What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
—Henry David Thoreau1
The roar of traffic rises within you. You long for the wild. You feel the tingle of the hunt. The prospect of wild boars with their stripy summer piglets. The red-eyed fury of a goshawk flashing through the trees. The towering sound of skylarks. The grisly larder of a red-backed shrike. Ill at ease in your house, you decide to take action. You leave the house. You get on the bus. And straight away the game is on.
Facebook messages tell you that in the local park some cute wild boar piglets have been sighted near a children’s playground. The police have not been called: this is a welcome and unremarkable sight for many children. On arrival, sure enough, a band of furry little JCBs are digging away beside their mother. Pedestrians stop for a moment, but the boars aren’t hanging around: they’ve got business to attend to. It’s true, not everybody likes them. Some cause traffic accidents, some are killed by hunters – but the boars, everybody knows, are here to stay. Most people accept them. Some have even created fan groups for them.
It’s a crisp spring day. A female goshawk rises above you, clapping her wings in slow motion as the fearful male, half her size, circles overhead. The harsh chattering punctuates the traffic noise below. It’s another unremarkable sight. With the morning ahead, you are free as a bird. Next stop – the city’s abandoned airport. It’s been left to grow fallow. Not by chance but by design. As you reach the airfield, the hum of traffic falters, and the thrum of crickets fades up. Red signs inform you that skylarks have made their home here, and soon you can see them as your eyes adjust to the wide open sky. Kestrels hang motionless, stiller than the kites on strings flown by the free-range children below. Given time, the sparrows will take food from your hand, but right now you’re feeling a little more wild.
Your next bus journey plunges you through tree-lined streets until, at last, you’re on the shores of a forested lake. It feels for a moment like you’ve skipped the city. In fact, you’re in the middle of it. Around you, newly planted trees heave oxygen into the city’s lungs. Ahead of you, the graceful shape of a black tern hovers, breaks the mirror water, and catches one more fish for its chick, sitting far out on a nesting raft, placed in the middle of the busy lake.
Down by a large river, a strange kind of ‘service station’ has been designed – for beavers. With their lodge just a few kilometres from the city’s centre, beavers were getting tired crossing the river. Now, they have a pit stop made for them by the local council: a floating platform where they can rest in peace. There aren’t any there today, but you can’t have it all your own way. These are wild animals, after all. A city is not a zoo.
Next stop, an old military area to the north. Here, amid a sea of purple heather, yellow gorse and downy silver birches, the song of warblers fills the air. For over twenty years, this suburban wonderland has grown wilder and wilder. You cannot walk everywhere in this wild place. The wildest areas are fenced off. Nature is colonising. Dogs are not welcome. You know, however, that if you were standing inside the heart of this urban wildland, you would come across the grumpy walking carpets of European bison. They’re not truly wild, the city’s confines are too small for that, but they are shaping the landscape nonetheless. Flowers and ponds lie where the bison have wallowed. All in all, it’s been quite a morning.
You need to get back into the city, in time for lunch. You have not been dreaming. And the morning I have just described is no uncertain vision of a future. It is, in fact, a daily springtime experience available to any of the residents in one of Europe’s largest and most profitable cities – Berlin.
Home to wooded heathlands, open lakes, flower-filled airfields and grazing woodlands, there is more landscape dynamism, more rewilding, and more birdlife in Berlin than in most counties of southern England.2 Berlin has eagles and ospreys, shrikes and wrynecks. Birds that have vanished from Britain are thriving here. Many animals, such as wild boars, beavers and goshawks, live right within the city. At least 170 breeding species of bird, more than in most British counties or any British nature reserve, thrive around Berlin.3
Somewhere along the line, we attributed aesthetic value to the green deer-lawns of places like Richmond Park, but Berliners decided instead that nature should come to them. Today, anyone in Berlin, should they choose, can breathe and feel alive in a city not entirely owned, managed and dominated by its human inhabitants.
Berlin’s dereliction doctrine can be seen in many areas of Europe, where the land around towns and cities is not required to make profit. Because there isn’t a financial outcome, the outcome becomes ‘recreation’. But recreation doesn’t mean local councils spraying chemicals around the base of each aspiring tree, as it does in many parts of Britain. Recreation means enjoyment of what the city lacks. The wild.
Just 6% of Britain’s land is covered with human structures of any kind.4 But that 6% is now more invaluable for wildlife than ever before. A whole range of British species now find themselves tied to the Built Life. These are the most fragile of our wildlife hostages.
Thousands of tiny actions, writ large, can determine whether our villages and cities are filled with wildlife as Berlin is, or sterile deserts tidied to the last degree. Whilst the long-term future of most wildlife will be decided in rural landscapes, there is a peculiar exception in the ecosystems that you and I can shape.
British gardens, as a collective, have the potential to form a network of nature reserves unparalleled in Europe. Our gardens account for 18% of land use in urban areas. Around 22 million people – and 87% of all homes – have access to a garden.5 Birds in gardens are often fed, whereas those in the countryside often starve. Higher temperatures in our towns and cities increase winter survival. Gardens are to twenty-first-century Britain what the hay meadow was to the eighteenth century – a massive life-support system, tipping the odds greatly in the favour of some birds.
Today’s fat-balls and feeders provide blue tits with an ecological anomaly: a tied-down food supply. Blue tits are certainly helped through the winter by fat-balls.6 Blackbirds, on a warm summer evening in April, provide you with the finest song on earth free of charge. If you’re wandering through your local village or park, the blackbirds are probably singing at a higher density here than in the New Forest. Suburbia’s blend of lawns and fat-balls stacks their food in a series of predictable parcels.
