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| Image courtesy of Wikipedia 'Seawall' by Liftarn |
I was out and about the other day on the gorgeous Essex
coast when I got chatting to two women who were walking round the sea wall. The
walls are one of the joys of the Essex coastline, providing the walker with a
panoramic view of both the sea and the land, with the former desperate to
breach the defence and take back the territory we have stolen from it; the
latter cheekily thumbing its nose from behind the safety of the wall.
The women were going the long route around the wall and were
kitted out with boots, fleeces and binoculars, so clearly they had an interest
in the natural world. There was much to see. With the tide half out, waders had
been gathering in large numbers and a flock of over 200 Golden Plovers was
passing overhead as we chatted. I had already seen Harriers over distant
Northey Island and had been chuffed to bits to find a Pompilid wasp dragging
its prey, a Woodlouse Spider, across the path.
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| Moth tent |
We remarked on the huge number of moth ‘tents’ we could see
in the surrounding scrub and I said it was good to see so many this year, there
having been far fewer in recent years. These tents protect the larvae while
they grow and can be quite surprisingly robust. One of the women said there
were far too many moth tents and she hoped they did not kill off the trees.
In other words, ‘trees good, moths bad’. This got me
thinking.
Firstly, what do we
regard as ‘wildlife’?
There appears to be a hierarchy in the way we regard our
wildlife and this is often reinforced with spectacular ignorance by the British
press. The famous biologist E. O. Wilson advanced the notion of ‘biophilia’ but
perhaps we are instead in the grip of ‘biophobia’. Mammals, birds and trees:
good. Amphibians, dragonflies and fungi: so so. Wasps, snakes and thistles:
bad. Sadly, the consequence is that often only the first group actually count
as ‘wildlife’ as the others are too horrible to contemplate. Why is this? Are
we conditioned at an early age to appreciate the cute, fluffy and accessible
and to despise the challenging, awkward and stingy? If so, we have problems, as
ecosystems rely on far more than the cute and fluffy to make them work. Where
would we be without the pollinators (including wasps and flies) and the
detritivores (slugs and slime moulds)? We would have no food and we would be up
to our knees in waste, that’s where!
Secondly, why are the
British obsessed with trees?
I suspect this is partly to do with what we regard as
‘nature’ and partly as a result of confusion around general green issues such
as climate change, global temperature regulation and sustainable timber
harvesting. More trees must be good, because we keep telling ourselves it is
the case.
People sometimes say to me ‘Well, France and Germany have
far more trees than we do’. But it’s not a competition. And even if we could,
do we really want to cover our wonderful heathlands, fens and grasslands in
trees? Of course not.
Thirdly, what’s wrong
with a dead tree?
My co-chattees (as Alan Partridge may have described them) were
concerned that the trees might be killed by the presence of the moths. I do not
want to seem mean but my first thought was ‘so what?’, although I promise I did
not actually say it out loud.
The fact is, we are now beginning to realise that dead wood
has a key role to play in the way ecosystems work and we need a lot more of it.
Conservationists now wince at our collective reaction to the storm of 1987 after
which everyone rushed to tidy up the countryside and remove all that lovely
dead wood. A handy publication is the Forestry Commission’s ‘Life in the
Deadwood’ which I urge you to find online. A dead tree is a good tree!
And on that happy note, until next time…
Written by Alan Roscoe
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