Man's inhumanity to otters

Roger Lovegrove
SILENT FIELDS
The long decline of a nation's wildlife
3520pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $50).
978 0 19 852071 9

In Silent Fields, Roger Lovegrove charts “the history of Man’s deliberate killing of terrestrial wildlife – specifically native birds and mammals – from about 450 years ago to the present”. Henry VIII’s Vermin Acts begin the analysis. Although Lovegrove acknowledges that our interactions with English, Scots and Welsh fauna can be traced back to the post-glacial millennia, it was this Tudor legislation that created a basis for the organized slaughter of competitor species until at least the Second World War. Lovegrove quotes a maximum combined population for England, Wales and Scotland of 3,310,000 people in 1525, less than half that of London in 2001. Sixteen years after Henry VIII was crowned, London was estimated to have 50,000 residents. Most people then were rural, a scene far removed from that of today when – for the first time – more than half the world’s population is urban. In fact, by 2001 only 20 per cent of people in England lived in the “country”. Such statistics are critical to unravelling the evolving social fabric that lies behind Lovegrove’s analysis. Modern concepts of wildlife and “wildlife watching” were way off on the horizon. People lived with and surrounded by nature.

Doctrine also played a crucial role. Before Darwin, no challenge existed to the Creation myth, and people believed absolutely in the biblical concept of human dominion “over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air and over every living thing”. Lovegrove writes that animals “were here to be employed as beasts of toil, as food, for sport . . . or whatever other requirement”. Concern for animal rights or welfare, such as over vivisection, was negligible. Cruelty was rampant, as was poverty: provision for poor relief was yet to arrive, and rural people, especially in famine years, had a high dependency on what Richard Mabey called Food for Free in 1972. Berries, eggs, wild meat, fungi and fruit were lifesavers. Finding such food meant country people had an intimate knowledge of their home ground, of seasons, fauna and flora, and also the wherewithal to resist competitors that threatened crops and livestock. This was largely unwritten knowledge, but it represented a time when an instinct for nature rivalled that now confined to indigenous communities in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific.

Underlining Lovegrove’s book is a patient study of parish records. (Scotland is excluded from the analysis, and has a separate chapter devoted to killing there, including a section on the “wanton slaughter by English ‘sportsmen’ in the nineteenth century”.) Writing in 1768, Robert Smith described stoats as “prone to wanton killing”, and in the Cornish coastal parish of Morwenstow, Thomas Trumble specialized in killing these remarkable little mammals, taking thirty-four in 1694. Amazingly, gamekeepers on the Elveden Estate in Suffolk accounted for 8,883 in the decade beginning 1920. Numbers like these pepper Silent Fields and are a constant source of surprise. From Elspeth Veale’s seminal 1966 study, The English Fur Trade, emerges parallel evidence of excess killing in pursuit of regal finery. Henry VIII passed a final sumptuary Act in 1532 – the same year as his vermin law – regulating a hierarchy of who could wear which fur. Not that he stinted on his own account, using 350 (albeit imported) sable skins to line a single satin gown in 1530. Even this pales by comparison with his forebear Henry IV, whose “splendid robe-of-nine garments was made from 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermines”.

Lovegrove laments that the data he used for Silent Fields, derived from churchwardens’ accounts now held in municipal and county archives across the country, are by no means complete. Many have been destroyed, and even his hard work only scratches the surface of 10,819 potential parishes in England (he trawled through 1,429 of them). His study celebrates localness; the painstaking lists of vermin killed – documented by generations of churchwardens – bring to life an aspect of how people experienced wildlife at a time when parishes lay at the heart of everyone’s lives, when the parochial was reality and a basis for understanding biodiversity.

The core of the book is individual species accounts, dealing first with twenty-one birds; most are either raptors or crows, though some surprises, like kingfisher and dipper, appear. For mammals, there are eleven, and they are a roll call of the stars of children’s popular literature: hedgehog, mole, polecat, pine marten, fox, rat, wild cat, badger, weasel, stoat and otter. Many readers will struggle to avoid flashes of Nick Butterworth’s illustrations for his Percy the Park Keeper series. At first sight, curiously, Butterworth’s miscreant bunnies are missing from the list, but this underscores a constant theme of Lovegrove’s work. Perceptions and attitudes change over time. Rabbits have become pests comparatively recently, swapping places with species like wild cat and pine marten – current red-list causes célèbres. Introduced to Britain by the Normans, knowledge of rabbits’ reproductive capacities meant that their warrens were first confined to offshore islands (another demonstration of changing times, given the massive efforts now dedicated to eradicating “aliens” like cats, hedgehogs and rats from many of those same islands). As land-based warrens were established, often by monastic communities, rabbits dispersed and colonized with predictable success. They were soon an important source of food (and income) to the poor; so naturally a dim view was taken of their native predators, such as foxes and buzzards. Rabbits were an asset worth protecting too. David Dimbleby’s opening BBC flagship episode for How We Built Britain visited the robust and well-fortified Thetford Warrener’s Lodge. They meant significant money for landowners.