The British garden network is thriving in many ways, but it’s odd how gardens have changed in the species they support – and could change again. Just a very short time ago, gardens were the perfect life support for starlings – two centuries earlier, for wrynecks. Hedgehogs, common in my childhood, now face imminent extinction.
Gardens change and mutate – reflecting our changing social conditions, and the conditions of the wider countryside. But most of all, they reflect our own changing states of mind. Chemicals, decking, concrete – we all have a whole array of tools to wipe birds out, quickly, and on a massive scale. These tools are ours to use, or withhold, as we see fit.
Our seemingly humble shared spaces – our gardens, verges and parks – are a habitat we need to maintain wherever we can. But in all of our personal quests to save our local wildlife and rewild a little of our country, at however small a scale, there is a critical enemy in the battle. It’s a creeping disease, rotting the minds of many, and especially our local authorities. It’s deeply un-British – and it’s terrible for wildlife.
Our policy on grass cutting along urban roads requires Cheshire East to cut verges to a higher standard, once a fortnight, during the summer months, to keep areas tidy.
—Cheshire East Council, in 2012, explaining the removal of roadside wildflowers planted by a resident.7
The staggering neatness of every inch of Britain is driven home when you return from a visit to Poland, Hungary or even large areas of Germany, France or the Netherlands. Our alarming obsession with order and sterilisation has yet to arrive in most European countries. Nobody in the rural villages of Spain seems to worry about ‘creeping’ vegetation. No council workers are spending taxpayers’ hard-earned money strimming a daring profusion of flowers on a verge. No children are waking up in a cold sweat, screaming at the prospect of unlevelled hedge.
In Britain, however, many of our local councils act, using our taxes, as the sterilising force of shared public places. Unlike farmers, who tidy their farms to increase yield, there is no economic reason given for the prevention of life in our towns. It reveals a new nastiness in Britain: a compulsive need to cleanse. Ecological tidiness disorder, or ETD, the growing compulsion to tidy Britain down to the last weed – appears to infect new sufferers each year. For a growing number of people, the need to sterilise appears to have become a hobby in itself. To beat it, we need to question not only our council’s actions but our own.
Is that untidy bush, chippering with sparrows, overgrown? Or is it just a bush? If you have a rural garden, is that ivy an indicator that you’re not in control – or is it the home of a spotted flycatcher? That muddy ‘waste ground’ down the road may be the only place a house martin can find building supplies. Is that loose roof tile a social disgrace – or an opportunity for a swift?
Given that almost all our insectivorous birds thrive in ‘scruffy’ margins, then expanding areas of natural profusion around our towns is now more important than ever. The future of the cuckoo will be decided by scruffy places rich in moths, the future of the house sparrow by how many untidy corners are left around our homes. And whilst the rhetoric of garden bird conservation has become about bird-feeders and nest boxes, far more useful to birds are gardens where trees, bushes and ‘scruffiness’ are rife. That gooseberry bush is an insect powerhouse. That ‘pernicious’ ivy is what supports your sparrows. But in many modern gardens, if there is one supreme victim of ETD, it’s not a bird at all. It is an animal that, at current rates, our grandchildren will never see – and may even struggle to imagine.
Snuffling out of our lives, hedgehogs, of which around 30 million existed in the fifties, numbered less than 1 million by the 1990s. In the last thirteen years alone, a further 66% of them have vanished. Losing a fifth of their population every four years,8 hedgehogs are now set for extinction by 2025. The hedgehog’s beetle prey has vanished from the countryside at large, but for a long time garden networks, rich in native flora, messy areas and old log piles, became their refuge. Scruffy piles of wood helped hedgehogs snuggle through the winter. Lawns were once unsprayed pastures; the relics of ancient ecosystems. Allotments and gardens were food-rich corridors through which hedgehogs could move and hunt creepy-crawlies in the grass. ETD has changed all of this.
Many of our gardens, devoid of nuance, disconnected by impenetrable fences, with a high chemical input and the poison of blue metaldehyde slug pellets filtering upwards in the food chain (endangering our own domestic dogs as well as native wildlife)9 no longer harbour hedgehogs. In my home city there is just one hedgehog refuge left, and that is the Bristol allotments. Here, an organic maze of earth, bramble, beetles and wood piles recalls the wildlife-friendly gardens of fifty years ago. Hedgehogs snuffle on.
The absurd tragedy of these walking doormats being faced with national extinction is a very British problem. Countries such as Germany are not worrying about hedgehog extinction. In Hamburg, studies have shown that hedgehogs have adapted their home ranges to the city, making them smaller. During the day, they hibernate under ‘brush’ in people’s gardens. By night, they forage the green spaces in its towns.10 They are having a great time. Other countries don’t have plenty of hedgehogs because they’re doing something remarkable – they have hedgehogs because they’re not. It would be deranged and odd, in most places, for city parks to be cleansed of life, lawns sprayed, bramble banks cleared and wood piles removed to the last degree. The idea in most countries is that gardens and parks provide an antidote, not a continuum, to the order of the indoor home.
At present, the micro-potential of our roads, villages, gardens and shared communal areas is wrecked by small agencies writ large. We do not need to return to unpaved roads, like those in Romania, to save our swallows and house martins. We just need to adjust our cultural attitudes – and open up our minds to letting nature a little closer to our homes.
