Feral

by George Monbiot

  Again, it would be deceptive to claim that I would like to see wolves reintroduced because they kill foxes or reduce disease or assist the owners of grouse moors and deer estates. I want to see wolves reintroduced because wolves are fascinating, and because they help to reintroduce the complexity and trophic diversity in which our ecosystems are lacking. I want to see wolves reintroduced because they feel to me like the shadow that fleets between systole and diastole, because they are the necessary monsters of the mind, inhabitants of the more passionate world against which we have locked our doors. The return of the wolf also makes the introduction of other missing species–such as boar and moose–more viable, as their populations will be checked without the need for human intervention. But it should happen only if there is broad public enthusiasm for the project.

  A survey conducted in Scotland suggests that people are less hostile to the reintroduction of the wolf than one might have imagined. The idea meets with slightly more favour than disfavour among rural people, and is welcomed a little more firmly by urban people.67 Even sheep farmers, surprisingly, were split: antagonistic on balance, but not universally so. The researchers who conducted the survey suggest that this could be because they make most of their money from subsidies, rather than from selling lamb. Only the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland was fiercely opposed, suggesting that, as in many other matters, it may not be representative of its members (farmers’ unions in Britain tend to be dominated by large landowners with strongly conservative views). I wonder whether the Farmers’ Union of Wales might have misrepresented the attitude of Welsh farmers towards beavers.

  While the wolf is a hard sell, another large predator could be introduced today, at no risk to people and little risk even to sheep. The lynx, until recently, was assumed to have belonged only to prehistoric Britain, unknown to the people even of the Neolithic.68 But recent finds have radically changed that assessment. First, lynx bones discovered in a cave in northern Scotland and two sites in north Yorkshire were dated at around 1,800 years old, dragging the species towards the present by some 4,000 years. Another cave in Yorkshire then produced a bone around 1,500 years old.69 That is now the most recent fossil evidence, but the cultural evidence for their continued existence in Britain extends a little further.

  Cumbric is a Celtic language similar to Welsh that was spoken in the north of England and southern Scotland–the territory, once much larger than the current county, known as Cumbria. A seventh-century Cumbric manuscript records the battles of Hen Ogledd, the Old North. Among these gory sagas sits, incongruously, a sad and beautiful nursery rhyme or lullaby. It is called Pais Dinogad: Dinogad’s Shift. The mother tells her son, Dinogad, of his dead father’s prowess as a hunter.

  Dinogad’s shift is speckled, speckled,

  It was made from the pelts of martens . . .

  When your father went to the mountains

  He would bring back a roebuck, a boar, a stag,

  A speckled grouse from the mountain,

  And a fish from the Derwennydd falls.

  At whatever your father aimed his spear–

  Be it a boar, llewyn, or a fox–

  None would escape but that had strong wings.*7

  This is not, in other words, an account like the story of Cath Palug in the Black Book of Carmarthen: the animals it invokes were real ones. They belonged to the fauna of the time and would have been known to the poet Aneirin, who wrote the manuscript. So what does llewyn mean? Until the most recent bone was discovered in Kinsey Cave (which happens to lie within the region in which Cumbric was spoken), linguists assumed that the word could not have meant what it appeared to mean, so they translated it as wildcat or fox. But the new findings have prompted them to reassess it; it could, after all, mean lynx.71 (The modern Welsh word for lion, by the way, is llew.)

  A ninth-century stone cross from the isle of Eigg shows, alongside the deer, boar and aurochs pursued by a mounted hunter, a speckled cat with tasselled ears. Sadly the animal’s backside no longer exists: if it had a stubby tail, that might have clinched it.72 This could be the last known glimpse of the native lynx in British culture. It might have clung on in forest remnants–perhaps in the Grampians–for another few hundred years, but it must have been extinct by AD 1500 at the latest. Like the wolf, it sustained itself in small populations scattered across Europe. Like the wolf, it is gradually emerging from these enclaves.

  The lynx does not pursue its prey. It is an ambush predator: it hides beside the places and paths used by the animals on which it feeds, and springs on them. Where this species exists, it is a specialist roe deer predator.73 In the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, for example, almost 70 per cent of the animals lynx kill are roe deer, followed by chamois, fox and hare.74 Where roe deer are scarce, lynx will kill larger species, such as red deer. Because they are forest animals, seldom leaving the safety of the trees, they present little danger to sheep, unless farmers let their animals into the woods.

  There is, as far as researchers can discover, no record, or even an anecdote, of lynx preying on people.75 They are adept at staying out of sight, and often remain unknown to the humans among whom they live. They are likely to perform a favour for landowners: reducing the populations of deer and foxes. And they could also winkle out the invasive sika deer (introduced from east Asia) which bury themselves in young plantations, where they become inaccessible to human hunters.76

  Again, according to the leading expert on the subject, David Hetherington, the Scottish Highlands, especially Am Monadh Ruadh–commonly called the Cairngorms–are likely to be best suited to the first reintroduction. They have plenty of deer and, thanks in part to their gloomy plantations of exotic conifers, plenty of cover. A smaller population, Dr Hetherington suggests, could be established in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, extending into the Kielder Forest in northern England.77 The Highlands could support around 400 lynx, he says, which should be a genetically viable population; the Southern Uplands could take around fifty. Unless these regions are connected, by means of wildlife corridors and special passes over the roads, the smaller population is unlikely to sustain itself. New woodlands are being planted fast enough in Scotland to make the reconnection of these places feasible.

