubble of a female cuckoo, wickering in the reeds. Each year more life, not less, comes to makes its home in Avalon.
Outside, beyond these carefully protected wetlands, lies silence. There is so little chance of stumbling on a hidden woodland, fluting with nightingales, of discovering an Exmoor valley bubbling with curlews, that few people bother to write off their precious work-free days to disappointment. In Somerset’s silent fields, nature springs not one surprise.
When faced with such rapid, devastating declines in our wildlife, the temptation can be to see Britain’s problems as part of some international malaise – the inevitable consequence of a changing climate, or a growing population. Across the world, these are indeed two key drivers of wildlife decline, but they do not offer an adequate explanation for the unique desert we have created in Britain.
One problem in coming to terms with the sheer sterility of our own country, national pride aside, is the syndrome of ‘shifting baselines’, whereby we have adapted our expectations of the countryside to the standards of just the last couple of decades. Most often, a conservation baseline will simply reflect what has been lost in the last generation. If you read a press release on insect loss, for example, it usually mentions the 1970s as the ‘start’ of a decline. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality, a huge amount of Britain’s insect abundance and diversity was lost before any record-keeping began. True butterfly clouds vanished from most places before any of us were born. So did wood-pastures fizzing with enormous anthills, and wrynecks. So did mile after mile of beetle-filled meadows, and red-backed shrikes. Beetle declines began at least around the mid nineteenth century with entire species vanishing before 1900. Now, our long-forgotten natural history lives on not in any living memory, but in the living countryside still seen in large parts of eastern Europe and other areas of our continent that have yet to be turned into factories.
Many press releases tell us that Britain’s bird declines are ‘being seen across Europe’ – but this is not entirely true. Western, industrialised, intensive Europe has seen these declines. Pre-intensive far eastern Europe, yet to feel the full destructive force of policies such as the CAP, has not. Whether it’s a turtle dove from Africa, or a partridge native to a Norfolk field, the loss of weeds in farmland achieves the same result: extinction. The farmlands of eastern Poland, Romania, Latvia or Lithuania – where the CAP has yet to wreak its devastation – are still alive with much of what we’ve lost.
Across Europe, the degree of decline in many birds correlates not with where those countries are, but with quite how intensively their countryside has been managed or cleansed. In hay-meadow-rich countries like Hungary, its 64,000 or more pairs of turtle doves are considered to be stable. The 120,000 or more pairs in the ancient farmlands of Romania have been found to fluctuate – but not, as yet, to decline.52 In countries with intensive farming but a large amount of less intensively farmed land, like Germany, turtle doves have declined by a half. In Britain, as described above, they’ve declined by 96%. Germany, a nation of intensive farming that feeds its own, still has 8,500 more pairs of wrynecks than Britain’s average of zero.53 Comparative studies show that as early as the 1970s, mixed farmland in Suffolk held 2.2 pairs of spotted flycatcher per square kilometre. In the same period, parkland in West Germany held 100 pairs per square kilometre.54
Germany is home to around 630 pairs of white-tailed eagle, but 150,000 pairs of red-backed shrike. That ratio, between a large predator and a bird happy with a spiky bush and beetles, is consistent with a modern landscape that has kept room for some of its insects. In 2014, the Netherlands, highly developed and populated, still held enough insect-rich pastures for 33,000 pairs of black-tailed godwits.55 Britain, with more acreage of low-lying farmland, had, in the same year, just 50.
The causes for bird decline lie in the unique silence of the British landscape. We have tidied and removed life with greater zeal than our neighbours, as we did in both Tudor and Victorian times. Today, 99% of walks in the wider countryside will take you through a landscape that is not only free from wolves but free, at last, from most insects too.
In addition to our collapsing insect food chain, another factor leading to our current wildlife freefall in Britain is something called ‘extinction debt’. Once populations have become isolated, you don’t need to do anything wrong. Such pockets of birds are already too small to survive the typical fluctuations of a normal population. With no recruitment of new birds, it only takes a few unfortunate events for each of those island populations to vanish. A bad winter, a wet summer, a persistent fox at a colony of curlews – and those birds will vanish, one island at a time. For example, 80% of our remaining turtle doves have vanished since 1994 alone. But that doesn’t mean farmers started doing anything much worse after 1994 – extinction does not, after all, work in a straight line. You cannot, for example, watch birds starve in the nest unless you study them each year. But suddenly, one year, your population of these birds will vanish, like some awful magic trick, because not enough chicks have been able to find food. Resident birds such as willow tits can sing for years – then go silent. Behind the scenes, their terrible yearly survival rates guaranteed extinction: these birds were the living dead.
In reality, ecosystems and their inhabitants do not respond to damage straight away. You punch them and they often react years or decades later. Not only do chemicals take years to fully sink into food chains, but birds do not fall off their perches overnight. It is only through successive years of nesting failure that birds are left unable to replenish their populations. Extinction debt is a term used for where future extinction is already guaranteed, as an inevitable result of events in the past. And sadly for Britain’s birds, a huge number of our bird populations are extinct – even as you watch them.
Freefall is under way, and has been for twenty years. It would be naive to think that many species showing freefall will be here at all within a human generation. At least six of these –turtle dove, wood warbler, willow tit, lesser spotted woodpecker, nightingale and curlew – are extinction-critical. And still other birds are just beginning their declines. Who would have thought we’d worry about pied wagtails, bobbing around our motorway service stations in their dapper pinstripe suits? Since 1994, they have declined by 11%. We make a dangerous mistake if we think we’ve reached the bottom. But we have also the ingenuity and opportunity to turn things around.
Britain has millions of wildlife-loving minds who – acting intelligently, differently than before – can restore our wildlife to amazing heights, provide protection against climate change, and ensure a future for rural jobs. And that is what the second half of this book will be about.