Written by Mike Swan, GWCT Advisory Services
I may be an Englishman, but I am deeply in love with Wales and its wonderful countryside. It all started with early teenage holidays on the Llyn Peninsula, boating, fishing for mackerel and pollack, and birdwatching. From curlews singing over the rushy pastures, to the wonderful chatter of choughs on the cliffs as we looked across to Bardsey Island, this land had so much that was enchantingly different from home in southern England.
That embryonic love affair was reaffirmed just over fifty years ago, around my 17th birthday, when I visited the Gower Peninsula, just west of Swansea, for a school field trip led by my biology teacher who was a Swansea graduate. I cannot think of anywhere in the UK which has such a diversity of habitat over such a small area.
From rugged limestone cliffs and broad rocky shores, through wonderful sandy beaches, to extensive saltmarsh and mudflats, the coastline alone is amazing. Add in the lime rich sand dune networks, the heath and moorland, the sessile oak woods, and the very diverse agriculture, from pasture and cereals, to vegetables and even orchards, and you find something new at every turn.
It is hardly surprising, then, that autumn ’74 saw nineteen year old me heading to Swansea to start my university career. I loved the place so much that I managed to make my “studies” last a bit over 7 years before finally getting a proper job as a trainee GWCT adviser. Since then, Wales in general, and especially the Dyfed and Gower countryside has been a significant part of my escape, with multiple visits each year. Most are centred around bass fishing, rock pooling, wildfowling and rough shooting, but there is much more to it than that – the environment and its wildlife is a crucial part of the experience.
How sad then, to read a BBC news report today; “Birds: One in four species in Wales in serious trouble.” As the article unfolds, Patrick Lindley, Senior Ornithologist at Natural Resources Wales singles out the curlew, amongst the 60 red listed species, for comment “Our skies are becoming silent, twenty or thirty years ago you would have heard ten breeding curlew for every three you hear today.” Well, let me tell you Patrick, it is worse than that, I reckon that fifty years ago there would have been twenty where there are now three; these declines are not new, they are not confined to curlew, and we have a long way to go to climb back.
Meanwhile, Patrick’s employer, NRW, and the Welsh Government in general, are doing their absolute best to take away key management tools that could help the curlew and other declining waders like lapwings, redshanks and golden plover. These and many other ground nesting birds are scientifically proven to suffer badly from predation by the likes of corvids and foxes, but control gets ever harder to achieve. To start with, NRW has carried on a process of restricting the general licences that allow corvid control so that they are now all but unworkable.
Worse still, the Welsh government has a stated aim to ban all free running snares, including humane cable restraints used for foxes. This is despite cable restraints being the only method of catching foxes that has been shown to meet the agreement on international humane trapping standards (AIHTS).
The typical response is to suggest using live catch cages instead, despite the fact that any but half tame urban foxes are not daft enough to go near one, leave alone go inside. Also, anyone who has been lucky enough to catch a properly wild fox in a cage will tell you that it will invariably injure itself, usually breaking both teeth and claws in its attempts to escape, causing considerable pain, and therefore failing AIHTS dismally.
We should also remember that there is rarely just one right method to deal with a problem. Many foxes are also shot, but you can only shoot one if you can see it; in taller vegetation or foggy conditions the fox is out of sight, but a cable restraint goes on working. Wildlife managers need a suite of control methods available to them to ensure success.
What is saddest about all of this, is that the evidence for predation control is there for anyone with eyes to see. There are precious few upland gamekeepers in Wales, but the few that are left preside over most of the remaining strongholds for curlew. Their management works to produce a few red grouse for shooting, are supporting a wide range of ground nesting species almost all of which are in decline.
NRW has commissioned work that says that breeding curlew will be on the brink of extinction in Wales over the next decade, and yet it seems hell bent on legislating to accelerate this, risking putting the gamekeepers out of work in the process.
Alongside all of this, the Welsh Government has a couple of interesting targets to help nature recovery. The first is to devote 30% of Welsh land, sea and freshwater “solely for nature by 2030”. Aside from wondering who the victims of the land and water grabs to achieve this will be, I ask a more fundamental question. Who is going to manage this and how?
People have been living on this land, harvesting food from it, and fishing its waters for thousands of years. None of it is pristine wilderness, our ancestors saw to that long ago. It is what it is; good, bad or indifferent, because of human influence and intervention. Letting 30% go back to its own devices would not restore much of what we have lost, and the implied lack of management would amount to blatant irresponsibility, by failing to take care of what we have.
Breeding corncrakes and corn buntings, for example, have been officially declared extinct in Wales, but dedicating 30% of the land to nature will not bring either of them back. On the other hand, managing hay meadows by cutting them later, like we did in the days of horse drawn agriculture, could restore corncrake habitat.
Meanwhile corn buntings could return to a less intensive arable farming regime that includes unharvested crops, to provide the food and shelter that they need. In both cases they would also need a predation control programme such as that used by gamekeepers to produce wild grey partridges if they are to succeed. We have already had decades of making payments to improve habitat that have failed to stem declines. Indeed, just creating the ideal habitat could even be counterproductive, producing a predation sink by attracting breeding birds in, only to allow them to be gobbled up during their nesting attempt.
Most of the other red and amber listed species that we are worried about live in man made habitats too. Indeed, even the best Welsh nature reserves are the result of human activity. The finest ancient semi-natural woodlands are just that; semi-natural. They may have a wonderfully diverse flora, and abound in treasured wildlife, but our ancestors have always used them for the resources that they supplied, taking wood for fuel and construction, mushrooms and berries for food, and utilising the wildlife too.
By the same token, look at the wonderful flower rich limestone cliffs of south Gower and spot for the sheep grazing the accessible ledges. These may look like pristine cliffs, but their internationally important flora is maintained by us; if we took our sheep away, much of the floral diversity would be lost to scrub invasion.
The second Welsh Government target comes with the new sustainable farming scheme, which proposes to require farmers to achieve 10% tree cover, and 10% semi-natural habitat as part of its aims. I can applaud more semi-natural habitat, but what then of the windswept hill farms, with their open character and dry stone walls where some of the few remaining lapwings and curlews nest. These birds, and many others, are inhabitants of open country, and they actively avoid trees.
Historical planting of so much Welsh hill land to conifer forestry has already done enormous damage to biodiversity. Adding in endless small woods, at the rate of one or two per farm, even if they are planted to native broadleaves, would amount to ecological vandalism too. It would be the death knell of open country, and with it the environment needed by some of the most treasured wildlife that remains in Wales.
What Welsh wildlife needs is not arbitrary soundbite targets that look good as headlines, but active countryside management, with restoration of wildlife habitats, plus ongoing management to maintain the balance. It goes without saying that part of that good management will involve biting the bullet and controlling predation.
The current mess is of our making, and we need to face up to our responsibilities, and be prepared to embrace predation control as part of the answer. To do anything less would be irresponsible in the extreme, and a neglect of our duty to our countryside and future generations of both wildlife and people.