The importance of natural historians and natural history societies in conservation

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THE IMPORTANCE OF NATURAL HISTORIANS AND NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETIES IN CONSERVATION DAVID BELLAMY To question the importance of natural historians and natural history societies in conservation is absolutely ridiculous - if there had not been natural historians and natural history societies we would not know anything about our countryside and our landscape and we would not have the conservation movement.

Conservation has become really big business in very many ways and lt has to become more effective more rapidly for this world of ours is disappearing.

Floras At Work The following is taken from my forward to Gordon Graham's Flora of the County Palatine. As I live there I am perhaps biased and would say that lt's one of the best local floras ever written: 'One of the saddest letters I ever received was from a miner who reminisced of his childhood days when he would find wild flowers, even orchids, in plenty amongst the dark satanic pit-heaps. Special natural places where he found hours of interest and refreshment for both body and soul after a twelve hour shift down the pit. His letter went on to bemoan the fact that when he took his grandchildren out onto that self-same countryside there was nothing left. The hedges had gone, the streams straightened and perennial rye-grass from fence to fence was the order of the day. All the special unofficial spots had disappeared and been tidied up out of all recognition.' Such places are within the span of my memory also. 'SSCI.s' - sites of special childhood interest where a diversity of water plants provided a spawning place for greater crested newts and coppiced woodland overflowed with wild flowers as they had when first put in the Doomsday record book. These, too, have nearly all gone; swept away by 'progress' and the very few that remain have wisely been designated as SSSIs - Sites of Special Scientific Interest. I have heard Barristers at Public Inquiries ask whether childhood memories can be trusted; is it fact or fancy? In the case of the miner and myself there is proof positive: records of the past for all to see, thanks to the existence of local floras.'

In Gordon Graham's Flora ofthe County Palatine can be found the discovery of the earliest records. The first four published records for Durham are those communicated by John Ray (1627-1705) to the first edition of Candor's Britannm published in 1695. In 1670 Ray had published the first record of shrubby cinquefoil from a specimen collected by T. Willisei on the south bank of the Tees and he saw it himself on the Yorkshire side of the Tees below Eggleston Abbey on his final sampling voyage in 1671. Ray's principal botanic correspondent in the North East of England was then Thomas Lawson (1630-1691) a schoolmaster of Great Strickland, near Penrith. In 1688, Lawson sent him a list of 200 rare plants which were used by Ray in the 2nd edition of the Synopsis methodica Stirpium Brittanicarium. The list is repeated in fĂźll in Dereham's Life of Ray, published in 1718. Although Lawson's observations were mainly in Cumbria, he evidently travelled widely in Northumberland and Durham. It is possible to locate many of the plants today in the places he found them.

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Natural Historians and Conservation The tendency for naturalists to be secretive about their records has thankfully almost disappeared as it has been realised that many important sites are rapidly being developed in ignorance of their environmental significance. There is growing evidence that expert naturalists are becoming more public with their knowledge and Willing to become directly involved in conservation. Natural historians nowadays are prepared to join people on the 'picket' lines that form around threatened areas and will stand up to explain why certain developments should not take place. Because of this concern and awareness, two things happened in this country. First, some natural historians met in wartime London because they were very worried that something was happening to the special, treasured spots where they went to look for the species that interested them.

They founded the Field Studies Council which has taken on part of the job of teaching natural history in the whole meaning of the words. Second was the formation of the county conservation trusts. More recently the concept of the trusts has broadened to emphasise not only 'conservation,' but also 'wildlife.'

Wildlife that exists and is threatened in this country as it is in countries like Africa. Wildlife, reflected by the diversity of interests that natural historians have, spans every order of organisms. These interests stem directly from the natural history societies and their importance cannot be over-emphasised.

Serious Threats This world of ours is in 'mega-collapse.' Wherever we care to look we find that we are over-exploiting the Earth. There are two things we have got to watch as natural historians in this country:Over-Grazing: Britain is over-grazed from the top of the Pennines and the top of the highest mountain in Scotland right the way down to the sea-shore.

Erosion in certain parts of the Pennines as a result of over-grazing is as bad as that in parts of Africa.

Eutrophication: We now understand that biodiversity is not something that happens where there is plenty of everything available in the environment.

Habitats like tropical rain forests have biodiversity because most of the essential nutrients are in very short supply and therefore the natural systems have to find many ways of organising themselves. The result is biodiversity.

Wherever we look across this world we are seeing eutrophication beginning to take a grip. The most biodiverse coral reefs on this Earth used to belong to Indonesia and much effort has gone into persuading the authorities there to do something to preserve them. Coral reefs are in oligotrophic seas and have a very narrow tolerance, especially to phosphate and nitrate. At the top of the Pennines in Durham farmers are now foddering their animals so moving nutrients right up onto the catchment and enriching the water as it goes all the way down to the rivers and sea. Along our coasts it causes algal blooms that can render shellfish toxic.

