by Dave Goulson
Although parts of Canvey Wick and West Thurrock Lagoons have been saved, there is no doubt that many other brownfield sites that had become rich in wildlife have already been destroyed. Endangered species turn up in all sorts of unlikely places, if you look hard enough. Just as the Canvey Island ground beetle was thought extinct, so for instance the streaked bombardier beetle (Brachinus sclopeta) was rediscovered living in a pile of rubble at a site in the London borough of Newham in 2005 having last been seen in 1928 (at Beachy Head in East Sussex). Regrettably, the particular rubble pile they had been hanging out in was scheduled for a housing development, which has since gone ahead – an unfortunate recurring feature of these stories is that rare species are often only discovered when they are about to be destroyed. Sixty-one of these precious beetles were hastily relocated to a specially created pile of crushed bricks and concrete nearby, but whether their new home will suit them we do not know – they are clearly pretty fussy,fn6 and our knowledge of this species’ requirements is necessarily scant, so the odds are against them.
Neither Buglife nor any other wildlife charities have the manpower to identify and then defend every possible patch of abandoned land and rubble pile, so who knows how many distinguished jumping spiders or streaked bombardier beetles may have found themselves concreted into the foundations of a new supermarket? Clearly the only way that such places can be properly protected is if all development sites are thoroughly surveyed beforehand,fn7 and then given proper protection if they are found to support significant numbers of rare or important animals or plants. In the current system, neither of these two steps functions particularly effectively. The government seems happy for places identified as being of Special Scientific Interest, such as Canvey Wick, to be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth, even when alternatives are clearly available.
I would love to see more appreciation of the amount of wildlife that is living right under our noses, within our major cities, thriving in the most unlikely of places. Brownfield sites can be wonderfully, surprisingly, rich in wildlife. Most are close to or within urban areas, and thus provide a fantastic opportunity for city dwellers to encounter rare animals and plants within walking distance of their homes. I’m not suggesting that all brownfield sites should become nature reserves, for even I would concede that sometimes there might be better uses for them. But we should use some common sense, and pause for thought before calling in the bulldozers. Britain’s wildlife is in trouble, and we cannot afford to lose more of the few places left where it is flourishing.
I’d like to think that future generations of children will be able to pond-dip, find beautiful wildflowers, discover bombardier beetles under rocks, and listen to the sound of birdsong and the buzz of bumblebees. Our increasingly urban population has dwindling opportunity to encounter wildlife, and some brownfield sites provide just such green spaces right on our doorstep. Although they were created by man’s actions in the past, they are now wild, quite different from our manicured urban parks, places where natural processes are at play, where nature rules.
Living in a crowded country in an increasingly crowded world, such places are incredibly rare, and we should treasure them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Knepp Castle and the Forgotten Bees
Feral … imagines the lives we no longer lead but might, the species that no longer exist but could, and the faculties we no longer engage but should.
Robert MacFarlane, interviewing George Monbiot about his book Feral
It is not every day that one gets an email from a knight who lives in a castle, with an invitation to be given lunch and a guided tour of his estate. I couldn’t help but be impressed, whilst also feeling slightly annoyed with myself for my instinctive urge to be overawed by someone with a title. I was also tremendously excited, for this wasn’t just any old knight with a castle – this was Sir Charles Burrell, 10th Baronet, owner of the Knepp Estate, a place that I had heard tremendous things about ever since moving down to Sussex. Of course I accepted, and a few days later in the spring of 2013 I found myself driving up to the front of Knepp Castle, an enormous and rather elegant castellated mansion built for the Burrell family by John Nash in 1806. There is also a ‘proper’ castle about a kilometre away, built by one of William the Conqueror’s knights just after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but regrettably the bulk of it was demolished in the 1700s to build the foundations of a road which eventually became the A24.
