Read the book: «Nature Conservation»

1 Introduction: Where We Are Now
Wildlife in a crowded island

In his classic book, Nature Conservation in Britain (1969), Sir Dudley Stamp began with the world population. By the mid-1960s, wildlife shared the planet with 3,400 million human beings. Thirty years later that number had grown to 5,292 million. Today Asia alone holds most of the world population of the mid-1960s. In 2000, we broke the six billion mark. The United Nations forecast for 2050 is 9,833 million people; if so, in a single century the human population will have nearly trebled.

In Great Britain, by contrast, the population growth is slow. In 1921, nearly 43 million people lived on our island. In 1965, despite the postwar ‘baby boom’, the population had increased by only 19 per cent to 53 million. Today it stands at 57 million and is virtually static. Our population explosion happened early, in Victorian times. In the developing world, most people are young. In Britain we have an ageing population. Mr and Mrs Average will have 2.1 children and will live well into their seventies. If the size of the human population were all that mattered, the countryside and its wildlife would have been under remarkably little pressure in the twentieth century, except around a few cities, mainly in south-east England.

Even so, 57 million people is plenty on an island of only 230,000 square kilometres (88,780 square miles). It gives us an average population density of 3.6 persons per hectare in England, 1.36 in Wales and 0.65 in Scotland. We outnumber every wild mammal found in Britain, with the possible exception of the field vole. We outnumber the commonest wild bird by about five to one. If we all had a decent-sized garden, there would be no countryside.

The New Naturalist Board in 1966. From left to right: James Fisher, John Gilmour, Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Dudley Stamp and Eric Hosking. (Eric Hosking)

It is not the size of the human population so much as our changing ways of life that have created the pressure on our wildlife. Despite a near static population, another 4.4 million ‘homes’ are to be built over the next 20 years, at least half of them in the countryside. Apparently, this is because many people nowadays prefer to live on their own. Our devotion to the car has produced a bonanza of road building so that it can be hard to find a place where the traffic cannot be heard, and the stars shine in a dark sky. It has produced an American-style, road-centred landscape that was only starting to appear in the 1960s: flyovers, filling stations, shopping malls and multistorey car parks. Although roads are thin, they flatten a lot of wildlife sites. A clover-leaf motorway junction was built smack in the middle of Hook Common SSSI in Hampshire. Another motorway cut Aston Rowant National Nature Reserve in half (though zealous geologists promptly designated the road cutting). You get a wonderful view of bisected Kentish SSSIs from the M2.

Even so, if the rest of the countryside was still rich in wildlife, we could lose some of it to further our material convenience without losing any species. However, agricultural improvements, well under way by the 1960s, have transformed the old prewar mixed farms, with their acres of permanent pasture and miles of hedges, into prosperous modern arable units, or rye-grass-based milk factories. The reasons, which might seem inadequate now, made sense then. As a wise giant in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had observed, ‘whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of politicians put together’. We vastly exceeded that modest goal, but, essentially, the higher the unit production, the lower the value for wildlife. By the 1990s we had achieved what would once have seemed impossible: wheat fields with nothing left over for the wild birds to eat, or fields of grass with scarcely a single wild flower. Another crop that was starting to take over much of the poorer land in the 1960s was Sitka spruce. Forestry was once considered by many to be a friend to nature conservation. Unfortunately the industry went the same way as farming – trees were treated purely as a crop, like wheat – and so it lost the favourable reputation it is now struggling hard to regain. The nation could have fed itself without destroying important wildlife habitats, and the heavily subsidised home-grown trees scarcely dented Britain’s import bill for timber. The destruction of our wild places, it seems now, was unnecessary. If it had a single cause it was an airtight Ministry of Agriculture, the client ministry of the big farming unions and the agro-chemicals industry, but no one else. When the Ministry was finally put to sleep in the government reorganisation of June 2001, no one, least of all the farmers, had a good word to say for it. The officials of MAFF, it is said, were the most blinkered and obstinate in the entire civil service (ask anyone in a conservation agency – or for that matter, on a farm). They made a mess of everything, from BSE to ESAs. The chaos that engulfed the farming industry in the 1990s was the endgame of decades of preventable idiocy.

The New Naturalist Board in 2001. From left to right: Richard West, David Streeter, Derek Ratcliffe and Sarah Corbet. Max Walters is absent from the picture. (Debra Sellman)

A high-density human population makes every acre precious. As Dudley Stamp noted, ‘nature conservation must work out its own salvation in cramped conditions’. Good wildlife habitat, such as chalk grassland and heath, has been reduced to scraps within a predominantly arable or urban environment. Many of our nature reserves seem ridiculously small to visitors from large, continental countries like the United States. Yet the same visitors also marvel at how attractive much of our countryside still is, despite all the pressures upon it. The island scale of the British landscape means that small is often beautiful. Britain has an amazingly complex geology, producing variations in landforms and building stone within just a few miles. A traveller from London to Brighton passes over at least seven different landscapes on gravel, clay, greensand and chalk, past downs, heaths, woods and secluded lakes. The lowland agricultural landscape is a patchwork, and small nature reserves may be big enough to enclose some of the best examples of natural habitats. Even so, in the long run they may still be too small. Even quite large nature reserves cannot do much for wide-ranging, low-density species such as wildcats or golden eagles. Small reserves tend to lose more species than large ones. A famous example is the inability of Woodwalton Fen, a small, brick-shaped nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, to sustain a population of the large copper butterfly. The butterfly survived through the 1930s and 1940s, when the weather was kinder, but the reserve was just not big enough when the going got tough later on. Because they are small, British nature reserves tend to be highly planned, with various zones and prescriptions designed in effect to squeeze the maximum of wildlife out of the minimum of space. Like farms, every acre has to count, which is why there are few places where wildlife is simply left to look after itself. A special site (a steep ravine) had to be found to study the natural development of woodland in Britain. So ingrained is the concept of management that in Britain we do not seem very interested in how the natural world actually works.