Drawing upon Natural Historians The role of natural history societies is more important than ever in supporting the interest of children who find the charges now levied by museums for identifications prohibitive. Natural history societies have always been led by

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the experts who trained and enthused younger naturalists. My own interest to become a natural historian was inspired by the botanist Francis Rose when I was a teenager. He recognised I had a talent for remembering the identification of plants and the places I had seen them. It was the skills and enthusiasm I gained from him in the field led me to a degree in botany, which was even in those days mostly biochemistry. I was however, thanks to him, able to develop my own special knowledge of the classic succession from open fenland through to raised bog. The project took me on a study of bogs from Iceland to the south of France and from Ireland to Russia.

Throughout the study I referred to all the local floras I could find along the way to find out where I should go. Very often the local natural historians would turn out and show me all the things that my PhD. was basically all about. The famous Western Irish Blanket Mires are domes of peat only fed by rainwater falling on the surface, but these were dominated by Bog Rush, Schoenus nigricans, and Bog Myrtle, Myrica gale, species that in the centre of Europe only occur at the rieh fen end of the whole cline. Why was it? Was it the fact that sea spray pouring in sodium and Chloride changed that water chemistry allowing these fen plants to grow on the bog land, or was it something eise? At the planning stage of the project Lloyd Praeger's books were used to identify suitable study areas. His books are compiled of local natural history society records of the last Century and it was one note in one of the books that took me to a place called Kilkee. There the flora of the local bogs were very similar to the Blanket Mires with a whole series of transitions very close to the coast, but with an intermediate flora between the true raised bog flora and the blanket bog flora dominated by Schoenus. The more there was looked at and analysed, the more could be found that in all probability the thing that designated it was the number of rain days per year, which acted like a flow through the system carrying away an unknown constituent, perhaps just acidity.

The contact that the project gave me with these habitats, particularly those in Ireland, led to my direct involvement with campaigns to preserve them in the face of widespread destruetion that resulted from a growing peat industry and agricultural practices fuelled by grants from the European Union. None of the work of the project could have been possible but for the records made by local naturalists in the centuries before me. One of the stränge things about real science is that published papers, like those in that great publication 'Nature,' may only be read by very few people and most of those who do read them are either colleagues or 'enemies' of the author whose only interest is to try to disprove them. Regardless of the credibility or otherwise of the publication, the original work will remain a valuable collection of information and records.

Hazards of Palm Oil Again thanks to the work of amateur natural historians, but a long way away from Britain. we are just looking at the biggest raised bogs on Earth, in central Kalimantan, or Indonesian Borneo. It is an area of 20 million hectares 160 kilometres from the sea, the peat is in places 19m deep. It is the most amazing place I have ever been. Normally it takes about three hours to walk a hundred metres through the undergrowth, so to perform the research a group from Nottingham University actually aim to build a railway through the middle of it.

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Among the organisms they found 1.9 Orang-utans to the Square kilometre - a very high density. They were very curious having never seen human beings before and they would walk along beside us. This area has been described as 'very un-biodiverse' by some because they had never bothered to look. In 50 hectares the researchers have found 274 species of tree. Every time we looked we found new species of fish in the bog pools. Incredibly, all 20 million hectares of this habitat will probably be cut down and turned into palm oil plantations in the name of a 'greener' world. I met a German environmentalist recently who declared that he had just bought an environmentally friendly motor car that runs on palm oil. The plantations will work for about eleven years and then it will all be useless.

Conservation in Europe The world we are living in is absolutely collapsing and if we did not have natural historians in the past we would not know what we are losing and also we would not be able to look after SSSIs and the genetic resources represented by them. The sites will need to be properly maintained so that sometime in the future we can Start to put them all back into working order. Few wanted conservation to go this way, but we have now got down to that level in this country. We have to hang on. Groups like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the Wildlife Trusts and National Trust (NT) are really doing something about it. Many thousands of SSSIs where the things that interest natural historians are 'holding their breath' waiting for the final coup de gräce, or for basic management. The management is not right all the time; perhaps for a want of knowledge about some basic ecology, but at least somebody is trying to do something to save the biodiversity so that when we come back to our senses we can put the whole thing back into working order.

One of the main forces in conservation today are the insurance societies. This year we had floods in Folkestone, not because of global warming but because of the way the water catchment has been managed in recent times. Hedgerows and wood lots have been removed, streams have been straightened and put in pipes, and farming takes place virtually on bedrock because there is little soil left as a result of modern agricultural practices. When the rain comes there is nothing to soak it all up and the river floods. Insurance companies are now refusing to cover developments in the flood plains of rivers until improvements are made. It all started in America where insurance companies began questioning why the Mississippi began flooding with increasing frequency. 'Improved' drainage in its flood plane had given property developers the mistaken idea that it was safer to build closer to the river with disastrous consequences when the banks burst. Across the world we are now seeing river systems being put back into working order. In the middle of Darlington the River Skerne had for some time been encased in concrete. with the polluted water going in one end and Coming out the other in exactly the same condition. Recently, it has been returned to its original, natural course. Today dragonflies and plants are beginning to grow and already the level of eutrophicants in the water is beginning to fall.

