Cathy lives in Hove, where she is in her final year of a Masters in Nature & Travel Writing. She enjoys writing about the natural world, and was longlisted in the Bradt New Travel Writer of the Year 2023 competition. She volunteers at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex as a volunteer ranger and white stork watcher. Follow Cathy on Instagram @writer.cathy, twitter @skiathoscathy and read her blog at https://writercathy.wordpress.com/blog/
Hans-Erik pauses to watch a white-tailed eagle as it soars past his office window, and I try not to shriek with excitement. ‘You see,’ he continues, ‘the nitrogen produced by industry and intensive agriculture in the Netherlands is enriching the areas of naturally poor, sandy soil.’
We’re at the Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve just half an hour’s train journey outside Amsterdam, originally intended as an industrial area yet now a thriving natural wetland. It provided inspiration for the UK’s pioneer rewilding project on the Knepp Estate in Sussex. Although nowadays the Netherlands National Parks Authority is keen to shed the rewilding label and prefers to intervene in support of nature.
Hans-Erik is someone I could talk to all day. Thoughtful yet forthright, he’s one of those nature champions who is a force to be reckoned with. He apologises for forgetting the English names of the lucky birds on his patch, yet he’s far more eloquent about conservation than I could ever be. Anyway, back to that pesky nitrogen.
‘Nitrogen-rich soil favours fast-growing plants like nettles and brambles,’ he continues. ‘It looks good – lush and green – and it is good, but only for some species. Here, we already have naturally rich soil, so the nitrogen doesn’t make too much of a difference’.
The national parks in The Netherlands have seen many impressive conservation successes. Beaver, otter, and the white-tailed eagle that interrupted our meeting, all thrive in healthy ecosystems supported by intelligent management for nature.
‘Some people might see the nature here and think,’ continues Hans-Erik, ‘oh, nature is doing well, maybe we don’t need to worry so much about it. But what about the plant species preferring the nitrogen-sensitive sandy soils, and the insects that need those plants for food and habitat? And what about the birds that like to feed on these insects?’ They’re the ones quietly fading away without fanfare.
This made me think how easy it is to fall into ‘nature complacency’. Visit a wetland site in spring or autumn and marvel at tumbling flocks of lapwing, the synchronised dance of knot or the incessant squabbling of geese; or raise your eyes at dusk to the mesmerising shapeshifting of starlings, and you could be forgiven in believing that the depressing news about nature is all in the mind of the ecologists. Get out early on any day in May and soak up the dawn chorus and it’s tempting to think nature is doing OK.
Conservationists rightly want to broadcast their successes, and who wants to hear constant gloomy news about nature? Too many repeated negative messages switch off an audience. But I wish nature was doing OK, for the stats make grim reading.
It’s easy to forget it’s ever been any different. Whereas now after a long car journey I bet your windscreen will be fairly clear, you might remember insects so abundant that within an hour on the motorway they’d blanket your car, glued to the paintwork. And who remembers the swarms of ladybirds in the long hot summer of 1976? Yet we can only remember changes occurring over one lifetime. Reading about mind-blowingly huge flocks of now-extinct passenger pigeons darkening the sky seems like fantasy. But more mundane plenty has gone unrecorded. How can we ever know for sure what abundance our grandparents saw and heard?
Things that change little by little leave unreliable memories, like ghostly shapes hovering in the periphery of your vision. But one vivid memory from over half a century ago has stayed with me. As a little girl, once the days began to lengthen, I’d beg and plead with Mum to let me put up our little canvas tent and camp overnight in the garden. I’d wake early, shivering with cold and the excitement of being all alone, and lie there listening to birds singing in surround sound. We lived in suburban Birmingham. Apart from the cuckoo, its unmistakeable call floating over our little garden, I didn’t know what those birds were called, but I knew they were noisy. Fast forward to 2020, the year when birdsong was supposed to be louder, and early May saw me blearily getting up at 5am, peak dawn chorus season. I’d decided to walk my local lockdown patch, again suburbia, this time in Sussex. All I could hear was a blackbird, sounding no less beautiful for its solitude, with the relentless chuntering of woodpigeon providing backing vocals.
Nature is slipping through our fingers, like those memories. But small actions make an enormous difference. With every garden left to grow a little unkempt, every farmer regenerating even a tiny bit of their land, and every tree that’s allowed to live out its life even if it’s in the way, nature will discover it and will return. We can all be nature champions.