This would seem odd in a big, wild country such as Canada or Brazil, but, as we ecologists never tire of pointing out, every inch of Britain is used. Most of the land has a history. Most of it is privately owned, and managed to provide income. British wildlife has long been used to living with the British, and exploiting such opportunities as we offer it. Presumably any species unable to make that crucial accommodation, such as the wolf perhaps, or Cerambyx cerdo, a huge beetle of giant trees in virgin forests, died out. But it is quite wrong to assert that because he has planted a few trees and hedges, and farms most of it, that the landscape is therefore man-made. This is a sinister reasoning, because if man has created a landscape there is an implication that he is entitled to do with it as he likes, and, if necessary, destroy it. In fact, many of our wilder places are almost unfathomably ancient, and were never planned or created. Most of our woods and commons, and even some hedges, evolved naturally in ways that are still mysterious. Whoever coined the term ‘natural history’ must have realised this instinctively. In Britain, nature does indeed have a history that runs parallel with that of humankind, often in harmony with it (man and nature in harmony is the subject of much of British art). Our relationship with the natural world has a history of its own (see, for example, Keith Thomas’ masterpiece, Man and the Natural World). Nature conservation is only the most recent phase in a long-running love affair.

Britain’s oldest farmed habitats can in fact be more ancient than natural landforms. For example, the fields of West Penwith, in Cornwall, with their strange polygonal patterns, are much older than the shingles at Dungeness or the wet levels at Pevensey, which were still under the sea when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066. A few woods have been managed in much the same way for as long as historic records permit us to see (and to carry on managing them in exactly the same way is absolutely the right thing to do: indeed, it is almost a duty to history). Past land uses were not necessarily ideal for wildlife, but they tended to leave plenty of opportunities. Butterflies could lay their eggs in sunny glades created by woodmen, before the canopy closed over again. Meadows were often full of wild flowers because farmers lacked the means to drain them dry or improve the soil (flower fields also made better hay). The highly regulated management of medieval commons could almost have been invented by a latter-day nature reserve manager. Modern conservationists are to some extent stepping into the vacated shoes of farm labourers, shepherds, woodmen and peasants, who would not have been able to read a conservation manual but knew more about conservation in practice than most of us. The challenge today is to obtain similar results by different means. Recent advances include the creative use of bulldozers, JCB diggers and suction dredgers.

Some millennial stocktaking

About 30 years ago, when I was just setting out into the nature conservation world, we used to be slightly apologetic about British wildlife. Almost anything we had, other European countries had better, we thought. Britain has few endemic species worth mentioning, apart from Primula scotica (the Scottish primrose) and the good old red grouse (which, ornithologists insisted, was the same species as the bigger, better-looking continental willow grouse), nor much of world importance, apart from the grey seal (which we were then culling by the hundred) and maybe the gannet. Since then, Britain’s stock has risen considerably. We have places such as the New Forest, St Kilda and the Cairngorms, which are important after all, and more old trees than anywhere north of the Alps. Our marine life, estuaries and Atlantic oak woods are pretty special, and Britain is right at the top of the European liverwort league. I was slightly staggered to hear we have 40 per cent of Europe’s wrens. If Britain sank beneath the waves, quite a lot of species would be sorry.

Britain’s wildlife is important in another way. Natural history is very popular – we have 4,000 RSPB members for every species of breeding bird – and we are very good at it. (Who wrote The Origin of Species? Who lived at Selborne?) Britain probably has the best documented wildlife in the world – all right, we might tie with the Dutch and the Japanese. Our 60-odd butterflies are nothing on the world stage, but the expertise acquired in studying them has been exported worldwide. British bittern experts are in demand internationally, though we have only a handful of bitterns. We might not be much good at protecting wildlife, but we certainly know a lot about it. How well, in fact, are our wild animals and plants faring at the start of the new millennium?

There are some grounds for optimism. The loss of wild habitats with which we are sadly so familiar can now be seen in a historical context – as a feature of the domination of intensive agriculture (including forestry) between 1940 and 1990. The statistics of habitat loss put together by the NCC in 1980 have been much repeated, and certainly paint a grim picture. I will not march through them all again, since statistics tend to have a numbing effect on our jaded twenty-first century minds, and they are meaningless without context. For example, what does the loss of 95 per cent of ‘neutral grassland’ mean? It does not tell us whether all the lost ground was of importance for wildlife, nor whether what remains is of the same value as it was. It does, however, imply that something pretty far-reaching has happened to the landscape, and that perhaps only one unimproved meadow in 20 has survived. Meadows are the biggest losers of the habitat loss stakes, but we have lost almost as much wet peatland and ‘acid grassland’, mainly on former commons and village greens, and about half the chalk downs and natural woods that existed before 1939.

The red grouse, Britain’s most celebrated endemic animal, adapted for life on heather moors. (Derek Ratcliffe)

The official nature conservation agencies publish annual estimates of habitat loss and damage in their annual reports. The loss is ongoing, and although it has fallen since the peak in the agricultural high noon of the 1970s, there is now less habitat to damage. The problem with the figures is that, however they are defined, damage assessment is relative. Some types of ecological damage, such as eutrophication, need a trained eye, while others, such as surface disturbance, may look like damage, but may be harmless or even beneficial. Moreover, the agencies have a bad habit of changing their method of calculation from year to year, and since devolution it has become maddeningly difficult to compare what is happening in England with Scotland or Wales or vice versa. All the same, the losses indicate that statutory protection of wild habitats has not been as effective as many had hoped.

The decline of lowland heath in six parts of England over two centuries. (From Nature Conservation in Great Britain, NCC 1984)

The concensus at the turn of the millennium is that loss and damage has slowed considerably and for some habitats may have halted. SSSIs have acquired a greater land value because of the grants they now attract, and SSSI protection is also more effective than formerly. Also more of them are owned or managed by conservation bodies or benign private owners. For at least one well-documented habitat, hedges, removal is now offset in terms of length by newly planted or repaired hedges (quality is not assessed). Hedgerow removal peaked between 1955 and 1965, when many of the open barley prairies of eastern England were created. The process went on in lower gear, with about 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) of hedges removed per year, mainly by arable farmers, but also for urban development, roadworks and reservoirs. The Government’s Countryside Survey found virtually no overall decline in hedges between 1990 and 1998, except in neglected ‘remnant hedges’: about 10,000 kilometres (2 per cent) of hedges were removed, and a similar amount planted. But the survey found evidence for some loss of plant diversity, especially tall grasses and ‘herbs’. The reason why hedges have stabilised is because government no longer pays the farmer to pull them up, but pays him to plant them. Stewardship and other agri-environmental schemes are the main reason why hedges are still planted.

