63 February/March 2024 February/March 2024 64
Elsewhere in Europe, these mesopredators,
especially wolves, have spread back into
much of their former range
W
hat’s missing from this picture?
I mean the picture of rural
Britain many of us hold in our
heads, whether it be a thatched
and mullioned idyll, or the bare
hills fetishised by naive nature writers? Well,
quite a lot. Trees in the uplands; soft boundaries
between habitats (ecotones) that are crucial for
thriving food webs; dead wood, of which
there’s a dearth in this country; scrub (a vital
but derided habitat); undrained wetlands; and
wild, healthy rivers. But there’s something
else, something whose absence is less visible
but just as important. Wolves.
Not just wolves, but any large or middling
terrestrial predators. We talk here of wolves
and lynx as “top” predators. But our native top
predators, until modern humans fi nished them
o , were lions, hyenas, bears and scimitar cats.
Wolves and lynx would better be described as
mesopredators. The wolf that didn’t howl helps
solve the mystery of how this country, for all its
love of nature, remains one of the most
ecologically barren places on Earth.
A few years ago, and centuries after the last
defi nite record in Britain (an animal killed in
Sutherland in 1621), we started talking about
wolves again. We also fl irted with the idea of
reintroducing lynx. Then we forgot again. While
rewilding has spread further and faster in the
past 10 years than I could have dreamed, it
follows a certain pattern, described by
ecologists as “non-trophic”. Trophic rewilding
means bringing back important missing
species, to restore ecological processes and
create self-regulating systems. Instead, most
of our rewilded places, while now much richer
in nature, remain closely managed by people.
People assume the role of wild predators,
limiting the number of herbivores and moving
them around. That’s fi ne as far as it goes. But
we’re not very good at it.
Until the early 20th century, deer were absent
from much of Britain. The roe deer was extinct
in England, the red deer confi ned to isolated
pockets, and non-native fallow deer to deer
parks and grand estates. A century later,
Britain has six species of deer, four of them
exotic: red, roe, fallow, Reeves’ muntjac,
Chinese water deer and Japanese sika. Up to a
point, the expansion of the deer population
was a great success. Beyond that point, it’s a
tremendous failure. Deer have done so well
Howl if you hink reinroducing
op predors would id
biodiversiy
Without wolves or
lynx, our ecosysems
remin brren,
depleed nd overrun
by prolifering deer
By George Monbio
(except in Wales) that they now present a major
problem.
There are no reliable estima