Reintroductions
As the landscape is tamed, the reasons for extinction shiſt from hunting for food and habitat loss to include persecution and hunting for ‘sport’. Badgers, foxes, pine martens, polecats, wild cats and oters became subject to persecution with bounties paid for their heads. Something similar applies to birds of prey, which declined rapidly once breech-loading firearms became widespread. Golden and white-tailed eagles, kites, buzzards and other raptors were all thought of as vermin and subject to heavy persecution – a practice that’s all too prevalent to this day.
Then we come to the Victorian mania for collecting things, which included birds and their eggs, plants and buterflies. Notable casualties in the county include lady’s-slipper orchid and chough. One positive outcome of the collection mania was that some people began to recognise that uncontrolled collecting was having a negative effect, so the first nature reserves were created. An example is the Trust’s Meathop Moss Nature Reserve, which was established 100 years ago to prevent the ‘over- collection’ of rare buterflies. However, the motives for this weren’t driven by conservation in the modern sense – it was a group of rich collectors trying to protect their favourite collecting sites from the riff-raff.
As we move through the 20th century, agricultural intensification becomes a major cause of extinction. The corncrake, having been a common bird, started to decline with the arrival of the first mechanical mowing machines; the burnt orchid disappeared as its nutrient-poor grassland habitat vanished with the application of modern fertilisers; and once-abundant species like lapwings, hedgehogs and yellowhammers now all seem to be absent from significant parts of the county.
Of course, it isn’t just a one-way street as deer, oters, badgers and peregrines are now all far more common than they were 50 or 100 years ago. However, the overall trend is obvious and disturbing; rare species are disappearing and once- common species are becoming rare.
Climate change will add another reason for species disappearance. There are some obvious early candidates; the high brown fritillary (its flight period always seems to coincide with terrible weather), the scotch argus and mountain ringlet
Extinct: Early 20th White-tailed eagle
century
Extinct: 1849 Wild cat
Extinct: 1680 Wolf
buterflies, and the county’s arctic alpine flowers all look likely to be very vulnerable, even in the short term.
So, what can we do about it? We as people obviously need to value nature more highly in our decision making, we need to start the process of allowing nature’s recovery and we are sometimes going to have to give
it a helping hand. For the Trust, any reintroduction is assessed on a case- by-case basis and guided by the IUCN guidelines for species reintroductions and translocations. Yes we’d like to put back as many keystone species as possible back into the wild in Cumbria but it has to be done in a responsible and appropriate way taking a range of perspectives into account.
www.cumbriawildlifetrust.org.uk 11
Damian Waters -
Drumimages.co.uk
Photo: Amy Lewis
Damian Waters -
Drumimages.co.uk
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