We have lost a lot of wildlife habitat, but conservation bodies saved many of the best places, and the story is by no means all doom and gloom. Today’s problem, which I will turn to in the last chapter especially, is the reduction in habitat quality and diversity, which is all the more insidious because it is hard to measure precisely. When we turn to species, the overall picture is the same. Many species – possibly most species – have declined over the past half-century, but relatively few have become nationally extinct. Some once believed extinct have since reappeared, or have been reintroduced in biodiversity schemes. The best-known victim of the past half-century, the large blue butterfly, has been reintroduced from Swedish stock, which closely resembles the lost British race. Thanks to thorough research and ground preparation by Jeremy Thomas and David Simcox, the project has been a resounding success, and several introduction sites are now open to the public. But there is a very large disparity between the small number of recorded extinctions and the much larger number that seem to be approaching extinction. For example, the JNCC considers that about 20 native wild flowers are extinct (though my own tally makes it nearer ten), but some 200 face extinction in the short or medium term. Similarly, some 29 lichens are considered extinct, but 148 are ‘endangered’ or ‘vulnerable’. The implication is that conservationists are good at saving species at the last ditch, but bad at preventing them from getting that far.

The status of plants and fungi in Britain (based on details from the JNCC’s website)

Invertebrates are often ‘finely tuned’ to their environment and are more vulnerable to change than birds or many wild plants. Their fortunes have varied from group to group. Ladybirds and dragonflies are not doing too badly – ladybirds like gardens, dragonflies like flooded gravel pits – but things are currently looking grim for wood ants, and some bumblebees and butterflies. In a recent review I learned that some 200 species of flies (Diptera) are considered endangered and another 200 or so vulnerable (Stubbs 2001). Granted that flies are mysterious things with rather limited appeal, one wonders what the implications of 400 nose-diving flies could be. If 400 subtle, specialised ways of living are under threat, the environment must be quietly losing variety, losing tiny facets of meaning, like a little-read but irreplaceable book being nibbled away bit by bit by bookworms. Interestingly the author of this review blamed some of the losses on conservationists – ‘inappropriate decisions by amenity and conservation organisations’ – as much as farmers and developers. Tidying up is bad for flies.

Not all species are fated to decline. In a detailed assessment of Britain’s breeding birds by Chris Mead (Mead 2000), the accounts are surprisingly well balanced: some 118 species are doing well and 86 are doing badly. However, the fortunes of different species fluctuate, reflecting the lack of stability in the modern countryside. Some once rare birds, such as Dartford warbler, red kite and hobby, are among those that Mead awards a smiling face, meaning that they are doing well – stupendously well in the case of the kite. Among other smiling faces are gulls, geese, many water birds and seabirds and most raptors. Several species have colonised Britain naturally, notably little egret, Cetti’s warbler and Mediterranean gull, and others, such as spoonbill and black woodpecker, may be on the brink of doing so. The commonest bird in 2000 was the wren, which has benefited from the recent run of mild winters and thrives in suburban gardens. Conservation schemes have probably saved corncrake, cirl bunting, stone curlew, and perhaps woodlark, for now. Perhaps the best news of all is the recovery of the peregrine falcon from a dangerous low in 1963, following the ban on organochlorine pesticides, though it still faces persecution in parts of Britain. We are now quite an important world stronghold for peregrines.

About 14 per cent of our moss and liverwort flora is considered vulnerable, endangered or extinct. This is JNCC’s projection of their respective ‘threat status’. (JNCC)

The losers – Mead’s unhappy faces – include familiar farmland birds such as skylark, song thrush, linnet, grey partridge, lapwing and snipe. Even starling and house sparrow have declined markedly. The problem they all face is lack of food on today’s intensively managed, autumn-sown cereal fields. The red-backed shrike has ceased to breed, and the red light is showing for black grouse and capercaillie, which are finding life difficult in the overgrazed moors and upland woods (and no good just putting up deer fences: the capercaillie crashes straight into them). Interestingly, small birds are faring worse, on balance, than big ones. A birder of the 1960s would be shocked at what has happened to lapwings or golden plovers, but pleased and probably surprised at how well many comparatively rare species have adapted to a changing environment. Stranger things lie just ahead. Try imagining green parakeets stealing the food you left out for the disappearing starlings.

Like birds, some of the smaller mammals have declined more than the big ones. Some carnivores, such as polecat and pine marten, are more widespread today than they were in 1966. The grey seal is much more numerous, thanks entirely to the cessation of regular culling. Deer are also more numerous, though this is a mixed blessing. Though increasing, the red deer is threatened genetically by hybridisation with the increasing, introduced sika deer, and may soon be lost as a purebred species. Bats, as a class, have declined. The best counted species, the greater horseshoe bat, is believed to have declined by 90 per cent during the twentieth century. The present population is estimated to be only 4,000 adult individuals. Only 12 colonies produce over ten young per year (Harris 1993). Rabbits have made a slow recovery from myxomatosis, and are back to about 40 per cent of their original abundance, but occur more patchily than before. The otter has staged a slow recovery, aided by reintroductions, but may take another century to recover its former range across eastern Britain. The real losers are red squirrel and water vole, both victims of introduced mammals. Dormouse and harvest mouse are also declining, apparently because of changes in woodland and agricultural land that reduce food availability. Our rare ‘herpetiles’ (i.e. reptiles and amphibians), sand lizard, smooth snake and natterjack toad, have benefited from site-based conservation and a zealous British Herpetological Society. Most of our freshwater fish seem fairly resilient, but the burbot has been lost and our two migratory shads reduced to rarity status because of pollution and tidal barrages. The char, which likes clear, cold water, has disappeared from some former sites. The powan faces an uncertain future in Loch Lomond following the accidental introduction of a competitor, the ruffe, which eats its eggs. Its relative, the pollan of Lough Neagh, is now threatened by carp, casually introduced nearby to please a few anglers. In the sea, we, with the help of our European friends, have overfished herring, cod and 22 other species, and almost wiped out the skate.

