http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=338101
Unnatural selection
Conservationists have been reintroducing choughs to the wild in Cornwall and
ospreys to Rutland Water. But, asks Peter Marren, are these interventions
robbing the natural world of its wildness?
30 September 2002
Last year, Mother Nature played a wonderful joke on conservationists. For some
time, Paradise Park, at Hayle, Cornwall, had been rearing choughs for release
into the wild. The chough which is normally pronounced "chuff", though the
birds themselves say "chow" has been absent from Cornwall for 50 years. This is
widely regarded as a bad thing, since the glossy-black, red-billed and legged
chough is a symbol of Cornish identity. They are birds of Cornish legend, and
several of them sit on the county's coat of arms. The loss of Cornish choughs is
akin to ravens deserting the Tower of London, or the bald eagle leaving America.
Not only the ornithological world is concerned. The Paradise Park reintroduction
was to have been spearheaded by Oggie and Embla, hand-reared choughs who do
flying shows for the visitors. But foot-and-mouth restrictions delayed their
release, and in the meantime would you believe it? a party of wild choughs
turned up out of the blue, and nested. Choughs one, conservationists nil.
Understandably, the chough chaps are said to be a bit "dischuffed". To add
insult to injury, the interlopers chose a stretch of cliff regarded as
"unsuitable" for nesting.
Poor old Oggie and Embla! Denied their destiny as building blocks of
biodiversity, they will presumably have to go on performing for the tourists.
But Mother Nature did not leave it at that. She followed up the chough jest with
an even more outrageous trick, this time at the expense of osprey enthusiasts.
Ospreys are, of course, everybody's favourite raptor, with their exciting
fishing exploits and agreeable habit of nesting in full view of a hide. But
while Scotland now has around 100 osprey nests to choose from, England has had
none at all since 1850, when we shot the last one. Encouraged by the spectacular
success that rewarded the project to reintroduce the similarly defunct red kite
to England, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and others
began an intensive rearing programme to release cage-reared ospreys at Rutland
Water in the Midlands. As they are programmed by instinct to do, these ospreys
return to Rutland after their migratory journeys to Spain and North Africa, and
last year a pair duly nested and raised a chick on the rainbow trout that the
reservoir was stocked with. This year they tried again, but the youngsters all
perished in the cold and wet of early June.
Meanwhile, Mother Nature had her own plans. While everyone was fussing over the
Rutland ospreys, at so many thousand pounds per chick, a Scottish pair casually
moved south of the border and set up their own nest at Bassenthwaite in the Lake
District. In full view of the public too. And without any of the panoply of
plans, artificial feeding, artificial nests and platforms, miniature
transmitters and custom-built centres. But if there is a lesson here that
animals tend to reintroduce themselves when the conditions are right it is
unlikely to be heeded. Too much credit has been invested in such projects to
stop now. European beavers are about to be released in Argyll. Golden eagles are
being removed from Scottish eyries for release into Northern Ireland. Wild
flowers are being sown widely as a kind of amenity crop (though many of them are
not wild at all, but fodder crops and garden cultivars). The Biodiversity Action
Plan envisages introductions as the key to survival of scores of species, large
and small.
Is there anything wrong with any of this? After all, the ospreys at Rutland
Water, or the Red Kites hovering over the M40, are delightful to see, and
gladden many hearts and bring in money to good causes and struggling rural
economies. The walks and talks organised by the osprey team are always booked
solid. Certainly those involved have not been slow to hype up their work. The
websites and brochures teem with words such as "innovative", "proactive", and
even "visionary". The implication is that doing something is always better than
doing nothing.
That there are in fact risks in mixing wild and captive populations can be shown
all too clearly in the sad case of the Atlantic salmon, now a genuinely
threatened species. Interbreeding with escapees from fish farms has resulted in
a weakening of the wild stock and its ability to survive. The necessary
toughness of wild salmon, tested and refined by millions of years of natural
selection is being undone by fish reared in nets and fed on chemicals. So
survivability is not only a matter of numbers. It is about fitness to survive,
and, as far as the salmon is concerned, surviving has never been tougher than it
is now. Similarly, one wonders whether the parlous state of capercaillies and
red squirrels may have something to do with the
fact that most of them are the progeny of introductions.
In the case of the well-researched, officially sanctioned projects to release
birds of prey, it seems unlikely that there will be unpleasant side-effects. But
is it not ironic that the osprey was taken off the "Red" list of species in
danger at the moment when the house sparrow and the starling were added to it
(on the grounds that their populations have halved during the past 25 years)?
Logically, we should be releasing sparrows, not ospreys. But sparrows are
unlikely to draw the crowds. The purpose of most of these introductions is not
nature conservation. The birds will come back anyway, in time, and supposing the
environment is right for them (and if it isn't, no amount of subsidised
pampering will help them). No, it is being done for other reasons entirely, some
benign, some, I think, sinister. Reintroducing glamorous animals and birds makes
everyone involved feel good, whether they are sponsors (good PR as
environmentally conscious bodies), wildlife charities (it looks like tangible
success), birdwatchers (ooh good bird), local innkeepers or even politicians.
In his memoirs, the achievement Michael Heseltine was most proud of during his
stints as Secretary of State for the Environment was the reintroduction of the
sea eagle, not the ground-breaking Wildlife and Countryside Act. We like
populating the countryside with our favourite animals.
I say animals, not wild animals, because I think that particular bridge has been
crossed. It seems to me that reared animals become property. The Rutland ospreys
may behave the same as wild birds, and, saving their leg-rings and transmitters,
look like them, but they remain our creation, bred for a particular purpose and
for a particular place. They are part of our grand design, not Nature's. The
friendliest cock-sparrow that enters our gardens for the opportunities it finds
there is wilder than the fiercest cage-reared eagle. The ospreys that return to
Rutland Water each year have no choice in the matter. Knowing the way ospreys
behave, we have turned it to our own advantage. They have become birds with a
use, which is to say that we have turned them into property. And since they are
used to raise income at £3 per guided walk, plus car-park charges and whatever
else osprey-fans might want to spend they are arguably commodities too.
I think that the current focus on species, as opposed to the less dramatic and
less consumer-friendly business of habitat management, is unhealthy. It involves
too many decisions from us and not enough left to natural forces. Intervention
tends to be forced on us by the universal system of targets, where so many wild
plants or animals must be saved within a fixed time-frame. We are arrogantly
appropriating too much of what is not ours to take. Historically a severe price
has often been paid for disrespecting wild nature. The ospreys swooping over
Rutland Water to the delight of nearly everybody are not a sign of increasing
closeness to the natural world but of a distancing from it. We are making a
garden of the land and calling it nature. Paradoxically, this may make real
nature all the harder to find.
Birding-Aus is on the Web at
www.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/home/birding/index.html
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