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Time was when I grew vegetables and salads and thanks to complete deer-fencing roe deer chinese water muntjac and llamas couldn’t get at my stuff but I gave up because pigones voles mice hares rats caterpillars aphids and pheasants could. They took everything. Even roses. Although raspberries blackberries chard and beetroot seem relatively safe from predation provided I pcked them just before the Berry Hawks noticed. Rhubarb is clearly too toxic for anything to bother with. I couldn’t face covering the gaff with frames and netting and turn it into a garden fortress and as we don’t use any pesticides any passing pathogen helps itself to stuff you don’t think of as vulnerable. Pseudomonas spp. will take over the World and it will be one without mallows buddleias Coluta and Viburnum bodnantense. I should stop calling my activities ‘gardening for nature’ and call it what it is – ‘managed dereliction’. But I digress …
I recognise many of the memories and losses in this post. But I’ll just mention a lightbulb moment. Around the mid-70s I was thundering up the A14 on my way from Cambridge to Chester and as I admired mile after mile of uniform semidwarf wheat and pondered why we were growing so much pig-and-biskwit wheat and if people realised this folly I noticed grey smoke rising ahead of me and drifting across the road. Once I hit it I found it wasn’t smoke at all but a cloud of aphids on the wing. They glued themselves to the Cortina according to tradition. I’m pretty sure that was around the time of huge aphid outbreaks and effective aphicides starting to be used prophylactically on cereals as ‘blueprint’ growing and the ’10-ton Club’ became popular. As did growing vast monocultures of the most popular varieties of cereal (I’m meaning both species and variety monoculturalism here). So on I thundered with the pedal to the metal hoping to get home before we all died of organophosphorus poisoning or diabetes. Little did I know …
So here’s the thing: by all means apply gardening for nature or managed dereliction techniques et al because these are ‘low regret’ actions which do no harm except to the garden centres and help the economy of the Republic of Ocado. There will be bigged-up success stories and unremarked abject failures and people will be charged entry fees to celebrate it all. But no amount of tinkering around the margins will solve the wicked problem of mass-medication of food-crops for humans which result in the extirpation of the food-item base of our former wild-life. And as it is not in the interests of the Agricultural Industrial Hegemony (and I don’t mean farmers) for this to happen – it won’t.
“It’s a Big Club – and we ain’t in it”
Some bad news for you – Field Voles do eat the buds off Rhubarb as sadly I have found here in Cumbria!!
Sadly, even large nature reserves can’t buck the trend of species in the wider countryside of intensive agriculture. So, we don’t see clouds of common butterflies on our walks in nature reserves and our boots don’t cause hordes of grasshoppers to jump out in front of us if we wander into sympathetically managed meadows. Loss of abundance is a serious problem and it occurs before we have local extinctions of species. Too few invertebrate species are monitored for their abundance, so we don’t realise what is occurring. We need huge areas for conservation, not just nice 10 ha woodlands, heaths, meadows etc. Huge areas means 00s to 000s ha sites with no use of pesticides, fertilisers, avermectins. Space for grazing and browsing herbivores to get food without reducing all areas to short grassland, space for water to accumulate and evaporate, space for mud, space for trees to die, to fall, to regenerate, and most of all, freedom from the constraints of agri-env schemes and their targets, and short-term reactionary management plans. There are such places (see Re-wilding Britain), but we need more and more to counter the agri-business hold on ‘wild Britain’.
Great to see this piece on Mark’s blog, Cathy. A fascinating yet sad subject. I too, remember the dawn chorus we used to get. Only 20 years ago, when we moved here, it was so loud I’d have to get up and close the window in order to sleep for another hour. If it was loud then, what was it like in the 1960s, the 1920s or a hundred years before? Shifting baselines scare the bejesus out of me.
Thanks Cathy for sharing your observations and how nature and its abundance is changing. You are right – we can all play a part with leaving a section of garden unkempt etc. But I also hope that government and corporations can make more of a difference in encouraging us to do more through policies and actions too.
Writing about Lapwings in The Birds of Norfolk published in 1870, Henry Stevenson said: “At the present day it is only through the ‘tales of a grandfather’ or the traditional lore of some octogenerian, that one can arrive at any conception of the former abundance of this species”.
We bemoan the losses we have observed ourselves in the years since WWII but it’s almost impossible now to imagine 19th Century bird populations.