We should not, however, judge the success of nature conservation measures solely by changes in the numbers of well-known animals. Birds are important, because everyone likes them, and because losses and gains among such well-recorded species are important clues to what is happening to their environment. In nature conservation, every bird is a miner’s canary. But birds are almost too popular. In the 1960s, many field naturalists specialised in relatively obscure orders, pond and shore life, and difficult insects, such as beetles or bugs. Today, an oft-heard complaint is that taxonomists are an ageing and diminishing band, and that the few professional ones are nowadays tied up in administrative tasks. The number of people who can identify protozoa, or diatoms, or worms is probably fewer now than a century ago. As a result, we have no idea what is happening to them. All too often, biodiversity has been lost from ignorance, even on nature reserves. Britain’s nature reserves are run by people who would know a hawk from a handsaw at a thousand paces, but to whom invertebrates are just wriggly things that live in bushes.

Discovering where the wildlife is

In the 1960s, the study of British natural history was in a reasonably healthy state, better in some respects than it is today. Entomology and microscopy were less popular than in their late Victorian heyday, but with the advent of cheap, lightweight binoculars, birdwatching was growing in popularity, and ecology was being taught at schools and universities. Serious naturalists were making connections between a species and its environment, which led, by extension, to conserving and managing natural habitats. Naturalists were well catered for by a wide range of books in print, not least by 40-odd volumes in the New Naturalist library. The now universal field guide had made an appearance, but there were also handbooks on beetles, spiders, bugs, grasshoppers and even centipedes and rotifers, at affordable prices. Naturalists were not infrequently equipped with a hand lens, and specimen collecting was not yet considered a crime. Television natural history had begun, with programmes such as Look and Survival and, though still in black-and-white, had less manic, less dumbed-down presenters and they were more often about wildlife near at home.

Much less was known about wildlife habitats and sites. Although some places had been thoroughly explored by naturalists, with long typed lists of species bound in massive ledgers, there had been few systematic surveys of habitats or species. The first attempts to census and record the distribution of species had been made in the 1920s and 1930s for certain colonial birds, such as heron and rook. However, the most important mapping scheme to date had been for wild flowers. In 1962, the Botanical Society of the British Isles published the Atlas of British Flora, which mapped the nationwide distribution of some 1,400 native or naturalised wild flowers and ferns using dot-maps based on a grid of 10 x 10 kilometre squares. What made the atlas possible was the invention of punch-card computers. It was all done without sizeable grant-assistance or central organisation, although the production of such atlases was later facilitated by a Biological Records Centre, established at Monks Wood under Franklyn Perring and, later, John Heath.

Similar atlases have since been produced and published for other plants and animals, including lichens (from 1982), butterflies (1984), bryophytes (from 1991), dragonflies (1996), grasshoppers (1997) and molluscs (1999). Pre-eminent among them are the bird atlases, The Atlas of Breeding Birds (1976) and The Atlas of Wintering Birds (1986). The production of a second breeding bird atlas recording breeding birds in 1993 was all the more valuable because it enabled an analysis of change over a 20-year period, providing a temporal dimension to the maps. The same has been done for only one other group, the butterflies, which received perhaps the most lavish and detailed atlas of all, The Millennium Atlas, in 2001. Distribution maps of many British species are now published on the Internet, via the National Biodiversity Network.

Of course, the relatively crude scale of 10 x 10 kilometres does not record actual sites (and so can make a species appear more frequent than it really is). Maps of vascular plants and butterflies have been published on finer scales, and a 2 x 2 kilometre ‘tetrad’ is now standard for county-scale maps (and represents a stupendous recording effort by local naturalists). These reveal some of the detail of actual distribution, fine enough to show the course of rivers and different strata and soil types. Some rare species have been mapped by actual sites; visually, the problem of actual-scale maps is that the ‘dots’ all but disappear – fly-specks on a blank canvas. Some insects, including butterflies, seem to occupy tiny patches of land, measured in metres rather than kilometres.

The venerable Victorian tradition for recording the wild plants of a county has been given a new lease of life by computer-based mapping. Grid-mapping was used in most of the county floras published since 1960. Their compilation by dedicated amateur naturalists, sometimes working as a team, sometimes, especially in the more remote regions, representing a titanic solo effort, is one of the wonders of British natural history. The majority of English counties have a flora published during the past 20 years, generally mapped on a fine 2 x 2 kilometre scale. By tradition they also include an overview of the county’s natural vegetation, progress in conservation and potted biographies of local botanists. The recent Flora of Cornwall has an accompanying CD-Rom holding the entire database of records. Some, such as The Flora of Dorset, record mosses, lichens and even fungi, as well as vascular plants. Others, such as A Flora of Norfolk and A Flora of Cumbria use elaborate coloured maps to compare plant distribution with physical features, a valuable advance made possible by modern printing technology.

Ten-kilometre square records of Arnoseris minima (lamb’s succory) plot the gradual decline to extinction in about 1970 of this once widespread ‘weed’. Hollow circles are records pre-1930, solid circles 1930-1970. (BSBI/CHE)

There are a growing number of ‘county faunas’, mainly of birds or butterflies, but on occasion extending to other vertebrates and at least the more popular invertebrates. Surrey Wildlife Trust has published a wonderful series of local insect ‘faunas’, including hoverflies, dragonflies, ladybirds and grasshoppers. Local bird reports have reached a high state of elaboration. They are often produced annually, enabling the present year to be compared with the last and revealing population trends. By contrast, many fine wildlife journals have fallen by the wayside, victims of rising costs and falling subscriptions, such as the long-running Scottish Naturalist and Nature in Wales. Fortunately the magazine British Wildlife came in the nick of time to rescue serious naturalists, and includes valuable news reports on all the main groups of flora and fauna. There are welcome signs of a revival in regional or specialised publications, such as Natur Cymru, the new ‘review of wildlife in Wales’, and the lively magazine Atropos, which is devoted to moths, butterflies and dragonflies.