All the species accounts are fascinating. Among the mammals, an obvious example is the otter – beloved by wildlife cameramen, celebrated by Henry Williamson as Tarka. Lovegrove notes that otters are totemic of UK conservation success, so much so that the original Otter Trust, established by Philip Wayre in 1971, considers its mission accomplished and has not released captive-bred otters since 1999. Full legal protection for otters was only secured in England and Wales in 1978, and four years later in Scotland. This is again a far cry from the Tudor period, when kings had “Otter Masters”, and otter-hounds were bred for the chase. Otters then competed for freshwater fish on natural lakes and rivers, and plundered man-made ponds with glee. Adding to otter woe was their piscivorous diet which meant that the Catholic community conveniently considered their flesh fishy enough to be valid Friday fare.

Lovegrove’s introduction also considers the contemporary and changing value of money. All the species accounts chart sums paid, and the price per otter head ranged from 2d, specified in the 1566 Act, to the fairly high price of 7s 6d offered by the Prestbury vestry in 1731. Daniel Defoe’s 1704 definition of a “poor man” in Kent as earning “between seven and ten shillings a week” is cited – for Lovegrove “a figure that still applied in most areas, certainly in the southern counties, for the remainder of that century”. Hunting vermin was potentially very profitable. At Prestbury, wily cross-border sneaks were discouraged by having to “declare before a lawful magistrate that the said otter was taken and killed within the parish precincts”. Such strictures notwithstanding, there was considerable room for creative accounting.

Among the birds, two charismatic raptors, sea eagle and red kite – both the focus of successful reintroductions – have chapters dedicated to them. Lovegrove opens his kite account with some lines from John Clare – the poet deploys an early name, “paddock”, “riding in the sky, above the oaks, in easy sail, on still wings and forked tail”. Kite flight is always spectacular, and Mark Cocker’s account in Birds Britannica (reviewed in the TLS, December 9, 2005) captures its mastery perfectly with the word “languid”. Cocker also lists other former names, “glede” or “glead” (from the Saxon for “glide”), and notes that kites were once so common as to enter local place names, such as Gleadthorpe in Northamptonshire. Clare’s “paddock”, a variant of other colloquial names, “puttock” and “puddock”, was also used for buzzard, the origins of which Cocker says are obscure.

These days it is commonplace to see red kites on the wing close to the reintroduction sites over, for instance, the M4. Such new-generation kites wheel lazily over “John Clare country”. Clare “bemoaned its loss at the hand of Man in 1830”, and by the time he was buried in his beloved Helpston parish in 1864, kite numbers were in free fall. Only in 1903, when members of the British Ornithologists’ Club formed a Kite Committee, did the climb from a low of five pairs towards today’s population of more than a1,000 begin. If this success continues, some believe the red kite could again be our most common raptor and reach in excess of 50,000 birds.

Lovegrove quotes Clare a number of times. In recent years, the resuscitation of the poet has gathered momentum with new selections of his work – including The Wood Is Sweet (2005), produced by David Powell, with fine linocuts by Carry Akroyd – Iain Sinclair’s wonderful Edge of the Orison (reviewed in the TLS, October 7, 2005) and Jonathan Bate’s biography (reviewed in the TLS, November 7, 2003). As well as the red kite (twice – both in celebration, and acknowledging their skills at taking chicks, ducklings and goslings), Silent Fields has Clare lines on the hedgehog and the mole. But far more importantly, he is also quoted railing against the changing landscape: “Inclosure thou’rt a curse upon the land, / And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence planned”. Helpston was enclosed in 1820, and Clare’s Gloucestershire contemporary James Knapp wrote at the time, of disappearing wildlife: “Some of our birds are annually diminishing – population, plough, enclosure, clearance, drainage”. Although Clare was actually briefly employed to plant the hawthorn hedges we so often celebrate, it seems that he and others were recognizing that a semi-natural mosaic of wildlands and agriculture was to be transformed irretrievably. And all this before the modern conservation movement had begun; more than a century before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Change flows through Lovegrove’s work like a tide; and his own career, as a prime mover in Welsh conservation – notably as Welsh regional director for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – spans a period of remarkable change for many of these species. To quibble over his thoroughness seems ridiculous, but there is an irony in his subtitle “The long decline of a nation’s wildlife” given that many of his vermin species are now starting to thrive in what are otherwise days of extreme biodiversity loss. Some, like badgers, may once again become the target of centrally sanctioned control. Lovegrove tackles some of this in his final chapters, noting that the raven, for example, is recovering apace. But other species, birds that were never vermin, and that were so abundant over the early period of this analysis – like the lapwing, skylark and common partridge – are in decline which not even Clare could have foreseen. Lovegrove has a final section in which he reviews a whole series of current issues, including the rolling red-grouse-moor-versus-hen-harrier conservation debate, and the Hunting with Dogs Act.

The most moving point, however, lies at the beginning of Silent Fields, before the story really unfolds. Lovegrove’s dedication is longer than many, and he remembers a friend, Fred Farrell, “with whom I spent the joyous years of youth roaming the hills, marshes, fields and woods of Cumberland”. If Roger Lovegrove’s lessons are to be learned, then we need to see the story spun as emblematic of a far wider crisis. We need to return nature to the heart of our culture, to the centre of communities. This can only really happen if the rich mosaic of nature that Cumbria represented a working life ago is secured for all of us – in all our backyards, our parishes.
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John Fanshawe lives in north Cornwall, and works for the conservation charity BirdLife International.