I was half expecting a butler in full regalia to answer the door, but instead it was answered by a young guy in rough outdoor gear who laughed at me when I asked for ‘Sir Charles’. He told me that Charlie was to be found down the corridor in his study, which turned out to be a vast, oak-panelled room in which the miscellaneous selection of old desks, tables and chairs were strewn with paperwork, documents, old maps, stuffed animals and photographs. Wading through this clutter was Charlie himself, I guessed somewhere around fifty years old, with a boyish shock of unruly hair and a ready smile – he turned out to be the most affable and welcoming of hosts. Ted Green was also there, perhaps Britain’s foremost expert on ancient trees and the vast diversity of life they support. He looked pretty ancient himself, weatherbeaten but with a twinkle in his eye and, it turned out, a wicked sense of humour. Over a coffee, Charlie explained how the Knepp project had come about.
He had taken over managing the family estate in 1983 as a young man, fresh out of the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. At the time there were half a dozen tenant farmers, and most of the 3,500-acre estate was intensively farmed. The estate has a well-documented history. Much of it was once a deer park, a favoured hunting ground for King John who had 220 hunting greyhounds stationed at the old castle. In the mid-1500s the deer park was abandoned and an active iron industry grew up in the area, leading to the creation of a huge mill pond over a kilometre long to provide power. When this industry didn’t last long, the land became predominantly farmland, a mix of pasture and arable, which it remained until the eighteenth century. Fortunately the mill pond survived, another relict of our industrial past which now supports a host of wildfowl and other aquatic life.
Charlie’s family came into ownership of the estate in the 1780s, and shortly afterwards had the new castle built, complete with a new, expansive deer park surrounding the buildings, in the form of pasture dotted with oaks that have now grown to enormous girth. The rest of the estate remained farmland, and in 1912 Sir Merrick Burrell founded the Knepp herd of Red Poll cattle, a handsome, blood-red dual-purpose breed used for both milk and meat. Through careful breeding he created prize-winning animals, and the estate became strongly associated with the breed, with a herd that grew to contain over 500 cattle by the 1970s. However, the estate was never particularly productive, situated as it is in West Sussex, on heavy Weald clay, a soil not well suited to modern intensive farming. Between the two World Wars half of the land was abandoned as it was simply not profitable to farm it, but during the Second World War the drive to be self-sufficient in food meant that all of the land was brought back into production, including the deer park, with the land ploughed right up to the door of the new castle.
When Charlie took over, little had changed since the Second World War. More or less the entire estate was intensively farmed, although it was barely making a profit as the soil just could not be persuaded to produce high yields of arable crops. To try to make ends meet they farmed the land harder and harder, ploughing right up to the base of the hedges and in tight circles around the great oaks in what had once been the deer park in an attempt to produce as much crop as possible. Even so, shifting subsidy systems and drops in milk prices meant that the estate began to run at a loss. Charlie questioned what they were doing – squeezing every last drop they could from the land for the privilege of losing money didn’t seem to make any sense, but after centuries of farming what else were they to do? With great sadness, in the year 2000 they sold off the last of the cattle and abandoned dairy farming altogether.
In
2001, in an attempt to diversify their income, Charlie entered into a Countryside Stewardship Agreement with Defrafn1 to restore the deer park around the new castle. Ted Green paid a visit, and was horrified to see the land being ploughed under the mighty oaks, some of which were in a pretty poor state. Old oaks support quite staggering biodiversity – no less than 423 different species of insects and mites have been found living in or on them, eating their leaves, forming galls, sucking their sap, nibbling their roots, and so on. Countless fungi, and a mind-boggling 324 different species of lichen have been found growing upon them (how many of us would have guessed that there were that many types of lichen at all, let alone just on oak trees?). A single oak tree can be a whole world in itself and this continues long after its death, for many of these insects burrow in the dead timber as it slowly decays over hundreds of years. Our ancient forests would have contained great volumes of dead, rotting wood, perhaps as much as 200 cubic metres per hectare, and numerous insects and fungi specialised in feeding upon this resource. In turn, birds such as woodpeckers specialised in feeding on those insects, while other birds and bats would nest in the cavities within the slowly decaying trees. While it is decaying, dead wood also helps to prevent soil erosion, and locks up huge volumes of carbon, while its eventual decay releases nutrients that new trees need to grow. In short, dead trees are wonderful places for wildlife, and an integral part of woodland ecosystems.