Tetrad records of Danish scurvy-grass from A Flora of Norfolk reveal the plant’s fidelity to a natural habitat, coastal salt marshes, and its mimic, the moist, salty verges of main roads. (Alec Bull & Gillian Becket)

A series of Red Data Books has been published on rare and vulnerable species, each one containing a great deal of ecological information on the eternally fascinating question of why some species are rare. The more recent ones include distribution maps. So far there are Red Data Books for Vascular Plants (first published 1977, 3rd edition 1999), Insects (1987), Birds (1990), Other Invertebrates (1991), Stoneworts (1992), Mammals (1993), Lichens (in part – 1996) and Mosses and Liverworts (2001). There is also Scarce Plants in Britain (1993), a kind of ‘Pink Data Book’ for wild flowers that live on the edge of conservation activity. Together they cover nearly 4,000 species, and undoubtedly many more would qualify, especially if we knew more about fungi, or soil and marine life. It is a daunting thought that perhaps a quarter of our wild plants and animals are rare enough to warrant conservation action – and, if our climate is truly changing, that this proportion will rise.

Site registers and monitoring schemes

To conserve species in a site-based system of nature conservation you need to link species to places. During the 1980s, the NCC embarked on a series of grand, nationwide habitat surveys, a kind of resource account of Britain’s wildlife. Cumulatively they produced a detailed documentation of Britain’s wild places as a factual basis for conservation decisions. The NCC drew on existing, scattered information, but the surveys also amounted to possibly the most ambitious programme of field survey there has ever been. First there were the habitat surveys: ancient woodland (‘the Ancient Woodland Inventories’), the coast (‘Sand-dune Survey’, ‘Estuaries Review’), peatlands (‘National Peatland Resource Inventory’) and rivers. Beyond the shoreline there was the Marine Conservation Review (q.v.), analogous to the Nature Conservation Review on land, which classifies maritime communities and documents the best sites. The Geological Conservation Review did the same for rock strata and special geological sites over 41 volumes. Then there were the species reviews. The Invertebrate Site Register documented the best sites of insects and other invertebrates. A Rare Plant Survey did the same for rare vascular plants. The long-running Seabirds at Sea project discovered where seabirds went and what they did once they were beyond the reach of land-based binoculars. These surveys formed a mass of raw material that could be tapped for SSSI notification, species protection, drawing up oil-spill contingency plans etc. The Geological and Marine Conservation Reviews were also major contributions to pure science. Most of this work remains unpublished, perhaps destined to remain forever in sagging, spiral-bound folders thronging the shelves of conservation offices or lodged somewhere in the labyrinth of cyberspace. It is almost unsung, this last, vast outpouring of British natural history. The NCC’s successor agencies continued some of it, and implemented smaller-scale surveys of their own, though generally for a particular, short-term purpose, but none of them had any interest in praising the work of their predecessor. All the same, it was a tremendous voyage of discovery with able captains. Those of its mariners that are not retired are now mostly in administrative conservation jobs, or working as consultants.

Recording rare flowers: Barbara Jones, a trained climber, surveying the Snowdon lily, Lloydia serotina, (below) on Snowdon.

There were also surveys that established a system of baseline monitoring to record how the natural world was changing. A basic ‘phase one’ survey that purported to map all Britain’s natural habitats started in the early 1980s, with the help of the county wildlife trusts. The NCC also started a National Countryside Monitoring Scheme, which compared present and past land use in selected parts of the countryside. A much finer tool for measuring change was handed to conservation workers with the publication, during the 1990s, of the five-volume British Plant Communities, compiled by John Rodwell of Lancaster University, the fruits of a 15-year project to classify all kinds of natural and semi-natural vegetation found in Britain. The vegetation of many SSSIs has been mapped using this National Vegetation Classification, thereby providing a baseline for monitoring change as well as for assessing how much of the different types of vegetation are on protected sites. The species that best lend themselves to detailed census work are birds and butterflies. Birds have long been monitored using the Common Bird Census (now the Breeding Bird Survey) organised by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), along with the regular counts of seabirds by the Seabird Group. The performance of rare birds is the responsibility of the Rare Breeding Birds Panel. For monitoring butterflies, a method was worked out in the 1970s by Ernest Pollard, which involved counting all the species seen along a regularly walked transect. The success of the scheme has meant that fluctuations in butterfly numbers can be recorded, as well as their distribution. Computer techniques have also made possible some novel ‘phenograms’ (see p. 28) combining numbers with dates of emergence. Further evidence of population changes in insects, especially moths, is provided by the ‘Rothamsted traps’ operated under standardised conditions across the country. There has also been a revival of phenology – timing the appearance of flowers or frog-spawn or migrant birds – in relation to climate change.

‘Abundance map’ of the kestrel from The New Atlas of Breeding Birds 1988-1991 showing relative numbers as well as distribution. (By permission, BTO)

From data to action

Surveys and data provision are meat and drink to conservation bodies. It is what they do best. But interesting and often valuable though they are, surveys and monitoring only tell you what is happening. They give a sense of the overall state of health of the patient, but are not in themselves a cure. In practice, looking after wildlife is not based on scientific rationalisation alone, but on negotiation and politics. It is rare that a conservation body has full control over a given situation, even on a freehold nature reserve. Decisions are often made in a cloud of ignorance, or in a spirit of compromise with more powerful interests. Indeed, conservation in practice is to a large extent to do with quarrelling. You make the best case you can, you cite your legal and moral rights, you appeal to the more important party’s better nature. Then, often with the mediation of a third party, you reach the best deal you can, with or without bitter words and recrimination.