The more we travel, the more we can learn from other countries’ tolerance of nature, the more we will realise that our destruction of it in our urban areas is entirely optional. It’s entirely against our interests, too. Insects pollinate our flowers. Hedgehogs remove a surfeit of garden pests. Sharing with wildlife benefits us financially as well as emotionally. But if one form of ETD has reached chronic plague proportions in recent years, it must surely be the desecration of our roadside wildlife havens.
If you are watching a barn owl ghosting along a scruffy roadside verge, you are enjoying the bounty of fallows. Where fallow land exists, it provides hunting corridors for some of our most special village birds.
Barn owls used to nest in stone and timber barns, with large, dark attics. These, in turn, resembled large tree cavities. Then, those barns were taken down. Now, with the invention of the barn owl box, barn owls are present once again. They’re using human cavities, made of plywood, and hunting voles on roadsides we’ve left alone. The roadside verge has now, often, become the habitat that decides if your local barn owl lives or dies. A good aspiration for any village would be to have a pair of barn owls. It would show that squeaky verges were making a comeback. Barn owls should be common, living beside us all. They bring universal delight to people, and benefit farmers, as well as residential homes, by removing rodents.
Kestrels, the barn owl’s daytime business rivals in the world of pest removal, are also vanishing. And whilst the scruffy edges of our motorways may appear unchanged, they contain fewer rodents than at any time before. This is one reason why your kestrels, short of food and short of cavities in buildings or trees, are vanishing from your daily drive. Kestrels, like barn owls, need Britain to be both scruffy – and mousy.
Rodenticides, applied widely, devastate the kestrel’s key prey. The fact that most kestrels tested in the UK now contain rodenticides is a shocking verdict on the way our countryside is poisoned from the bottom up.11 Alongside this assault on our verge-side hunters, verges themselves are relentlessly tidied. Those verges, if left, would harbour voles. Those voles would recruit kestrels. Those kestrels would remove thousands of rodent pests for our farmers. Yet, in most areas, the sterility of our council-mown roadsides means barn owls and kestrels struggle to survive.
In spite of such an assault, over 700 species of British wild plant, 87 of which face extinction, such as the man orchid, can still be found on our roadside verges. Bird’s-foot trefoil, one of the ultimate insect generators in the British countryside, can thrive here. And these areas are not insignificant in size. In total, our road verges cover over 1,000 square kilometres of Britain, an area larger than Middlesex.12 If all these roadside verges were left unvandalised, just think about the recoveries of nature around our towns – and the reconstruction of our food chain.
Ironically, it takes no money at all to leave a verge, and for local residents, in turn, to benefit from the bounty of flying insects, and birds, that verges can provide. In recent years, the charity Plantlife has pointed out that plants, not chemicals, are, in fact, the best natural killers of grasses – not local councils or herbicides.13 Species like yellow rattle effectively attack grass roots, halving their growth. Plantlife praises several councils, such as Dorset, for promoting life along its roadsides: using plants, not chemicals, to control invasive grasses, and even within a few years of this policy being adopted, a drive across Dorset is one filled with far more kestrels than you will see in comparable drives across many British counties. Sadly, other councils have yet to follow suite, reserving their money for worthwhile endeavours and not for the desecration of the natural world around us.
Few places feel the life-removing force of councils more than my home county, South Gloucestershire. Around the town where I grew up, life is not only silenced in the farmlands. It is thwarted for no economic reason around our homes. Each year, South Gloucestershire council sprays the chemical glyphosate, banned in public places from Chicago to Paris, banned in eight countries, onto any promising green surface and around the bases of trees.14 The impact on people is still not fully known, but it is increasingly considered by some experts to be cancer-causing.15 There is no doubt about the impact on birds: it is devastating. Glyphosate dramatically reduces plant diversity and vegetation abundance. US studies have shown that it directly limits the abundance of small birds – including sparrows.16
Nettles are attacked as if they are enemy combatants, invading our country. South Gloucestershire council is doing its best to make the county nectar-free – and it’s doing an excellent job. Honeybees and spotted flycatchers are long gone from the fringes of most villages. Groves of bramble, feeding butterflies and prime habitat for birds, are routinely ripped out without thought. Roadside flowers are a noteworthy event, except for stands of planted daffodils. You wonder, as you watch people paid by the council driving around, levelling hedges, scything flowers, killing the shared wildlife of our towns, how many birds have been lost, at a local level, through such petty yet expensive acts of ignorance. Worst of all, the benevolent intentions of many people towards nature are also being mown to the ground.
In 2002, Cheshire resident Vera Shallcross planted an entire verge of the A534 near Sandbach with wild daisies and a variety of other flowers. Ten years of her stewardship later, in just two hours, the council had them mowed to the ground. The reason given was ‘ensuring roads were visible to motorists’.17 This has to be one of the strangest justifications of all time. Roadside accidents are a very serious matter. Aspiring daisies are not.
What hope do we have for restoring wildlife in our villages if even a promising verge, or a clump of caterpillar nettles, is a target for our taxes? There is only one glimmer of hope in this matter. Nobody, except councils, and a few vocal sufferers of ETD, think such cleansing is a good idea. You can read irate articles in the Guardian and Telegraph, Mail and Times, about the desecration of local flowers. You can find endless letters to local papers, deploring the vandalism of bees and lovely old trees, and petitions by local residents against the use of glyphosate. Yet tens of thousands of small campaigns have failed to halt the vandalism. None is more embarrassing to our country than the case of Sheffield’s trees.