When Adolph Hitler was preparing for the Second World War building his autobahns he took advice, not from a natural historian, but from a landscape

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architect. He advised Hitler to plant the sides of the roads with Grey Alder, Alnus incana, because it is a very rapidly growing tree. Hitler had them planted and by the time he wanted to Start the war the alders had fixed so much nitrogen that everything eise was killed off on the banks. Consequently the banks collapsed and repairs delayed the war by some nine months.

Threats are not confined to Africa, South East Asia and the Amazonian rain forests; wherever we look across Europe, the biodiversity is probably in the greatest danger that it has ever been. In parts of the Mediterranean there are important biodiverse areas among old farms and vineyards. These are under threat because the younger generations of farmers have abandoned their traditional farming roots to earn a living in the cities. The remaining, ageing, populations of farmers are beginning to find that they cannot manage to work their farms anymore. The biodiversity is doomed: If the European economic recession is Coming to an end there is little possibility of young families returning to the land. As the old folk, in their retirement, join their children in the cities, the neglected areas will quickly go over to oak and sweet chestnut scrub. On the other hand, if the recession deepens and the young farmers lose their jobs in industry they will almost certainly turn to intensive agriculture to make the small patches of land pay. Biodiversity will be lost as they apply phosphate and nitrate to the land. They will in all probability be subsidised for doing so.

If only we in Britain had plugged into the European system of phytosociology then it would be easier to look on Europe as one great Eco-net, a cline of change.The whole of the European flora and fauna associated with that net has been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. Some of those are safe, but I wish SSSI's were a lot safer than they are in this country. These areas must be seen as oases of genetic diversity that have now got be linked up by the creation of great biodiverse 'corridors' by capitalising upon the worries of insurance companies. Care must be taken with the choice of gene stocks that are used to revitalise these 'corridors' as they must be 'endemic' to each locality. It basically can be done, but it cannot be achieved without the use of the right genetic stock and the expertise of local natural history societies.

Redgrave Fen Redgrave Fen was already beginning to dry up very badly at the time I was studying for my PhD Thesis. I used a series of water pits in order to monitor the levels of the water table. My father was an amateur clock maker and he made a device that recorded the changes in the levels with a trace on a drum. The traces revealed a very stränge double diurnal rhythm rather like a tidal movement. The pattern was mysteriously interrupted by a sudden drop and rise on the levels which were eventually attributed to periods of water extraction from a nearby borehole. The borehole has now been moved at great expense and the fen should get wetter - if it does not, please don't ask me back to Suffolk again. See Plate 3.

The Fen is very special. It is a piece of living East Anglia which somehow has managed to exist over all this time in a viable State. The management of the Fen is very encouraging and exciting, and there is much more to learn. If it had not have been for your Society and those societies and natural historians before you, we would not have had the information to identify the significance of these places, or manage them properly.

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Collecting Thelnetham Old Fen is a favourite of mine and I saw Fen Orchid, Liparis loeselii, there during my study. It also existed at Redgrave Fen. If you look back in your records you can see that some pretty wicked things have been done by members of various natural history societies:'It was quite easy to pick this species because it came out roots, tuber and all between the finger and thumb. Twenty-one specimens pressed.'

I remember going to a public house just outside Manchester where an old room had been re-opened having been forgotten for many years. The room had been used by the Manchester Natural History and Philosophical Society and it had been preserved as it was when in use by them. It contained binoculars that were then hired out for sixpence per day and the walls were covered with pictures depicting such subjects as Queen Victoria and the Titanic. The pictures were made entirely out of the wings of butterflies and moths. Thousands and thousands of Swallowtail butterflies pinned up on the wall. Today it is an enormous challenge to train natural historians who cannot pick a plant and press it.

It would have been exciting to have a specimen of Liparis loeselii out of each of the fens in East Anglia in your collection, but this cannot be done anymore.

We have to make sure, even if it means buying areas and having nurseries of our commonest plants, that children can come along and actually press them.

Also, although I could not do it myself, put one of those very beautiful insects in a killing bottle and pin it out.

Finally, may I congratulate you on your Society - may it be thriving well into the next millennium. I wish I was still a natural historian and not just a 'telly' Personality.

David Bellamy, c/o Conservation Foundation, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR

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o c CO 0 1 Ă– P l a t e 3: Redgrave Fen, the Suffolk part of Redgrave and Lopham Fens NNR, August 1995. An exciting project to restore this wetland sile is underway (p. 5).