Don’t forget the wolves …

 

Let’s have a change from politics, just this once. Let’s talk about something that matters (or should matter) to everyone who lives in these islands. We’ve got a bit of a hoo-haa*) going on in the village at the moment, a campaign against a wildlife regeneration project. This must be something of a first: people usually campaign for Nature, not against it.

Just over the hill to the north of Coney Weston lies the remnants of Knettishall Heath, part of the heathland which in the 17th century ran from just north of Sapiston all the way to the Norfolk border. You can still trace our local settlement history in the way villages cluster around the edges of that heath, their agriculture reaching out into the more fertile clay banks left after the Ice Age by the huge Bytham river. That river created the landscape we know today, its foaming glacier run-off laying down skeins of clay, silt and sandbanks all along our valley.

Nowadays we grow irrigated wheat or forced carrots and asparagus on the sandy banks, but before the coming of plastic sheeting and electric pumps they were common land, only good enough for the peasants to use as rough grazing and to gather the gorse for their bread ovens. Then, with improvements in agriculture the land became too valuable to leave to the poor so it was enclosed, ploughed and improved until it became indistinguishable from the fields around it.

Iron Age man would have farmed those sandy heaths, burning down the encroaching trees and gorse and brambles, every few years setting fire to a different piece to create a patchwork of vegetation so his sheep and goats could flourish. And as the human population increased so did the numbers of livestock, growing until the pressure of grazing kept the heathlands almost entirely bare of trees and scrub. Nightjars nested among the heather, sand lizards flourished, woodlarks and skylarks took advantage of the edges of woodland and heath, with the mad-eyed stone curlew scampering on patches of bare and broken sandy ground. From the woodlands rooted in the clay around the edges came the predators, kestrels and merlin, owls and bats and buzzards, taking advantage of the open spaces. Rabbits nibbled the vegetation down to a thin carpet. That heathland landscape was never natural, but it was not exactly farmed either: it was gardened with love and care, nurtured to yield a sustainable contribution to the farming economy. 

Then things changed, farming practices changed, populations changed. The cities grew and our countryside was neglected. First the sheep went, then the rabbits, then the smallholder with his fag-hooks and saws and flaming torches. Then we saw a neglected heathland landscape in the process of regeneration: first the brambles moved in; then on the light soil the birches; on any clay patches the sycamore sprang up in its millions, carpets of bright green seedlings battling each other to reach the light. In thirty years the grass and heather was confined to shrinking patches. No curlew, few nightjars, few lizards and larks. On the sand there were birch trees, some already rotting from the bracket fungus that kills them all in the end. On the clay lay gloomy carpets of smothering fallen sycamore leaves, the sycamore trees desperately trying to suppress the young oak trees which over hundreds of years would slowly replace them. 

What of the future? Come back in five hundred years and you’d find a lot of oak trees in the mix, native trees that nourish and shelter a thousand species from owls to ichneumon wasps. In a thousand years there would be a few small-leaved lime among the dominant oaks and in five thousand years England will look like it did before the Iron Age: a lime forest. Unless you’d forgotten the wolves. 

Among those great forests will be open patches, places where wind and fire and disease have temporarily halted the march of the trees. On those patches there will be pockets of different ecologies, grass or heath or fen. In those little pockets will be the rare animals and insects and birds that cannot survive under the canopy. England will house a rich flora and fauna but it will be squeezed into those temporary patches of open ground. There will be a lot of it overall, but compared to the forests it will be tiny.

Did I mention the wolves? You’ll need wolves because otherwise the deer will browse the forest to destruction, wreck the ecology, leave the soil bare and open to the winter rains so that it washes away, leaving the bedrock chalk bare and barren. We killed the last wolf in 1390. And before you started the experiment, did you manage to kill all the crayfish which are wiping out our fish? Did you kill the invasive weeds that threaten to choke our rivers, rotting in stinking masses that destroy all life? Did you cull the muntjacs which devour our rare native orchids?

To keep England productive and beautiful and to protect our wildlife we need gardeners, experts who understand how this patch of earth works. If we want to re-establish the ecology we live among, the ecology that mankind is part of: we can’t afford to forget the wolves or the crayfish or the invasive weeds. You can’t do this sort of thing on the fly or by gut feeling, you need to study, you need to be trained. We need, in short, experts. Be honest now, you had forgotten the wolves.

Which brings me to the hoo-haa.

Suffolk Wildlife Trust now runs Knettishall. In a few short years they’ve transformed the management. The big fences have gone except round the edges, with a network of footpaths established outside the heart of the heath, allowing dog walkers (some of them very reluctant to use a leash) to let their pets run where they won’t destroy the wildlife. Browsing ponies keep the seedling birches down. But this was not enough. Like a neglected garden the Heath needed weeding.

We’ve watched Knettishall degrade as heathland for over forty years, watched the birches spread like weeds, seen the pine plantation grow black and barren on the northern edge, seen hawthorn and blackthorn scrub take over the heather and pink-grassed open spaces. It was too far gone for natural methods to repair the damage on any reasonable timescale so in came the machines, chainsaws, JCBs, the heavy hand of civilisation brought in to address its own failings. The work is done now, great swathes of weed trees ground down to mulch, over-rich soil scraped back to reveal the impoverished sand and the seeds which need that sand to re-establish themselves. Exmoor ponies and the local deer can now keep the heath open, a haven for wildlife. Yes, it’s being gardened, but we have no choice if we want to preserve heathland and the wildlife that depends on it. It’s garden or let the weeds win.

Why the hoo-haa? Because people see something for the first time and think that that is how it should be. If you have only known the Heath for ten or twenty or thirty years, and if you haven’t studied at least a little ecology, naturally you can only see change from what you believe is the ‘natural’ state. You want to hold on to the situation now, forgetting that a landscape is dynamic, not static, and sometimes change has to be managed. “Now” is not necessarily the optimum, and in the case of the Heath “now” was so far from the optimum that drastic measures had to be taken. A landscape has a history and if we neglect that history then it is easy to make very destructive mistakes.

Adam was a gardener. That, if we want to share our lives on this over-crowded island with a rich mix of plants and wildlife, must be our profession too.  

There is, however, a threat to Adam and all lovers of the countryside and the soil, a political threat. HMG has decreed that Norfolk and Suffolk take 250,000 dwellings by 2030. You can’t garden on concrete and asphalt.

 

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*) Hoo-haa Cambridge dictionary: an occasion when there is too much interest in or discussion about something that is not important.

 

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