  Not all reintroductions succeed. Dr Hetherington offers this handy tip for avoiding disappointment: ‘Don’t do what the Italians did in Gran Paradiso. Only released two lynx. Both male.’78

  8

  A Work of Hope

  I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

  Has broken Nature’s social union,

  An’ justifies that ill opinion,

  Which makes thee startle

  At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

  An’ fellow-mortal!

  Robert Burns

  To a Mouse

  I woke to the machine-gun rattle of hail on the windscreen. As I raised my seat, Alan’s eyes snapped open. We packed away our lunch and Alan drove back onto the road, then up a track towards the top of the estate. As we climbed, the land became bleaker and darker. The frost-scorched heather was almost black: it looked as if it had been consumed by fire.

  We stopped where the road overlooked a little glen in which a few trees grew. As Alan explained why trees had persisted around the streams, I noticed a bird soaring up from the far end of the valley. I was turning away, thinking ‘buzzard’, when the sun touched the broad planks of its wings. As it flapped towards us, I stiffened in my seat.

  ‘Look!’

  The great shoulders, the heavy head, the stout body dispelled my remaining doubts. As it crossed the moor, another eagle plunged down from the sky and dive-bombed it. They rolled over together in the air, then parted and flew on parallel tracks over our heads: two golden eagles, in April. There was, Alan said, a good chance that they were establishing a territory here; perhaps they were already nesting. It was the first time that he had seen a pair on the estate.

  We continued up the stony track until we found ourselves among the last lenses of snow
filling declivities in the blasted, treeless moor. We left the car. It was bitterly cold. I had made a mistake in assuming that April in the Highlands of Scotland would resemble April in the high lands of Wales. The wind raked through my inadequate clothes. I felt almost naked.

  We walked up onto a ridge where tiny twigs of dwarf birch, no higher than my knee, still struggled against the deer. We crawled around in the heather with the wind at our backs, identifying it among the myrtle it resembled. Dundreggan has the greatest concentration remaining in Scotland, but by comparison to the dense dwarf birch tundra I had seen in the Norwegian Arctic, this was unimpressive. The moor was hard and bristly, like an upturned yard brush.

  Beside the ridge, Trees for Life had built a large exclosure in 2002, by agreement with the previous owner, to see how the land responded where the deer were excluded. As soon as we stepped into it, I could feel the difference. It felt like walking on a winter duvet: the flora here was soft and spongy. Already a thick sward of pale reindeer lichen, sphagnum and deep grass had formed. The dead stems of bog asphodel still clutched their seed cases.

  The land inside the fence was littered with survey poles and transect marks. The scientists Alan worked with had already made discoveries that overturned accepted wisdom. Ecologists had assumed that dwarf birch grows best on boggy land. But here, in the absence of overpopulated deer, the researchers found that it did better on the rocky ridges: other surveys had found more of it on boggy land only because the deer were more reluctant to venture there. Similarly, scientists assumed that the aspen which grows further down the glens prefers steep slopes. But its distribution also appears to be an artefact of overgrazing: as soon as the trees were given some protection, the researchers at Dundreggan discovered that they grew more vigorously on level ground.

  Rewilding experiments are likely to present stiff challenges to current scientific knowledge. Many of the places ecologists have studied have been radically altered by human intervention, and many of the processes they have recorded, and which they assumed were natural, appear to have been shaped as much by people and their domestic stock as by wild animals and plants. Like the belief that natural systems are always controlled from the bottom up, now shaken by the discovery of widespread trophic cascades, a number of hypotheses, great and small, could turn out to be false as food webs are allowed to recover.

  Alan pointed me to another curiosity. Pushing through the moss and lichen in the exclosure were pine seedlings. Where did they come from? The textbooks, he told me, assert that pine seed tends to travel about fifty metres from its parent tree. But this, he argued, cannot be true of all the seed. At the end of the last Ice Age, pines recolonized Britain from the south. If it takes twenty years for a tree to produce cones, which then spread its seed fifty metres north, Scots pine would not yet have reached London. Yet within 500 years of its return to England, it had arrived in the Lake District. The seed-bearing trees closest to the exclosure were a mile away, and none of the forest creatures that might have carried the cones lived here. Pine must have a means of dispersal that ecologists had so far missed.

  It was hard, at first sight, to imagine how it could travel such distances: pine seeds are heavy and their wings are slight. Alan pointed out that when, in the spring, the pine cones crack open, the Highlands are often covered in snow, whose surface melts and then freezes. They are also racked by gales, as I was painfully aware. The shape and smoothness of the seeds suggest, he said, that they might have adapted to ski over frozen snow. I noticed that the saplings in the exclosure mostly grew from crannies or from under large rocks, places in which the seeds might have wedged after skidding over smoother land.

