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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 37 BUCKETS OF BIODIVERSITY ROGER MITCHELL AND DAVE STONE

Roger Mitchell began:It can be said that English Nature fulfils both parts of this title in that we both garden and play God. By ‘playing God’ I mean that we have the authority through licensing and other statutory duties to regulate quite a lot of what happens or does not happen to species. Hopefully Barbara Young will elaborate more on this point in her talk and in doing so she will prove that God is a woman as she is our chairman.

Dave and I will address the issue of gardening on different size plots. I will start with a brief history of English Nature’s Species Recovery Programme (SRP) and then go on to look at a few projects to illustrate what we do, why we do it and perhaps leave a few questions hanging for the discussion later.

My first slide illustrates Bronze Age Villages. - Let’s consider the first few thousand years that preceded the SRP. Its now accepted that as the ice left Britain man colonised in a big way, clearing and farming the land. This slide shows our Bronze Age ancestors modifying their landscape in Peterborough close to our present day office, - in fact I think that is our office! Not only were the habitats modified but re-introductions took place both deliberately and accidentally. Man certainly moved crop plants around, his culinary herbs and his medicinal plants too and accidentally moved around other seeds and invertebrates. Both domesticated and wild animals will also have been moved by farmers and traders. The modification of our landscape and the pattern of plant and animal populations continued apace and, last year here, Oliver Rackham illustrated this in his talk about interpreting the history of the countryside from what we see today.

The next slide is of Constable’s ‘Haywain’ - Constable’s landscapes are often held as the glowing ideal to which we should attempt to return, but intervention was underway then too. The Haywain was probably planked with wood from the black poplar tree, like the one in the background of the picture, but as man controlled riverine flooding this tree lost its habitat and natural colonisation began to fail. It was thus increasingly introduced whilst its wood provided a valued commodity. (Earlier to the west of Windsor Park French Oaks were introduced to replace the English Oaks which were felled to build our fighting naval ships.) By the time that John Constable died in 1836, another change was occurring as the first grey squirrels had been spotted in Wales some eight years before. A late change in this Haywain scene was the barraging of the River Stour downstream in the early 1970s so that the grey mullet no longer swim up to Flatford Mill.

The purpose of this brief introduction is to illustrate the context of change in our landscapes and species over thousands of years - translocations and habitat management is very definitely not a new phenomenon. However, the real difference is that some of the changes sought in more recent times were for nature conservation rather than for building material, food or fancy. For example, the large copper butterfly became extinct in the UK in 1851 but was subsequently reintroduced using Dutch stock to Woodwalton Fen in 1927.

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Lord Rothschild had purchased Woodwalton Fen in 1910 as a nature reserve and then donated it to the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves.

However, the various re-introductions have all failed and we have now given up on attempting to keep the large copper going at Woodwalton and have turned our attention to the Broads where there is the breadth of habitat necessary for the metapopulations to develop - but more on that from Dave later. And now the circle is closing as biodiversity conservation, of which reintroductions are a part, is seen as a test of sustainable development policy.

The Government’s strategy known as ‘A Better Quality of Life’ includes biodiversity indicators alongside socio-economic - I think it is likely that Barbara will say something more about this later.

It is now ten years since the original report ‘Recovery’ was published. This was to provide the overall rationale for the Species Recovery Programme with an individual plan for each of the 180 species then listed on protected schedules five and eight of the Wildlife and Countryside Act. This report predates the UK Biodiversity Plan and strongly influenced this targeted approach to species action.

In the foreword to the report it suggested that the ideal scenario was to take each species off the protected list as, due to the action, it had become a secure self sustaining member of the ecosystem. It was also stressed that implementing recovery should be a partnership between Government, VCOs, land owners, land use interests and many other organisations. English Nature’s Species Recovery Programme was started the next year with a series of partnership projects, and the rest is history!

The next slide show the gains of the SRP Programme. In 1991 we were working on about 13 species at cost of about £130,000 and now we have nearly 290 species on which we are lavishing over a million pounds. About 90% of these are insects or flowers. Those good at mental arithmetic will notice it’s getting cheaper from about £10,000 per species at the start to around £4,000 per species at present. This does not show that it is getting cheaper in real terms but it shows the fantastic partnerships which are developing, enabling more money to come in, of which there are too many to name. As a result of all this effort we now have 52 species which have reached our initial recovery targets and over half of those have involved translocations.