In 2017, two pensioners and a Green Party councillor were arrested. Sheffield City Council spent £250,000 of taxpayers’’ money on legal fees – in a time of austerity. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for the Environment, visited and described the whole thing as ‘bonkers’. Nick Clegg, a former local MP and leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that the sight of peaceful activists being arrested was like something out of ‘Putin’s Russia’. What is happening? Sheffield’s veteran urban trees are set to be cut down.18
The council, which is using a private contractor to resurface the roads, has decided that the ancient trees, some of which were planted in 1919 as war memorials to soldiers lost in the First World War, have to go. The town council is so determined that they have welcomed the convictions of local people who have dared to oppose them. Campaigner Calvin Payne, whose crime, it appears, was stepping inside a ‘safety zone’ and urging people on Facebook to ‘save the trees’ (this was noted as a call to protest), was given a suspended sentence, and ordered to pay £16,000 in costs.19 Even after a series of court cases, nobody knows why, to pave a road, trees on a pavement need to be cut down.
This new manifestation of ecological tidiness disorder has incensed everybody. Some commentators have focused on the terrible precedent set by destroying wartime memorials. Others have emphasised the fact that councils can defy the will of local people, ban protest and strike at the roots of our democracy. ‘Tree-gate’ represents the controlling urges of many who menace our public spaces – an urge to cleanse the land at every turn.
No other European local government seems to destroy local heritage this way. In Berlin, local government, regardless of its politics, has for decades filled the city with native trees and wild areas. In the Netherlands, Belgium and France, villages are filled with flowers, not just for ‘in bloom’ competitions, but as standard practice. You do not see hedgerows given absurd haircuts to preserve national order.
Britain’s squared hedges, the sprayed bases of trees, the lifeless lawns, in aggregate, wipe out wildlife on a massive scale. Garden warblers were first noticed in the bushy maze of our village gardens. How many villages are bushy enough to hold them now?
Yet in spite of all this, we are not, at all, a petty country. Suburban England is, in fact, one of the most involved areas in wildlife preservation. Giving any thought to this matter, we would deplore the fact our taxes are used to destroy the wildlife around us. Many people, of varied political leanings, want the buzz of bees back in their lives. And that should pave the way for a new campaign.
Anyone who has visited countries in eastern Europe for their wildlife is likely to have spent some time in its rural villages. Such places reveal a staggeringly different attitude to ‘tidiness’ and one we urgently need to copy if we’re to get our village wildlife back. In almost any space outside of a tended garden, nature is rampant. Scruffy willow stands characterise many shared spaces. So do open, earthy areas where swallows collect mud. These are modern rural villages – they are paved and hygienic. The houses have small gardens, similar to our own. This wonderful ‘encroachment’ of nature is a cultural difference, and not an economic one at all.
In Britain, curing ecological tidiness disorder has to happen first. Pushing for an incentivised ban on herbicides in our public spaces would be a start. Pushing to remove the budgets that councils use to tidy, senselessly, whilst claiming they never have enough money, would be a powerful step by government – but our nature charities must ask for it first.
A ‘Keep Britain Messy’ campaign, backed by our wildlife charities, was something I first ventured in Birdwatching magazine.20 The aim of the campaign would be simple: to avoid expensive desecration, and allow the growth of ‘scruffy’ areas to bring birds back into our lives, providing a richer playground for Britain’s nature-starved children in the process.
As a child, I remember finding teeming caterpillars among nettles, carefully extracting them and watching them turn into peacock butterflies later in the summer. Yet today you read fearful articles in papers from parents, concerned about their children being stung by nettles. But nettles teach you a lesson you don’t forget. Would you really want to raise a child afraid of nettles? What would happen to them later on – if something serious happened in their lives?
The richer the world around us – the scruffier, messier, the more full of life – the more that life will reward us in turn. The tidier our world, the more effectively we will drive hedgehogs, sparrows and honeybees to extinction. Not only will their charisma vanish from our lives, but the practical services they provide will be gone as well.
One hundred years ago, the villages of southern England held nightjars, wrynecks, nightingales and red-backed shrikes. Joined together, they would, in the future, have the scale to do so again. If the ‘tidiers’ are pushing for cleansed verges and consequent kestrel decimation, then we, the ‘messy’ camp, must push back. If the people of Poland can enjoy village nightingales, we should be able to as well. An RSPB ‘Villages in Voice’ campaign could see a collaboration between villages in southeast England, growing hawthorn scrublands to promote nightingales and other birds to recolonise villages and towns.
Indeed, it is only very recently that Britain has seen an epidemic of ETD. A look at any village photo from the first half of the twentieth century proves that people gardened, lived happily, played happily, in villages populated with the chaos of nature. Heritage-heavy newspapers like the Telegraph and the Mail could help play a role in urging a return to such flower-filled times. But how large has the change been in our villages, as they have been sterilised over time? For the evidence, look at Figures 27 and 28. These two contrasting images of a Hampshire home encapsulate many of the changes from our acceptance of mini-wilderness, to the enforcement of tidiness. The first image is taken in 1914, the second in 2017. The thoroughfare remains, widened a little for traffic, but otherwise the house, the wall, the structure, is all the same. The difference lies in the detail.
The 1914 picture is fuzzy not with age but with grasses, flowers and bits of twittering ivy. The 2017 image is cleansed, its smooth green lawn flower-free. This narrative, country-wide, removes billions of insects and millions of birds from our lives. And whilst many aspects of our lives have improved since 1914, our local wildlife has grown ever worse.