  As if to reinforce this idea, the wind howling over the moor suddenly armed itself with frozen snow. Even when I turned my back to the wind I felt as if it were passing straight through me. Then the blizzard stopped just as suddenly and a rainbow arced over the moor. It flashed off again, and just as abruptly we were hit by a squall of rain and hail. Alan, oblivious, had found a heap of black grouse droppings and, stooping over them, had started explaining the ecology of the species. Fascinating as I am sure it was, I decided that I had had enough weather for one day.

  As we drove past the little glen, we saw one of the eagles again, planing across the wind. Alan said this was a good sign: if it was holding the territory it was likely to breed here. One predator, perhaps, was already returning.

  Here is a table of the large mammals and birds which could be considered for reintroduction into my own country (and which in a few cases have already begun to establish themselves here). Some of the entries might surprise you: I strongly recommend the return of the moose, for example, but not of the wild horse. The wolverine ranks higher on my list than the bear. I have given the grey whale the same score as the eagle owl.

  This list is offered as a catalogue of plausibility. The highest scores represent the reintroductions that might be tried first, on the grounds that they are most likely to succeed, to be politically acceptable and to help restore dynamic processes in the rewilding lands or seas of this country in the current (and warming) climate. Polar bears need not apply.

  Once such species have been established at genetically viable population sizes and protected from man-made hazards, they should, more or less, be left to get on with it. If they cannot survive here, that answers the question of whether or not the reintroduction was appropriate.

  Broadly speaking, I have marked down the Ice Age and Preboreal species–those adapted to the open tundra or steppes, the habitats available during and soon after the great freeze. If an animal died out as a result of warming and the habitat changes this caused, it is likely to be less suited to the current climate than those which may have been hunted to extinction. This is why I have judged the reindeer and horse harshly: they returned to Britain soon after the glaciers retreated, but disappeared as the grasslands of the cold, dry Preboreal period that followed gave way to forest.

  We cannot always be sure which factor was most important in the disappearance of an ancient species. Some of them would have been affected by both climate change and hunting. So we must make educated guesses, comparing the survival of the horse and the reindeer, for example, to that of other hunted species, such as the moose, the aurochs and the red deer, which lasted much longer. The question of whether horses and reindeer disappeared because the grasslands turned to forest or the grasslands turned to forest because horses and reindeer disappeared is also hard to resolve. But even those who conducted the research proposing that the northern Siberian steppes turned to tundra because the grazing animals were killed by hunters suggest that the southern steppes turned to forest for climatic reasons.*1 Nor do we have definitive extinction dates, as the fossil record is far from complete.

  My aim here is to expand the range of what we consider possible, to open up the ecological imagination. That requires some understanding of palaeoecology. The fact that sometimes eludes biologists and naturalists, steeped in the present, is that every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna.

  When I studied zoology at university, I read a number of accounts, founded on ecology and physiology, which tried to explain why very large animals live in the tropics but not in temperate nations. I found them interesting and in some cases persuasive. But, like the authors of these speculations, I had missed something. The inherent difference they sought to explain did not exist. Until very recently, large animals lived almost everywhere, often in great numbers. They could do so today: African lions have been living and breeding in outdoor enclosures in Novosibirsk zoo in Siberia since the 1950s. Large animals appear, in most parts of the world, to have been hunted to extinction by people. These species have been excluded from temperate regions not by any natural ecological or physiological constraints, but by humans.

  With the possible exceptions of Australia’s and Madagascar’s, none of these megafaunas has the capacity to amaze as much as that of the Americas. Alongside mammoths of several species (includi
ng one that dwarfed the woolly variety), mastodons, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, lived an improbable bestiary of other massive herbivores. There was a beaver (Castoroides ohioensis) the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail, with six-inch teeth. There was a giant bison (Bison latifrons) whose bulls weighed two tonnes, stood eight feet at the shoulder and carried horns seven feet across. Shrub oxen (Euceratherium collinum) and musk oxen inhabited the entire northern continent. (Neither of them are really oxen: they are closely related to sheep and goats, but very much larger.) In South America there was a giant llama (Macrauchenia) whose face ended in a trunk. There were armadillos–glyptodonts, such as Glyptodon and Doedicurus–the size of small cars, armoured with a bony carapace like a tortoise’s. Ground sloths–such as Megatherium and Eremotherium–the weight of elephants stood twenty feet on their hind legs, and used their formidable claws to pull down trees.

  The great American lion (Panthera leo atrox), one of the largest cats ever to have existed, was almost sweet by comparison to the terrifying Smilodon populator–the giant sabretooth cat–which weighed as much as a brown bear, hunted in packs and possessed fangs a foot long. The short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) stood thirteen feet in its hind socks; the Riverbluff Cave in Missouri has scratch marks made by its claws fifteen feet from the floor.48 One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialized in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey.49