It is thus rather depressing to report that modern forestry practice is to remove dead trees as swiftly as possible so that they do not harbour disease, and to avoid the extremely unlikely event that they might fall on a passer-by (how many of us make a habit of standing around under long-dead trees during windy weather?). In some heavily managed forests, there can be less than one cubic metre of dead wood per hectare. As a result, many of the creatures that feed on dead wood have become enormously rare – for example, the pine hoverfly, a species that breeds in water-filled rot holes in old pine tree stumps, is now teetering on the edge of extinction in the UK. Similarly the violet click beetle, which breeds in the soggy black mush to be found in the hollow heart of long-dead, well-decayed tree trunks, is now known from just a handful of trees. We have left these poor creatures with nowhere to live in the modern world.
Some of Knepp’s oaks were dying or dead, and traditional practice would, of course, be to chop them down and saw up the timber for firewood, but fortunately Ted knew the value of dead wood. He suggested that Charlie leave the dead trees in situ, and plant a few extra ones to eventually replace them. I had seen this when coming up the long drive to the house – the old trees remain, most alive, some part-dead with hollow trunks and craggy leafless branches but some green tufts of fresh leaves, others entirely dead, riddled with woodpecker holes, and slowly shedding their mighty branches to the ground, where they are left to rot. All of them looked magnificent.
As part of the Countryside Stewardship Agreement, the arable fields were returned to pasture, and Charlie introduced a range of grazing animals (fallow deer, Exmoor ponies and old English longhorn cattle), using tough breeds that can survive outdoors with minimal management. Instead of being surrounded by fields of wheat and oilseed rape, Charlie and his family could now look out from their house on herds of grazing animals leading more or less natural lives. They also noticed that insect and bird populations began to increase. As Charlie put it, ‘There was a great feeling of ease and space and lack of stress.’
It was this in part that inspired Charlie to make a very bold move – to take the entire estate out of conventional farming and turn it into a ‘rewilding’ project. The concept of rewilding is argued by some to be a revolution in conservation. Conventional conservation practices in the UK often involve very intensive management to maintain particular, valued habitats. For example, chalk downland will scrub over if not managed, as is happening around the impact zone on Salisbury Plain. The fragments of flower-rich chalk down-land that survive, aside from on Salisbury Plain, are almost all in nature reserves such as Box Hill in Surrey, or Castle Hill near Brighton on the South Downs. In the winter teams of volunteers can be seen with axes and saws, labouring to bash back the hawthorn and blackthorn scrub. Grazing animals may be brought in for short periods, or the grasslands cut using a tractor. Invasive weeds may be pulled up or herbicided off. Heathlands are similar, for unless invasive birch trees are removed, our heathlands, much prized for the rare butterflies, birds, reptiles and flowers they support, would quickly turn into forests. These are not natural, wild areas by any means; they are habitats created by the actions of man centuries or millennia ago, and they may be just as intensively managed, in a way, as the cereal fields that surround them.
The term rewilding was first used in 1990 by David Foreman, an American conservationist and environmental activist who was disillusioned by the failure of the conservation movement to make any substantial headway against the tide of habitat loss and extinctions. It refers to a concept of creating large reserves and then allowing nature to decide what happens – to interfere as little as possible, ideally not at all. The best known example in Europe is the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, a fifty-six-square-kilometre area that was largely open sea until 1968, when it was reclaimed by enclosing it with a dyke. The marshy reserve quickly became a very important wetland for wading birds, but it was threatened by encroachment with willow seedlings which, left unchecked, could have eventually made the area unsuitable for waders. It was then that a Dutch biologist named Frans Vera proposed a controversial solution.
