Reintroductions


 This secretive summer visitor is absent from Cumbria – corncrakes are best seen on the Western Isles. Photo: Fergus Gill/2020VISION


EXTINCTION


The theme for this issue of Cumbrian Wildlife is reintroductions. In order to look at why species should be brought back, it makes sense to examine why they were lost. Conservation Manager David Harpley considers the reasons why species have been driven to extinction in the past.


The extinction of species in Cumbria is a real and current problem. Sadly, the list is long – and the BOOM project (see page 16) has identified some of what we’ve lost, including corncrake, pine marten and small blue buterfly. For wild plants, a Plantlife study showed that the former counties of Cumberland and Westmorland lose, on average, about one plant species every three or so years.


It’s also important to recognise that whilst we have lost some species, we have also gained many others. Some have come under their own steam, others have escaped from gardens or parks and some have hitched a liſt as humanity moves around the planet. There are those we have grown tolerant of or rather like, such as litle egret, speckled


10 Cumbrian Wildlife | May 2019


wood buterfly and sycamore, but the list of unwanted invasive species is long: rhododendron, grey squirrel, mink and American signal crayfish.


Clearing up the impacts of these problematic species and removing them can be difficult, expensive and time- consuming – and sometimes impossible. Increasingly we will see and have to welcome new assemblages of plants and animals in the countryside, which can be a very positive thing even if we have to say goodbye to some species that we see as our old much-loved friends.


It’s been like this for a long time. Forest elephants and rhinoceroses once roamed in Europe and the animals that reached Cumbria aſter the last ice age were nearly the full complement of the European


mega-fauna, so wild catle, wild boar, bears, wolves, lynx, wild cats, beavers and elk (or moose if you’re feeling North American) were here. We know this because their bones have been found in caves in the limestone parts of the county. Why did we lose them? Well, it varies from one species to another; some need big areas of wild country to live in, some are tasty, and others are a nuisance.


The issue of which species ‘should’ be present in Cumbria today – and which of the long list of ‘missing’ and ‘lost’ species it is desirable to bring back is a potentially complex and controversial question. For example, are we trying to take back our environment to a specific time when there was an idealistic mixture of long-lost species?


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