The Hunt for the Golden Mole (30 page)

The word ‘depauperate' is often used to describe ecosystems that have lost important species. If it applies to Vietnam, then it applies just as much to Britain. This is a source of discomfiture. Environmental politics is bedevilled by the absence of good international role models. The charges of hypocrisy flung at rich countries by the poor are easy to make and hard to refute. Latecomers to the feast are not easily charmed by western nations patting their stomachs and telling others it's their duty to stay thin. As it is with climate change – do as we say, not as we have done – so it is with wildlife. Having wiped out most of our own, we have found a sudden interest in dissuading others from doing the same. The cause is good, but the glass house is a tricky place from which to launch it.

The last person I heard complain of ‘depauperatism' was a zoologist trying to make a case for the reintroduction of wolves in Scotland. With Ol Pejeta's lions and livestock in mind, this might not be as crazy as it sounds. Or not quite. In England the government's official conservation adviser, Natural England, declares its intention ‘to conserve and enhance the natural environment, for its intrinsic value, the well-being and enjoyment of people and the economic prosperity that it brings'. The language is bland but the idea is radical. That bracketing of natural and human interests would have been anathema to Natural England's predecessor, the Nature Conservancy Council. For them, ‘people' were pests to be excluded wherever possible from ‘the wild'. The old way was a powerful force in the polarisation of interests – wildlife versus crops – that characterised the post-war agricultural revolution and guaranteed that there would be more losers than winners. Who would have imagined that the finger-in-the-dyke UK Biodiversity Action Plan would need to include the likes of hedgehog, hare, harvest mouse, skylark, cuckoo and toad? It was unimaginable, but it happened – another fine example for others not to follow. For decades after the Second World War, the countryside suffered under a kind of apartheid – one place for wildlife, another place for man. Displaced by their human oppressors, animals were confined to ghettos where they lost touch with each other. Biodiversity became bioconformity, and nature sank to its lowest ebb since the Ice Age. It was a kind of taxonomic multiculturalism in which a home for one population too often meant the displacement of another, and in which wildlife conservation turned into ambulance-chasing. How can we save the red squirrel? The dormouse? The stone curlew? This was nostalgia – a misty-eyed yearning for the good old days of Ratty and Mole, and for the countryside of Clare and Constable – and
nostalgia is no substitute for the kind of clear-headed thinking that will actually put fur on bones. This may look parochial – an English writer bemoaning the state of an industrialised landscape in which a corncrake is about as welcome as a rat in a Pot Noodle factory – but it's not. The problems are the same wherever in the world man and wildlife clash. You can't conserve what is not conservable. It was French medics in the First World War who formalised the system of
triage
, by which they sorted patients by order of need. As it was for men in their field of war, so it is for animals in theirs. There are species that can look after themselves, species that can be saved if they receive the right attention, and species that are beyond hope. On this basis it could – some would say
should
– be goodbye to the giant panda and goodbye to the red squirrel.

England's long campaign to preserve the red squirrel from the invading grey has been an exercise in futility. The grey – which, unlike the red, is happy to cross open ground – is better adapted to the altered countryside. It is also bigger, fiercer and wholly illiberal in its attitude to rivals, and carries the squirrel pox virus that kills the red. The Prince of Wales, uncrowned king of the dreamers, wanted the red squirrel to be adopted as the nation's mascot, and declared that it was ‘absolutely crucial to eliminate the greys'. I once had a conversation about this with the BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham, who simply pointed through the window to the municipal park opposite, where grey squirrels were swarming through the trees. The questions hardly needed asking. How could you expect to wipe out an entire species? Who would pay for it? How could it be imagined that rescuing red squirrels, which need continuous tree canopy, was simply a question of slaughtering greys?