With this recovery programme we take an unashamed and pragmatic approach to conservation. We recognise that the single species approach is particularly important where valued and local taxa are at risk and can only be saved by targetted intervention. In practice most species projects do involve habitat restoration and thus many sympatric species benefit as well. I’d like to quote from Peter Marren’s book on rare plant species at this point. He said -‘The emphasis on action is better than the previous unwarranted assumption that species take care of themselves on nature reserves.’ - They didn’t - so this is what we are doing instead.

Something else to celebrate is the UK Biodiversity Action Plan - 7,000 actions in all, of the 391 species action plans 211 have re-introduction related actions and 104 have specific re-introduction targets. We lead on 92 of the species action plans and 15 of the habitat plans. Even though we have

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generously allowed other lead partners to take some of the jewels in the crown of the recovery programme, like the Dormouse, I should point out that not all Recovery Programme Species are also BAP species. For example, the Smooth Snake, the Fen Violet and the Red Kite. English Nature does still continue to fund work on those species because not only are they important in an English context but because their recovery also contributes to biodiversity and helps to raise public awareness of the issues.

Let us look at a few example of re-introductions taken by the Recovery Programme.

The Field Cricket centred on West Sussex was eventually reduced to one population - three sub-colonies in 1 km square. It has now been established on seven sites through translocations. One of the issues here is the ex situ conservation which must be linked to in situ conservation - This is one of our rules. It is not our intention to simply build ‘zoo exhibits’ although these certainly have their place in raising awareness of the requirement for biological conservation.

One of the more famous re-introduction projects was for the Large Blue. It once occurred in 90 colonies in England but declined until it became extinct in 1979 through loss of habitat due to grazing neglect. But is now up and reestablished in nine sites in south west England initially using Swedish stock through an ex situ route. The BAP target is ten sites by 2005. Another 19 sites are now in various stages of preparation for re-introduction sites. This project so far has cost £220,000 and has involved 70 individuals and about 13 different organisations so far.

The Lady Bird Spider was thought to be extinct after the 1920s but was found again in 1979, and after some considerable time and effort getting the site right, its numbers have now increased from 50 to 576.

Just a few years ago the Fen Violet disappeared from its last site at Woodwalton Fen but it was later seen at Wicken Fen. The experts from Monkswood started researching into the recovery of this species and decided to try to re-introduce it to Otmoor where it had not been seen for five years.

However, this is a cautionary tale because when we arrived at the site we found that disturbance to the original seed bank of the violet by the removal of encroaching scrub, had caused it to spring up on its own.

Due to the SRP, and related initiatives, we now know a great deal about both the in situ and ex situ conservation of some species. A great deal of money has been spent on survey, autecology and monitoring - in fact the not inconsiderable amount of money spent on recovery work over the last decade has fuelled a renaissance of whole species work and good old field natural history (As mentioned by Barbara Young in her talk last year!). So, has the time come to stop writing action plans and surrounding every re-introduction initiative with an elaborate insurance blanket of monitoring and meetings?

Shouldn’t we just get on with it and throw buckets of species in the direction of what we perceive are their required habitats and let the great melting pot of nature take over? In other words, stop being so precious and scale the whole operation up! This is the big chance - and the big challenge. Let’s not forget that the current UKBAP species targets do not add up to some sort of

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favourable conservation status … for many species there’s a great deal further to go. These big ideas also need big excavator buckets and bold initiatives to create the habitats and landscapes required to advance the recovery of the English Flora and Fauna.

Dave Stone continued:In this section I am going to look forward and carry on from the theme started

by Ruth Davis this morning. I am also indebted to many of the other speakers today as they have already touched on the importance of landscape, the importance of synergy and issues such as meta populations. However, I am going to re-iterate one theme that has been fairly recurrent today and that is the theme of sites.

The word ‘Sites’ has a very comfortable and reassuring resonance about it.

