Literature

Richard Hopton, Sherborne Literary Society

Elegy for a River by Tom Moorhouse (Doubleday) £14.99

Sherborne Times Reader Offer Price of £13.99 from Winstone’s Books

C‘ onservation science,’ Tom Moorhouse writes, ‘is founded on a wild hope.’ His new book, Elegy for a River, is a learned but light-handed around eight million; by 2004 there were just 220,000 remaining. Between 1989 and 1998, when mink numbers were peaking, the water vole population fell and witty account of how this works in practice. ‘Each by 90 per cent. Loss of habitat can shoulder some of threatened species is a glittering, ecological puzzle box’: the responsibility for this calamitous population decline it is the ecologist’s job to find the key to unlock the box. but it lies largely with the introduction of the American

Once this is done, it might become possible to save an mink into this country in the 1920s by fur farmers. endangered species. Inevitably, they escaped into the wild where they found In pursuit of this dream, Moorhouse has spent years a ready, abundant and more or less defenceless food on the banks of – and in – Britain’s rivers and canals. source: the water vole.

The particular object of his research and, increasingly, The sorry tale of the impact of human intervention his affection was the water vole. – for no better motive than profit – in nature on the Water voles, immortalised as Ratty in Kenneth water vole is mirrored in the case of the American

Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, had been ubiquitous signal crayfish. Introduced into this country in 1976 for in Britain’s rivers and waterways but, by the late 1990s, commercial reasons, they quickly escaped into the wild they had nearly vanished. Moorhouse set out from where the population exploded. Moorhouse estimates

Oxford University’s Zoology Department to find out that there are now many billions of them in our rivers what was happening to Ratty. and lakes. This problem may be under water and out The first two-thirds of this book tells the tale of of sight, but it matters: it’s an ecological disaster with

Moorhouse’s years of research into the water vole. It is far-reaching results and, as Moorhouse notes bitterly, partly a story of ecological discovery, partly one of the it’s self-inflicted. joys, frustrations and occasional alarms of fieldwork. As Elegy for a River is a well-written book, its style

Moorhouse says, ‘Fieldwork is a goddess with a mean approachable and anecdotal but retaining the scientific streak and a sense of humour.’ Capsizing chest waders or heft to make the ecological case. Moorhouse finishes suddenly rupturing dry suits are ever-present dangers for with a vigorous, reasoned plea for vastly increased the riparian ecologist. The reader also gets a good sense spending on conservation. His case is economic as well of the methodical, scientific grind of ecological fieldwork. as ecological; the spending would pay for itself. ‘It is,’ It transpires that the principal reason for the he writes, ‘an essential investment that makes sound decline of the water vole is the rapid spread of its economic sense.’ main predator, the American mink. By one estimate, in the 1950s Britain’s water vole population stood at sherborneliterarysociety.com

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