Figure 29 shows Zywkowo in Poland. This ‘stork’s village’, now a tourist attraction, is in many respects very like a small village in southern England. It has a falling rural population, a church, a pub and a park. But in recent years, 8,000 tourists have turned the fortunes of the village around. The local Association of Agriculture and Tourism oversees a thriving B&B operation – and ensures the whole village is kept wonderful and wild.
The chemical imprint in such a village in eastern Europe must be close to zero. The garden shrikes attest to that, as do the hundreds of swallows and swifts, the spotted flycatchers and butterflies swinging through the streets. Nobody is spraying nature into oblivion, one impeccably lifeless lawn at a time. We could have our villages this way – as soon as we want them this way. Emotionally, our lives would also grow infinitely richer as a result. And a village tolerance of nature may, in time, give way to ever more respect of the natural world around us – and what it can provide. Such an attitude is best built from the bottom up. So here’s what you and I can do.
House sparrows are sown around the world by people. They thrive in mud palaces in the Sahara. They thrive on cattle ranches in the Amazon. They thrive in New York City, where they were introduced in the 1850s to eat rampant linden moths,21 and have since become North America’s commonest bird. It has been calculated that the range of the house sparrow can extend by as much as 225 kilometres in a year.22
It’s quite an achievement, then, that in Britain we’ve been able to halve our number of house sparrows in four decades, from 12 million in 1970 to just over 6 million today.23 No species better proves the degree of wildlife desert we are now able to create. House sparrows might be found around houses, but it’s the conditions houses and gardens create – small invertebrates, dense bushes and nooks in which to wedge a nest – that ensure their survival. Across the country, sparrow declines have been strongest in the south and east, overall our wealthiest areas. But the correlation becomes more interesting – and compelling – when examined at a smaller scale.
In London, boroughs with lower income, like Hackney, have more stable sparrow populations. In London, and in Britain as a whole, suburban areas, however, show the strongest declines. Greater income leads to more spare cash, more home improvement and the power to tidy our surroundings. The overall outcome, wandering through a suburb in middle England, is that ‘scruffiness’ has gone. Get tidy, spray your lawn, pave your drive or clad your garden – and you deprive sparrows of invertebrates. Starvation, alone, now hammers many populations in suburban England, with fewer chicks leaving the nest, in ever poorer condition. Feeding sparrows seeds may seem kind, but chicks being fed vegetable seed matter are more likely to starve than those fed on invertebrates.24 Instead, it is far better to plant native bushes, such as hawthorns, in which sparrows can feed themselves.
Cover, too, is just as important. Take exception to that large, untidy and very noisy bush – and you’ve deprived sparrows of the place where they hide from sparrowhawks and hold their daily coffee mornings. Dense bramble bushes, ivy creeping up walls, roofs with little gaps, nearby ‘fallow’ habitats like railway embankments – all of these sparrow habitats are vanishing. In their place, you have bare walls, paved driveways and no vegetation. House sparrows have a triple habitat that we need to protect: communal nesting nooks, dense communal bushes, and vegetated areas with aphids.
Income improvement makes people’s lives better – but it doesn’t have to signal the end for these noisy brown seeds. Nest boxes, put under one’s roof, replace nest sites lost to cladded roofs. Just a couple of dense bushes provide shelter from predators. Bushy native plants like gooseberries can provide the aphids.
Take a careful look at your local suburb. It may be a well-to-do area, but for a house sparrow it’s a world away from the far richer opportunities of Hackney. But you, me, our neighbours, can all make room for a little more scruffiness – and a few more sparrows. In return, sparrows reciprocate by eating aphid pests, cleansing our gardens without chemicals or cost. Many communities welcome sparrows as quiet forces of tidiness. Given a chance, they’re on hand to help with the gardening too.
Whilst a sparrow colony can spend its whole life in a couple of gardens, isolation is one of the most dangerous situations for many birds to face. For a number of declining species, restoring nature across whole villages is now needed, if we’re to hang on to the birds that delight us in our gardens each summer.
Spotted flycatchers, as much an afterthought in the 1960s as honeybees, are almost gone – along with the clouds of aerial insects they once skewered in mid-air. Spread piecemeal across the countryside, their remaining ‘island’ populations are all extremely fragile. This is where rural gardens, joined up, can act as lifelines. Studies have shown that spotted flycatchers are declining less in rural gardens than in the wider countryside around us.25 A large rural garden has a better chance of retaining bees and butterflies than most woods or farms. Rural gardens are often planted for the enjoyment of colour and insects – the countryside is not.
Our attitudes in rural gardens play a huge role in whether flycatchers live or die. Keep your flowers, bees, butterflies and the scruffiness of creepers and little nooks, and there’s every chance your garden could still be graced by a flycatcher. Foster the same attitude in your neighbours, and suddenly your entire village can turn into a flycatcher landscape –more useful as a refuge than a single garden. Large areas of mid-Wales, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, in particular, have good concentrations of spotted flycatchers in rural villages – and could, at sufficient scale, keep them for future gardeners to enjoy. Tidiness, of any kind, removes flycatchers. Scruffy bee-filled gardens, free from chemicals, are their friend.
Fifteen thousand years ago, swallows were nesting in the Creswell caves in Derbyshire, sharing with cave bears, cave lions – and us.26 Twenty-first century swallows have forgotten caves. They’ve moved on. There are no regular natural swallow colonies in Britain and they abandoned Creswell, at last, in the 1990s.