‘Phenogram’ of the red admiral butterfly from The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies, plotting latitude at 100-kilometre intervals against months, forms a ghostly outline of Britain. (From Butterflies for the New Millennium survey organised by Butterfly Conservation and Biological Records Centre)

Yet ‘quarrel’ is a remarkably rare word in conservation literature. I think the first time this particular spade was called a spade was in Professor Smout’s book, Nature Contested, published in 2000. More often, like politicians, the parties prefer to sweep disagreements under the carpet, using euphemisms like ‘discussion’, ‘debate’ or even – a popular choice in the 1990s – ‘partnership’. Nature conservation is a quasi-political matter in which the arguing is done as far as possible behind closed doors, and the outcome reported to a supine press with a bland statement. Many conservation bodies have become so used to the self-censorship of uncomfortable facts that they seem to operate on a different plane of reality from the farmhouse or the estate office. Their publications reflect the power of image and presentation in the modern world. It is necessary for conservation bodies to appear slick, dynamic, successful and, above all, relevant. Where the facts of disappearing wildlife appear to contradict this image they can be distorted by the same black arts (‘let’s focus on the positive’) or used to justify an appeal for more money. Ignorance of natural history can be a distinct advantage in this world. Hence, if in the later chapters of this book, I may sometimes seem rather sceptical about the claims of the conservation industry, and its official agencies in particular, it is because I have seen something of this world from the inside. Conservation bodies rarely stoop to deliberate distortion, but their version of events can be coloured by the views of their ‘clients’ and partners, by the attitude of their political masters or by that of a mass-membership. You do not, for example, hear the RSPB talking much about cats, or the Wildlife Trusts about fox hunting. Nature conservation in a crowded island in which all land is property is bound to be difficult, even when everyone agrees that wildlife is a good thing. Conservation can be seen in different ways, depending on how you are affected by it: as a moral absolute, as a cumbersome, bureaucratic restriction, as an unjust imposition by ignorant outsiders, as a potential source of income. I think wildlife is a good thing. Indeed, in my own life I think it is probably the most important thing. I would like my country to preserve as much wildlife and countryside as possible, but without enmeshing rural life in petty restrictions. The standpoint of this book is a love of wildlife but not necessarily conservationists. In these pages you may therefore find a lot of ‘buts’. I hope it will not sound unduly negative. I feel it may be necessary. An account of nature conservation in Britain devoid of individual opinion would be a dull read, indeed not worth reading. I hope this book is worth reading.

PART I Dramatis Personae

2 The Official Conservation Agencies

The British government has always delegated its responsibilities for nature conservation to a semiautonomous agency. The governments of other European countries tend to keep theirs within agricultural departments or National Park bodies. The reason why Britain behaves differently probably lies in our early start and the influence of science in the 1940s (for a good account of this postwar science boom, see Sheail 1998). The founders of the Nature Conservancy, the first official conservation agency in Britain, saw it as a biological service, comparable with a research council or scientific institution, like the Soil Association. They hoped it would develop as a science-based body, using its own research programme to advise government on land-use policies affecting wildlife. As Professor Smout has pointed out, ‘the rule of the bureaucrat guided by the scientific expert has been highly prized in government for most of the twentieth century’ (Smout 2000). They were anxious that nature conservation should not be swallowed up in the departments for agriculture and forestry, where, as a newcomer, and so starting at the bottom of the civil service peck order, its influence would be stifled. Max Nicholson, who directed the Nature Conservancy between 1951 and 1965, had influence in high places and ensured that, as a semi-specialised body, it secured a semidetached status as a research council under the wing of Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of Council. As such, it could not be bossed about by predatory departments of state. There are advantages to ministers in such arrangements. Expertise is ‘on tap, not on top’, and if anything goes wrong it is the agency’s fault, not the minister’s. Dispensable Board chairmen can be sacked, but the minister need not resign. Much of the history of the Nature Conservancy and its successor bodies hovers around the tension between the zeal of semiautonomous agency officials and the brake of government (the appointed Councils of these bodies have tended to be part of the braking mechanism rather than the zeal). It is there between the lines of their annual reports and, now that the papers are at last available under the ridiculous 30-year-rule, you can read about the formative years of that thorny relationship in a fine, detailed book by John Sheail (1998). But here I need to skip over those, to many, golden, well-remembered early years with unseemly haste.

Max Nicholson, Director of the Nature Conservancy 1951-1965. (NCC)

The Nature Conservancy is said to have been the first official, science-based conservation body in the world, and the only one with a large research arm. Although money was always tight, the Nature Conservancy under Nicholson tended to box above its weight. It achieved a good deal, acquiring a nationwide network of National Nature Reserves and research stations, and gaining an international reputation for sound, science-based advice on the management of wild species and natural habitats. I begin the story where Dudley Stamp left off, in 1965, shortly after the Nature Conservancy lost its independence after becoming a mere committee within the newly formed Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). ‘One chapter is concluded,’ wrote Stamp, ‘but there is every sign of a new one opening auspiciously.’

If so, it did not stay auspicious for long. The 1960s should have been a good decade for the Nature Conservancy. The general public had become more ‘environmentally aware’ through events like the pesticides scare (Rachel Carson’s book about it, Silent Spring, became an international bestseller) and the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967. The threat to our wild places had been underlined by the construction of a nuclear power station at Dungeness (Plate 11) and a reservoir at Cow Green in Upper Teesdale (Plate 13). The Conservancy was closely involved in these issues, and its growing fame was exemplified by the traffic jams on Open Days at Monks Wood Field Station (not to mention visits on different days by Prince Charles and the Prime Minister). However, its status within NERC drew attention to the essential ambiguity of the Conservancy’s role: could a body be scientific, and therefore impartial, and yet advocate a partial view – that conserving nature is a good idea? The Conservancy itself dealt with this duality by dividing its administrative responsibilities under one subdirector (Bob Boote) and its research under another (Martin Holdgate). Unfortunately the Conservancy no longer had full control over its affairs. For example, its budget for nature reserves had to compete for funds with NERC’s broader research, including geophysics, oceanography and the Antarctic. Internal censorship prevented the Nature Conservancy from speaking out on pesticides and other pollutants. Tensions grew in the boardroom, where some members thought it was worth making sacrifices to preserve the link between conservation and fundamental science while others decided that nothing had been achieved by joining NERC, and that the Conservancy would be better off going it alone. The Conservancy’s new director, Duncan Poore, was of the latter view.