It has been the trusty foundation of conservation in the UK and Europe for well over a hundred years now. Comfortable? - yes, successful as a foundation for conservation? - I think that that is highly debatable and I think many of the talks we have had today illustrate that. Special sites have undoubtedly been important in preserving species and habitats on the brink of extinction along our shores and flower-rich grassland meadows provide a good example of a habitat that has been pushed to the brink and where special sites have been critical in preventing it from being finally eradicated. The Lady’s Slipper Orchid would have been faced with extinction without site based conservation.

However, since we have had site based conservation with a statutory foundation in the UK many sites and species have still been lost. The Biodiversity Action Plan with 391 species action plans illustrates this decline as it deals with species which have declined more than 50% since 1970 - a very short time - this is a bleak picture.

So, if site based conservation is not enough what is the alternative? I’d argue that the alternative is to start thinking big. Sites shouldn’t sit in splendid isolation. We need to include the wider landscape. In the 1990s English Nature developed a framework for conservation that went beyond special sites, we called it ‘Natural Areas’. Derived from information about the physical geography and characteristic semi-natural communities, they go some way to making ecological sense of species’ distributions. For example, the Adonis Blue, whose distribution is coincident with areas with a calcareous substrata.

There are three key things to note about natural areas. They define the extent of key environmental gradients. They move beyond thinking about dots on maps. By setting out the natural features which are important or possibly unique to an area. Implicitly they reflect the dominant land use patterns and consequent anthropogenic influence on species and habitat distributions.

Natural Areas also place sites in a wider landscape context. In the ‘Suffolk coast and heath natural area’ is the Alde estuary - part of this area was chosen for an exercise to test the feasibility of restoring habitats on a scale larger than a single site. A vision map was developed in collaboration with a number of key stakeholders identifying preferred restoration options and on the ground work. The project, over a period of about three years, set about delivering as much of this vision as was possible in the time available. It was quite

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successful and significant attempts were made to restore linear habitats such as hedgerows. This pilot showed that conservation could take place in the UK on a scale larger than single site. It showed that sustainable approaches to conservation also needed to take account of and involve people - stake holders are important. The other thing it shows is that landscapes of the future need not be the same as the historic landscapes. Why do we always look back as a conservation community? Why can’t we look forward?

Landscape scale nature conservation is variously named, it is called the Ecosystem approach by the IUCN, Eco-Regions is the term used by WWF International and Lifescapes is English Nature’s term for this approach.

Regardless of its name the concept is the same - it is about sustainable maintenance of natural processes, meeting the needs of people and biodiversity; a vision of future landscapes of biodiversity. The connection between this and re-introductions is quite clear. Re-introductions are one of the tools of nature conservation. Where we become engaged in re-introduction work we are aiming for sustainable populations. Big thinking about landscape scales affords us the opportunity to think big about re-introductions.

Let me leave you with a few personal thoughts about advancing the recovery of the English flora and fauna in a big way.

First, we must stop pretending that there is anything natural about the species’ and habitat and distribution of the UK. Roger has already demonstrated that we have been ‘meddling’ with distributions for well over 5,000 years. We need to engage in new action that will actually fashion new landscapes that are ecologically and economically sustainable. I think we need to stop trying to tame nature and start trying to work with it a little bit more, working with the active processes and dynamism that has driven millions of years of evolution. We need to stop thinking parochially and start to think nationally and internationally about what is really important in terms of global biodiversity. We need to stop trying to have examples of everything in one small natural area. By building bigger landscapes and focusing on what’s important we can then start to re-introduce that critical biodiversity by the bucket load and then let nature take its course and let the processes of natural selection take place with a view to creating healthy meta-populations across wider landscape areas.

I suppose it could be argued that what I am proposing is that we just garden on the grandest possible scale but I’d rather think of this combination of re-introduction and landscape management as returning to our ancestral roots, bringing back a sense of stewardship into the lives of our community, righting wrongs where we have caused extinctions in the past and giving back to nature what we have taken away. (text prepared by D. K. and M. N. Sanford from a recording made at the conference) Roger Mitchell and Dave Stone English Nature Northminster House Peterborough PE1 1UA

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