House martins, like swallows, are ‘high maintenance’ in their relationship with humans, but it’s amazing how recently that relationship was forged. At the start of the nineteenth century, many were still nesting on cliffs and under river banks, just beginning the process of colonising our towns.27 Few birds remind us how swiftly our own lives have changed in the past century. London still has millions of houses, but the cart-horses that sowed manure and insects have come and gone. The sewers that sowed insects and disease have thankfully gone too. So have London’s teeming house martins. The house martin’s decline reflects, in part, the ever-decreasing volume of flying insects in the wider countryside. As we saw in Chapter 3, air pollution dramatically reduces the chances for colonies to survive.28 But house martins are also threatened by the dangers of an ever-tidier world.
House martins need access to wet mud, in scruffy ditches or stream edges, within close reach of villages, if they are to successfully glue their home onto yours. They need flying insects, and the sources that generate them, close to their home, to raise a family. Britain’s house martins now thrive best in areas where houses ‘grow wild’ – where our homes grow alongside insects, clean air – and glorious mud. Cultural attitudes, town by town, are so important in the survival of our house-dwelling birds, and the little muddy areas beside our streams, in our yards and along our tracks, which may seem just an untidy nuisance to us, are vital to these sprightly summer birds.
Starlings, evolved in open grazing woodlands, nest in deep cavities, and grub for leatherjackets in pasture. Over time, they have shifted this adaptation from our wood-pastures into our towns and cities. Until the 1980s, it seems food-rich lawn and a deep nook weren’t hard to find, either in the countryside or around our homes.
In a short space of time, as our roofs have become clad in PVC and our lawns subject to chemicals, starlings, like wrynecks before them, have relentlessly vanished from our villages. Overall, the BTO calculate that 25 million starlings have vanished from Britain since the late 1960s.29 Now, most remaining starlings depend on a dual habitat created by us. They need our houses to have enough hollow entry points, or nest boxes, for them to hide a family each April. They require enough insect-rich lawn to feed that family.
If you’ve had your roof done but still have a soft spot for starlings, a nest box with a 45-millimetre entrance hole, 15 centimetres square and 45 centimetres deep, provides an excellent home.30 Put it high on your house, ideally below the eaves, and not facing into direct sunlight. Starlings are adapted to seek out nooks. They’ll find their new home in no time.
If you’re spraying your garden, stop. You are wasting money. You are killing starlings. And the whole point of nature is that starlings deal with the pests in your lawn. They also provide comedic value, being one of few birds, as the comic poet Pam Ayres points out, to walk, not hop. Looked at in sunlight, the purple and green on a starling is the most ornate decoration in your garden.
Some of us, however, may have larger gardens yet – and older ones. There are few more remarkable havens for wildlife left in Britain than some of our very last wood-pastures. When old orchards vanished from Kent and Herefordshire, many of Britain’s last wrynecks did as well. When orchards vanished from Somerset, so did most of its lesser spotted woodpeckers. So rich are some ancient orchards in the Welsh Marches that a study of just three, in the Malverns, discovered the existence of 1,868 species within them.31
For the past seven years, I have never failed to be surprised by the layers of life within an ancient orchard. In the Malvern Hills, in Herefordshire, a small group of us have, over the past five years, tried to unravel its secrets. The orchard, it seems, works like a complex block of flats.
Every apple yields a secret. Mistle thrushes hide successful nests in mistletoe.32 In a neighbouring cavity lie the eggs of a mandarin duck. In another, the squawking chicks of a jackdaw. In a deeper, older tree you sometimes find the snuggled ferocity of a tawny owlet. Below sloping branches lie the tiny drilled homes of lesser spotted woodpeckers; drilled into the heart of the oldest apples, the homes of their larger green cousins. Honeybees can still be found in abundance, covering pussy willows at the orchard’s edge. Hornets thrive in the old trees. Dormice from adjacent woods creep through the maze of overlapping apple branches. Rare bracket fungi colonise the oldest trees. Goshawks hunt the orchard for birds. Polecats from nearby barns hunt for rabbits.
If you own an ancient orchard, you’re in possession of a place more reminiscent than you might think of Britain’s wild wood. Much of an ancient orchard’s life is hidden, encrypted: out of sight. But an orchard sprayed, its dead wood removed, is little more than a shell. It will hold just a fraction of the life we have found in our Herefordshire haven. In chemical orchards, birds like redstarts, spotted flycatchers and lesser spotted woodpeckers, all dependent on caterpillars, butterflies or bees, need not apply.
Whilst the obvious answer, if an orchard has exhausted its economic life producing fruit, is to remove it, the heritage lost extends far beyond the history. Britain’s wood-pasture birds are in serious trouble. Sixty per cent of traditional orchards have been removed since 1960. Your orchard, growing ever richer over time, is the ageing nature reserve that no one else is growing. And that, all in all, makes it a very special place.
Urban gulls have engineered cities built on top of our own. This is because there are no foxes in the sky, scaling our buildings with cunning and crampons. So urban gull productivity, as any Bristol resident knows, is very high. The ‘urban heat island’ effect means that temperatures can be 4–6 degrees higher in our cities than in the surrounding countryside. This allows gull nesting to begin earlier, and streetlights also allow the gulls to forage through the night.33 A long way north of Bristol, the arctic terns of Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland, are now thriving on flat factory roofs that resemble shingle beaches. Kittiwakes have bred on the rocky ledges of the Tyne Bridge and other man-made structures in Newcastle and Gateshead since at least the 1960s.
These gulls and terns may just be the beginning. Does it seem unfeasible that in future, guillemots, razorbills and shags might all form colonies on the ledges of buildings or bridges? If swifts can forsake trees for churches, for how much longer will Britain’s seabirds nest exclusively on cliffs?