‘The bigger issue,' said Packham, ‘is that our countryside is
in ruins, and our habitats are in catastrophic decline. You can moon and coo all you like over nursery-book favourites like dormouse and red squirrel, but it won't bring the countryside back. What it actually does is divert thin resources away from where they would do most good.' It is a stark truth. Every animal needs its natural habitat. If we can't provide it, then the species is condemned. This is why animals with narrow ecological tolerances, like red squirrel and giant panda, are at higher risk than generalists of more catholic taste. Historically in Britain, ‘habitat' has meant a network of small and isolated nature reserves, ecologically fragile and in the long term unsustainable. Even in countryside as hostile as this, you have to think in terms of the landscape as a whole, not just isolated survival bunkers. It is all very well for farmers to join stewardship schemes that pay them for hosting wildlife, but the good intentions remain unfulfilled unless they can form an unbroken chain of neighbouring farms that allows movement across the land. This is a basic principle of the Ol Pejeta model, which encourages migration in and out of the conservancy. The scale may be bigger, but the thinking is the same – a linking of biological storehouses that opens nature's arteries and circulates the blood, releasing the patients from intensive care. It's not only animals that have to adapt to change. Wildlife managers sometimes need to revise their thinking too.

The reintroduction of locally extinct species into their original or similar habitats is the alpha and omega of rescue conservation. Again Ol Pejeta leads by example with the black rhinoceros. The reintroduction of scimitar-horned oryx, previously extinct in the wild, into the Dghoumes National Park in Tunisia is another huge international triumph, deservedly accompanied by the sound of trumpets, a perfect demonstration of the value of captive breeding. Good zoos now do not take
from nature. They give. There have been many other examples – black-footed ferret in the US, Mexico and Canada; beaver in Sweden; Zanzibar red colobus monkey on Pemba Island, Tanzania; mountain gazelle and Arabian sand gazelle in Saudi Arabia; Arabian oryx in Oman; Przewalski's horse in Mongolia. They vary in their provenance. Ferret, gazelles and horse were all captive-bred. Monkey and beaver were translocated from the wild. They all breathe gently on the guttering flame – pinpricks of light maybe, but in gathering dark a pinprick shines like a beacon. As I write, a trial reintroduction is under way of beavers in Scotland, the only part of Britain that has much space unoccupied by humans. For years, zoological fundamentalists have had their eyes on it as the perfect place to reintroduce the European lynx and wolf. This is a good illustration of the kind of mess we get ourselves into when we destabilise the fauna. Zoologists remind us that humans in Stone Age Britain were outnumbered five to one by bears, which lingered until some time between the eighth and tenth centuries. Lynx were thought to have become extinct at the beginning of the fourth century, but bone analysis now suggests that they survived in Scotland for another thousand years. The last wolf probably died in around 1700, though there are plenty of legends that place the event earlier or later (according to the most persistent of these, it was killed near Inverness in 1743, allegedly with two local children in its stomach). Without top predators the fauna is incomplete, which is why fundamentalists want to bring them back. But what hope is there? Even the beaver trial took ten years of political campaigning to achieve, and received a sniffy response from farmers who dismissed it as a ‘costly luxury'.

If the vegetarian beaver has had to wait so long for admission, then what chance is there for bear, lynx and wolf? For bear we
can confidently answer: none. For lynx we can predict a fair chance, and for wolf at least something on the upside of nil. The case in their favour is that wolf and lynx both do what big carnivores are designed for – they eat herbivores. In Scotland this means deer, which, in the absence of predators, have become a pestilence. In England, too, they are a scourge of crops, woodlands, gardens and cars. No accurate figures are kept, but the best estimate is that deer every year cause 34,000 road accidents in Scotland and 8,000 in England, injuring more than 400 people and killing ten. Despite heavy culling, the combined population of the six resident species – red, roe, fallow, sika, muntjac and Chinese water deer – is heading towards two million, and likely to increase by 10 per cent a year.