Unfortunately there was to be no return to the pre-1965 days: the choice lay between the frying pan of NERC and the fire of a government department. The Conservancy’s committee split, with an influential group voting to leave NERC. A way out of the impasse was offered by the Government’s Central Policy Review under Lord Rothschild – the famous ‘Think Tank’ – which advocated the separation of customer and contractor. As a ‘customer’ of the natural sciences, the logic was that the Nature Conservancy should become independent of NERC, but the same logic prevented it from carrying out in-house research. Rothschild proposed that only half of NERC’s budget should be paid by its parent Department of Education and Science, with the balance found by commissioning research from other government departments. Most of the Nature Conservancy’s own little budget would now come from the new Department of Environment, or, in Scotland, from the Scottish Development Department (SDD). Funds were also transferred from NERC to pay for contract research. By one of life’s little coincidences, the Education Secretary who helped to set up this new Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) was the same person who presided over its demise, 16 years later – Mrs Thatcher.

Rothschild’s report gave the Conservancy the excuse it needed to make public its wish to leave NERC. Government agreed that the Conservancy’s dual role had ‘caused stresses difficult to resolve within the present framework’ (Sheail 1998). Unfortunately the solution, as Government saw it, was to separate science from administration. The Nature Conservancy would become a quasi-autonomous council of the Department of Environment, but its scientific stations would remain behind in NERC. This divorce, representing the exact moment when field-based natural history began to turn into administrative nature conservation, became known as ‘The Split’. The Nature Conservancy Council, usually referred to as the NCC, was established by Act of Parliament in 1973. Its first chairman was a Whitehall mandarin, Sir David Serpell, lately Permanent Secretary at the DoE. He promised to run the new agency on ‘a loose rein’ (which fooled nobody). As a sop to anguished pleas that the NCC must retain some scientific capacity to function properly, it was allowed to keep a small in-house team of scientists under a ‘Chief Scientist’, a term coined by Rothschild. But their job would be limited to commissioning and keeping abreast of research, rather than doing it themselves. In the meantime, its erstwhile Research Branch was reconstituted within NERC as the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE – now renamed the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology).

The Nature Conservancy Council (NCC)

‘No one was entirely happy with the outcome of the “Split”’ (Sheail 1998). Some saw it as a further demotion that threatened the special relationship between science and land management so carefully fostered by the Nature Conservancy. However, that relationship was already falling apart. While the White Paper ‘Cmd 7122’ had talked up the potential of nature reserves as ‘outdoor laboratories’ and the importance of its advice to land managers, the hard truth was that by the 1970s only a handful of nature reserves were used for fundamental research, and farmers and foresters were not queuing up for the Conservancy’s advice (they had their own scientists). Moreover, the crisis in the countryside was growing and it was no longer a matter of experimenting over the best way to manage a wood or a heath but of saving such places from complete destruction. Inevitably this required a shift in emphasis away from scientific research towards site safeguard, which, unless you happen to manage the land yourself, is an administrative task. Most of the Conservancy’s research budget now went on cheap, low-key surveys that helped to identify or characterise the places that most deserved safeguarding. Consequently, the split between the NCC and its former science branch broadened into a chasm. ITE gradually ceased to be a significant part of the nature conservation world – to the deep regret of many of its staff, which included New Naturalist authors like Ian Newton, R.K. Murton and Max Hooper.

The 1970s were a bad decade for the natural environment. In Britain, Dutch elm disease and the removal of hedges created stark, arable landscapes, while in the uplands blanket afforestation transformed many square kilometres of open country into sepulchral timber crops of introduced spruce, pine and larch. Limestone pavements were smashed to bits to adorn suburban gardens and corporate offices. The Norfolk Broads, still crystal clear in the early 1950s, became clouded with silt. The heaths went up in flames during the drought years 1975 and 1976, and, apart from the mountain tops, there seemed to be hardly any wild land that agricultural grants could not convert into profitable farmland. Hence, the NCC was overstretched, using what small authority it had to oppose harmful developments, reach agreements and establish nature reserves. On occasion, it stepped back from events to appraise the situation. In 1977, for example, it published a ‘policy paper’, Nature Conservation and Agriculture, containing the NCC’s thoughts on how to reconcile increasing food production with the maintenance of ‘Britain’s rich heritage’ of wildlife. Essentially the message was that, while vast amounts of public money were helping farmers plough and drain the land, the incentives to preserve wildlife were negligible. You did not have to travel far to see the consequences. A second policy paper, on forestry, was shelved after reported disagreements on the NCC’s Council, which contained members with vested interests in forestry.

In 1977, the NCC at last published A Nature Conservation Review, edited by its Chief Scientist, Derek Ratcliffe, describing the range of wildlife and natural vegetation in Britain, and singling out the 735 best examples of coast-lands, woodlands, lowland grasslands and heaths, open waters, peatlands and upland habitats, all graded according to their international, national or second-string importance. The Review was, and remains, an astounding tour de force, combining a rationale for site selection with a kind of Domesday Book of Britain’s wild places (though, as Jon Tinker pointed out in New Scientist, it had taken eight times as long to produce as the original Domesday Book!). The original purpose of the Review had been to provide a reasoned ‘shopping list’ for nature reserve acquisition. Because of the obvious sensitivities involved – for by no means every landowner would have been delighted to find his property on the list – this aspect was played down, and the Review was presented to the public as a reference book of important biological sites. In commending it in these terms, the Ministers for Environment and for Education and Science were careful to avoid committing themselves to any particular action. The Review sparked no change in environmental policy, but it did form a necessary reference point for site protection. Without some means of assessing the relative importance of wildlife sites, the NCC would be blundering in the dark.