Peregrines on Derby Cathedral have amazed researchers by snatching migratory woodcock, at night – using the lights of the building itself.34 Migrating so clumsily that they almost fall out of the sky, woodcock could, for millennia, bumble over their sleeping predators below. Now, should they pass a cathedral at night, there is every chance of getting nailed by a day-hunting predator. The bumbling night life of the woodcock just became a lot less fun.
Urban peregrines are on the rise – entirely because of human activity. A peregrine in a city is safe from persecution. Its chicks, falling early from the nest, are more likely to be rescued by concerned passers-by. An urban peregrine not only has a smattering of migrants it can catch by streetlight but a sushi-style procession of city pigeons – and in London, gaudy ring-necked parakeets – to snack on by day.
The movement of birds from natural habitats into our cities has, however, a long history. It is a wonderful but unnatural thing for a peregrine to make its home on a cathedral. These commitments reflect a moment in history when human habitats were as appealing to birds as those available in the wild.
Birds committing to humans, however, come to rely on us doing what we’ve always done. But we’re the fastest-changing species on earth. One day, a few decades hence, during an epidemic of avian flu, we may choose to remove feral pigeons from our cities. And then, having committed to the human world, peregrines could be endangered once again. Indeed, Britain’s endangered kittiwakes, at risk of global extinction, nesting on ledges on Newcastle’s buildings, should be seen as something of a colonising triumph. But even here the disease of ETD has crept in. Each year, nets placed on buildings to discourage the birds end up senselessly entrapping the kittiwakes instead.35 The urban life can bring safety – but it’s a fragile existence. Some of our most iconic birds are already paying the price of change.
Swifts have been a part of Built Britain for a very long time. But it’s only when you visit ramshackle old towns in France, Spain, Poland and so on that you realise swifts should be really common – because they are so well adapted to living in brick trees.
In Britain, we now have a very small number of ramshackle roofs, stone tiles and other swift-friendly nooks left in our ever-neater cities. The website swift-conservation.org sells and proposes a number of nest boxes that can be wedged under the eaves of almost any house, specifically designed for swifts.36 The fun part, of course, is that by playing loud tape calls of swifts, in areas where they arrive each summer, we can, literally, call them down from the sky. The first year, swifts may simply inspect your nest box. The second year, they may stay to breed. Entire new colonies have now been established this way – with a nest box, a set of very loud speakers, and some rather puzzled neighbours.
Swifts make, each year, a journey that we made just once, over hundreds of thousands of years – from African woodlands to temperate houses. It will be a sign of our nature-friendly cities if they’re still cleaning our skies in a hundred years to come.
The Greenwich Docks, the Isle of Dogs, the rubble of Dagenham. Five or more degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, on average, the industrial greenhouse of London, and the sheltered environment of its dockyards, provides the perfect combination of insects and dust for a special summer visitor.
If you can see rubble, gantries and ‘keep out’ signs, if there are Dobermann guard dogs watching you with silent hunger – you are in the land of Britain’s industrial songbird. And if London were a country, the black redstart would surely be its national bird. Black redstarts famously established themselves on the bomb sites of London after the Second World War. They have a habit of falling in love with places that some might describe as hellish, blasted and forlorn. That flashing orange tail on a little black bird is hope: hope that even rubble can be claimed by nature over time.
From choughs in Welsh mine-shafts to peregrines on old grain silos, industrial structures across Britain teem with unexpected life. As primary industry fades with the decline of manufacturing, our industrial buildings are being taken away too – along with our swifts and black redstarts. A part of this is inevitable, of course. Most people wouldn’t miss a crumbling building any more than they would want to live in one. We need a flourishing economy and people need new homes. But when all of our buildings are shiny and new, a weedy stone warehouse becomes an oddly precious thing.
There is huge urban tourism interest in areas where nature has taken back control. The popularity of films like 28 Days Later has only shown how pervasive that idea can be. There are profitable ghost-towns in the USA with prairie-dogs living in the old wooden ranches. Perhaps, as we tidy away our industrial sites, we too could set a few aside – monuments to the past, refuges for the wildlife that claimed it. Listed buildings – for wildlife. These miniature urban jungles could, if properly marketed and managed, prove popular attractions for city-dwellers craving the intrigue of wilderness in their very urban lives.
The post-industrial areas of northern England have a very different aspect to other places when it comes to saving birds. In these areas, vegetation freestyles in a way rarely permitted in any nature reserve or across much of the country. There are floodplain woodlands rich in willows and willow tits, and fallow grasslands filled with rare flowers and butterflies. Here, less land is managed – and more is simply left. Durham, in particular, is a fascinating county for birds declining elsewhere.
Many pairs of long-eared owls haunt Durham’s moors and grasslands. You can find whinchats by the roadsides. As many as 300 pairs of willow tit are thriving.37 And almost every time a willow tit pops up, it’s not doing so in pristine woodland – but in a derelict coalfield. The reason? An iron hold on landscape control has been loosened. Durham is scruffy. And in nature terms, that is the highest compliment.
Recognition that northern England’s brownfields are vital areas for nature has been withheld by conservationists for a very long time. Ecological purity – the reedbed, the canopy woodland, habitats that are often much poorer for birds – has been prized over the dynamism of a brownfield river valley. Slowly, however, things are starting to change. Nature reserves like Potteric Carr, in Yorkshire, and the RSPB’s Swillington and Fairburn Ings reserves, are beginning to popularise the idea of brownfield wild. Spoonbills have recently started to breed at Fairburn – a gem in Britain’s brownfield crown.