But what are we to do about it? Lynx would certainly eat a few, but a few is all it would be. Computer modelling suggests Scotland could support a population of up to 450, which would be enough to boost eco-tourism but not enough to stem the tide of deer. If the lynx is to be reintroduced, then it will have to be for its own sake, not as an organic pest controller. There is a moral and ethical point here. Reintroductions of locally extinct species are allowed under European law only if the original cause of their extinction has been removed. In the lynx's case this means persecution by humans, which is precisely why zoologists say we have a duty to bring it back, the only meaningful apology for past misdeeds. There is a political consideration too. Unless we restore our own landscape and the animals that belong in it, then where is our authority to lecture Laos and Vietnam on theirs?

Wolf-talk has been going on for decades – zoologists arguing in favour, and Highland sheep-farmers, with common sense on their side, questioning the lupophiles' sanity. For years the political wind blew the wolf's house down. It was not even
believed that it could have a significant impact on the deer. But the ground shifted when evidence from America's Yellowstone and other national parks suggested that the predictions had been overly pessimistic. It might take a while, maybe sixty years, but wolves and deer would settle into a balanced predator–prey relationship in which deer would be reduced by more than 50 per cent.

Scientists also tested public opinion. Urban people, who mistakenly thought that the principal risk from wolves was to humans, were slightly more in favour than country folk, who correctly understood that the risk was to sheep, but there was an overall majority in favour of the wolf. The peculiar economics of their industry means that even farmers are not as hostile as they used to be. Without subsidies they would make a loss on every animal sent to market. In the past, when subsidies depended on the number of animals they kept, a lost sheep would mean a direct hit on the farmer's pocket. But subsidies now are paid simply for grazing the land, regardless of flock size, so a dead sheep is a shame rather than a catastrophe. If you factor in compensation for losses to wolves and profit from eco-tourism, then the issue takes on a different shape. Nevertheless, opinion remains polarised. Some scientists see the wolf as an obligation; others as a step too far. Whichever way the pendulum swings, there is no possibility of its swinging very fast. South of the border, where much of the country gets no closer to a wilderness than the grass on a roundabout, the outlook is different. You would more easily reintroduce the pillory than big carnivores to Middle England. If deer are to be kept down, and if wildlife agencies are to make good their pledge to reverse the degradation of broadleaf woodlands, then they will have to rely on fence and bullet. Another man-made problem, another human tweak.

On a world scale, the Highland wolf hardly registers as an issue. It's not a rhinoceros, or a snow leopard or a red panda. It's not threatened by global extinction – for the IUCN it is a species of least concern – and not many people would include it on their list of furry favourites. In fairytale, fable and folklore, only the rat wears a blacker hat than the wolf does. But it's a useful example because it shows how complex is the reckoning that must be done before an absent species can be put back where humans think it belongs. And it's a useful provoker of thought. As a top predator capable of maintaining equilibrium between the hunter and the hunted, its ecological function is easy to understand. But there are many other species on the IUCN
Red List
– threatened, endangered or critically endangered – so obscure, so small or so weird that there is no public awareness or concern for their fate. There will be more about these later. For now, they bind me to my purpose. Apart from myself, Gary Bronner and the man who discovered it, who in the world gives a zalambdodontic molar for the Somali golden mole? Who in the world knows anywhere near enough about the species, the habitats, the ecosystems they think should be saved? Think of the pine marten, another animal persecuted to near-extinction in Britain. It is now seen so rarely that, according to the People's Trust for Endangered Species, many people think it is a bird.

I have seen
la martre
in France but never in Britain. A few days ago I did have an encounter with its commoner cousin, the stoat. I looked out of the window and there it was, the ultimate exemplar of sleekness and glossiness, up on its points and curving its trunk with all the grace of a dancer in the limelight. There was no prey for it to chase, and nothing to threaten it, but still the dance went on. A behaviourist might have discerned some purpose in what it was doing, but I could see nothing
beyond the sheer joy of uninhibited movement, a joy atavistically shared by an observer made suddenly aware of the pleasures of summer. I stood for a while after it had gone, waiting for it to return but knowing that it wouldn't.