The second key NCC document was its long-term strategic review, published in 1984 and entitled Nature Conservation in Great Britain (‘NCGB’). It was in part an assessment of the successes and failures of the nature conservation movement, and in part a set of ground rules for the future. The failures outnumbered the successes by 21 pages to five, and any impression given by the glossy pictures of a healthy, vital natural environment was contradicted by the lowering bar graphs that showed ‘with stark clarity’ how far wildlife habitats had diminished during the past half-century – a loss of 40 per cent of lowland heaths, for example, and an incredible 95 per cent of ‘lowland neutral grasslands’. Behind the statistics lay a detailed analysis of habitat loss undertaken by Norman Moore – but, as it happened, ‘NCGB’ proved to be the only opportunity to publish any of it. Perhaps Council thought it might depress the minister. The real significance of the review lay not so much in the detail but in its heightened sense of conviction. For the first time the NCC explicitly recognised nature conservation as a cultural activity, and not merely as pure or applied science. ‘Simple enjoyment and inspiration from contact with nature’ was not a partisan activity: it concerned us all. It followed that we should conserve nature in the same way that we take care of other essentials like air and water. ‘Nature conservation has in the past sometimes conducted its business on too apologetic and timid a note’, declared the NCC, looking back at its own history. Timidity had too often meant surrender. ‘We need to play a hard but clean game for our side,’ said the NCC’s new chairman, William Wilkinson. So there were now ‘sides’, us against them. The strategy was heartily supported by most of the voluntary bodies, who rightly saw it as a challenge, heralding a significant change of policy, and expected NCC to honour its brave words to the letter. But in the freewheeling climate of the 1980s, having the courage of your convictions meant having to fight for them. The five years of corporate life left to the NCC were hard ones, and led straight to its destruction.

There were really two NCCs, separated by the watershed year 1981 in which the Wildlife and Countryside Act reached the statute book. The pre-1981 NCC was a fairly low-key organisation with a staff of about 500 dispersed thinly about Britain, struggling along on an annual budget of about £6 million (the NCC had scarcely any income or assets). It advised government on issues affecting wildlife, commented on local plans and developments and grant-aided worthy projects, but was rarely in the headlines. The man in the street had never heard of it, which is not to deny that the NCC achieved a great deal on very little.

Sir William Wilkinson, chairman of the NCC 1984-1991. (English Nature)

The post-Act NCC took a little while to get going, but it became another organisation entirely, more powerful, more centralised, and often in the headlines, especially in Scotland. By 1988, the NCC had 780 permanent staff with a sixfold budget increase to £39 million. An enforced move in 1984 from the old Nature Conservancy’s stately quarters at Belgrave Square to a modern office block in Peterborough gave the organisation a chance to centralise its dispersed branches – an England headquarters at Banbury, scientists at Huntingdon, geologists at Newbury, publicists and cartographers at Shrewsbury were all sucked into Peterborough. The organisation also became computerised and corporatised. Corporate planning was introduced in 1985, requiring staff to complete monthly time records, recording (in theory at least) every half-hour of activity. The Act made nature conservation much more expensive. By 1988, nearly a quarter of the NCC’s budget was spent on management agreements on SSSIs.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act distorted the NCC’s activities for nearly a decade, as its regional staff struggled to notify SSSIs and negotiate agreements over their safeguard. Land not notified as SSSI became known as ‘wider countryside’, and there was little enough time to devote to it (with the honourable exception of urban conservation, largely a one-man crusade by George Barker). Unfortunately, the wording of the Act forced the NCC to adopt a heavy handed approach on SSSIs, in which an owner or tenant would be presented with a formidable list of ‘Potentially Damaging Operations’. Permissions to carry on farming in ways that did not damage the site’s special interest were called ‘consents’. This sort of language understandably put people’s backs up, as did the fact that there was no appeals system and the conviction that notification would lower the land value. Suspicion and potential hostility could be mollified by the farm-to-farm visits of the NCC’s regional staff, who were generally speaking more charming and persuasive than the documents they had to deliver. To the extent that the Act was a success it was theirs, not that of the politicians who created a botched system, nor the civil servants and lawyers who insisted on its rigid application. The local NCC staff rapidly learnt that the only way to make the Act work was by goodwill – hardline interpretations of the law and threats of prosecution simply alienated people, and got nowhere.

In some areas, especially in island communities, SSSIs were seen as an alien imposition. In Islay, teeming with wildlife, a severe dose of SSSIs looked like a punishment for farming in harmony with nature. Things came to a head in the small matter of finding a source of peat for an Islay distillery as a substitute for Duich Moss, one of the best raised bogs in the Hebrides. A team of environmentalists led by David Bellamy, intending to plead the cause of peatland conservation, was howled down by angry islanders normally renowned for their hospitality and gentleness of manners. It was not that the community was against nature conservation, only that they did not enjoy being told what to do by a Peterborough-based quango (a place not particularly noted for its teeming wildlife).

Notifying SSSIs was a much more complicated business than anyone had foreseen. To begin with staff had to find out who owned the land, and even that could be a hornet’s nest with, in Morton Boyd’s words, ‘many untested claims to holdings, grazings and sporting rights’ (Boyd 1999). SSSIs were an absolute, bureaucratic system imposed on a system of tenure that was often the opposite: communal, fluid, and based on non-Westminster concepts of custom, neighbourliness and unwritten rules. Outsiders blundering into these matters could unwittingly set neighbour against neighbour. They could also make themselves very unpopular. Moreover some SSSIs were already under dedicated schemes for forestry or peat extraction, or an agricultural grant scheme. In the Outer Hebrides an EU-fund-ed Integrated Development Scheme was in progress, while in Orkney an Agriculture Department-funded scheme was encouraging farmers to reclaim moorland. The NCC often found itself outnumbered. When, in 1981, it opposed the extension of ski development into the environmentally sensitive Lurchers Gully in the Cairngorms (see Chapter 10), the NCC found itself ranged against the Highlands and Islands Development Board, Highland Regional Council, and sports and tourism lobbies, as well as local entrepreneurs. It won that particular battle but, in the Highlands and Islands at least, the NCC eventually lost the war.

J. Morton Boyd, Scottish director of the NCC, at Creag Meagaidh, which he helped save from afforestation. (Des Thompson)