It’s now time for wastelands, scrublands, to become protected as the wilderness lacking in our fields. It’s time we kept our brownfield wilderness, and willow tits, protected – for good. Brownfield Biospheres would be a good place to start: land purchased for the preservation of nature, thriving beside and enriching some of the most populated areas in our country, bringing nature to an entire generation of children otherwise sealed off from it.
Little ringed plovers are to gravel pits what swallows are to barns. Flying from the Mediterranean each year, this is a bird deeply in love with small chunks of rock. The more dangerous, the more risk of being squashed by a forklift truck, the more little ringed plovers seem to thrive. But they’re not alone. Britain’s gravel pits are extraordinary magnets of life.
Each year, dragonflies emerging from flooded gravel-pit reedbeds draw droves of migrant hobbies, as they arrive from Africa to hunt them on the wing. Many of our ducks thrive in these places, alongside balletic great crested grebes. Sand martins build colonies in abandoned sand and gravel banks and hawk over the insect-rich water.
Flooded gravel pits are more than diverse ponds – they also protect habitats no longer seen in the wider countryside. The area around pits, water-retentive, naturally regrows with riverine scrub. The social importance of gravel pits, as areas to walk and enjoy nature close to cities, acts to protect this habitat, even if that protection is sometimes accidental. Nightingales share this rich scrub world with bullfinches, cuckoos, and a range of other vanishing birds.
Given that our birds evolved in places where scrublands played a vital role, our gravel pits come as a strange rescue formula in a countryside now free from nuance. A visit to Paxton Pits, in Cambridgeshire, or the Cotswold Water Park, in Gloucestershire, will reveal a richer spring chorus than most of our woodlands. Cuckoos watch reed warblers from scruffy willow stands. Grasshopper warblers reel beside patient fishermen in the brambles. At Cheshire’s Woolston Eyes each May, you can watch black-necked grebes in all their finery, escorting their chicks on their backs, protected by noisy colonies of black-headed gulls. Over 110,000 individual birds of all species have been ringed at the Eyes – an amazing testament to the power of gravel. Gravel pits are truly the wetland hay meadows of the twenty-first century.38
For brownfield rewilding to work, however, it’s not enough to buy the pits. Nature charities, local financiers or local government must buy the corridors. The Dearne Valley, the Durham coalfields, the scrublands of Liverpool and Manchester, are thriving as collective landscapes. But there is another danger to these industrial jungles – and it’s not just being built on. These places could one day be managed to extinction. The magic of brownfield wilderness is freestyling and decay. In areas too small for full ecosystem dynamics, the brownfield wild showcases the last of our freestyled scrublands. Scrub clearance, the ‘conservation’ tool that decimates so much wildlife, is best kept well away.
Britain’s brownfield wilderness is special and unique. It preserves processes not seen elsewhere in Britain for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, like the growth of wild floodplain thickets. Management would kill it outright. Far better to buy brownfield – then sit back, relax, and let it rot. That is how brownfield nature works – and it’s a rare and special thing.
Each day, forest elephants and lowland gorillas make an enormous mess of the Congo rainforest. Trees are cleared. Soils are disturbed. Dung is dropped. Dung beetles aerate the soils. New trees grow. The gorillas play their part by unwittingly scattering thousands of seeds. Indeed, without elephants and gorillas, each of which disperses invaluable species of trees, the Congo jungle would grow infinitely poorer.
If humans have any ecosystem role left, which I believe we do, we act, like our gorilla cousins, as the Opening Ape. We are, after all, a species too – one with a sustained habit of clearing and planting. Small allotments and hand-cut hay meadows are the results of our acting in a manner not too different to our primate ancestors.
Robins, for example, are so familiar that it’s worth reconsidering their gamble – from following pigs with predictable snouts to unpredictable humans with hoes. With a 45% increase in the British population since 1970, robins are thriving, not just on the earthworms we dig up but on the mealworms we put out. Even wild boars can’t compete with such a service.
Creating open spaces, disturbance and tree chaos can be a role that’s very good for wildlife, provided this doesn’t come to replace the restoration of our landscapes. In our cities, there won’t be many places large enough to accommodate the stewardship of wild cattle, horses or lynx. There will always, however, be areas for the Opening Ape to thrive.
Iron Age farming has been employed on the islands of Tiree and Coll, in Scotland, for so long that there is little record of what was there before. Tiree has become, under human stewardship, a paradise of flowers, seeds and insects, a network of crofted meadows that dovetails with the ‘machair’ of the coast: the natural grassland kept low by the wind, and fertilised by the calcium-rich remains of seashells. The same can be found in the rich crofting settlements of North and South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, where the fields are alive with lapwings and redshanks, corncrakes and skylarks – all in glorious abundance.
These Hebridean farmlands remind us how well we have, in the past, integrated with nature. How small-scale gardening and planting, writ large, can add up to thriving populations of birds. Each summer, most of Britain’s corncrakes, hundreds of breeding waders, starlings and cuckoos, as unaffected as the island’s thriving bumblebees, carry on here much as they did a century before.
There will always be smaller areas of Britain – little islands, islands within cities and our gardens – where the Opening Ape can sow life. In a nation of 65 million people, the earthy disturbance of humans still has a vital role to play. And as gardeners, in our scruffiest, wildest and most wildlife-friendly capacity – we can still act as the animal that makes the rest of nature proud.