It had long been thought that, before man arrived, much of Europe was covered in dense ‘primeval’ forests, an idea that was based on analysis of pollen preserved in peat and lake beds. Frans challenged this idea, arguing that these forests may have been much more open, a patchwork of open glades, scrub and closed forest, maintained by large grazing animals – aurochs, boar, bison, deer, and so on. Going back even further, 50,000 years ago there would have been rhinoceros and straight-tusked elephants, the latter readily capable of flattening sizeable trees. It has even been argued that the huge trunks and thick, heavily fissured barks of some of our native trees, such as oaks, are an adaptation to protect them from uprooting by these long-extinct creatures. It is quite an attractive idea, for it provides a possible solution to a major ecological conundrum – where did all of our rare grassland flowers, bees and butterflies live before humans came along and cleared the forests? Creatures such as the Adonis blue butterfly, which occurs only on south-facing, sunny chalk downland, could not possibly survive in forests. But perhaps Europe wasn’t all dense forests, and the Adonis blues,fn2 spider orchids and so on all lived in these large clearings? Frans persuaded the Dutch authorities that, instead of clearing the willows by hand or with herbicides, perhaps herds of large mammals would do the same job but in a more natural way. Red deer, ponies and cattle were duly introduced, and left to get on with it. The absence of any large predators to control them meant that numbers became too high, and now some animals are shot to prevent overpopulation and starvation, but otherwise management is minimal, and there is currently a resident population of some 3,000 red deer, 1,000 ponies and about 300 cattle. The animals have certainly helped to keep the willows at bay, and so the area remains an enormously important bird reserve, with spectacular species such as the white-tailed sea eagle in residence. Perhaps most importantly, Oostvaardersplassen and the concept of rewilding have caught the imagination of the Dutch people, not least because the reserve is just ten kilometres from central Amsterdam, so that it is very easy to visit and experience this near-wild area.
Elsewhere, where protected areas are larger, rewilding projects are able to take a further step. The herds of deer, bison, aurochs and ponies that roamed prehistoric Europe were once preyed upon by wolves, lynx and bears, and if one goes back further in time even by lions and hyena. Natural communities all once contained top predators, until man arrived, drove them away or killed them and took their place. If one wishes to restore natu
ral communities and natural ecological processes, then one needs top predators, or so the rewilding ethos goes. The best known and most successful example of a reintroduction of a top predator is the release of wolves at Yellowstone National Park in the state of Wyoming, USA. Yellowstone was made a National Park in 1872, and covers a vast area totalling nearly 9,000 square kilometres of the eastern Rocky Mountains (to put the size in context, Yellowstone is larger than the counties of Hampshire, East and West Sussex and Surrey all combined). Grey wolves were, of course, a native species in the region, but were nonetheless regarded as undesirable even in a National Park and were deliberately hunted to extinction, both here and across much of their US range. Two pups were killed by park rangers in 1926, and shortly thereafter the wolf seems to have become extinct in the park.
By 1933, there were reports that Yellowstone was being denuded of vegetation by the rapid growth of the elkfn3 population in the absence of wolves. The trees had stopped regenerating because any young saplings were being eaten, while the grasslands were being grazed bare. The park service started a long-term programme of shooting the elk, but they didn’t manage to kill enough for the state of the ranges to improve. By the 1960s, local hunters who had become used to elk being unnaturally abundant and hence easy to shoot, started complaining that the park rangers were shooting too many. Heaven forbid that they would have to make any effort to stalk the animals before gunning them down. Hunters being a powerful lobby in the US, Congress threatened to pull the funding for Yellowstone if the rangers didn’t allow elk numbers back up, even though it was transparently obvious that there were far too many already. Elk numbers were duly allowed to grow again, and the park was stripped almost bare of vegetation.