Invasive and Introduced Plants and Animals by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1099101
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The way forward: a sustainable future for Britain’s raptors?

We live in more enlightened times. Yes, undoubtedly the fate of Britain’s birds of prey has changed as human attitudes, values and perceptions of them have shifted quite dramatically in a very short space of time in the mid 20th century. Environmental history research has shown that the first fledgling moments in that attitudinal shift can be traced back to the last two decades of the 19th century, and the efforts of landowners like the Grants of Rothiemurchus (who were protecting and cherishing ‘their’ ospreys by around 1880) should not be forgotten (Smout and Lambert, 1999, pp41–44). Indeed, these pioneering efforts should be celebrated as the first historical murmurings in a wider raptor conservation story (Lambert, 2001, pp74–91). That some landowners were willing, for one species at least, to stand against the dominant ethos of the time, namely structured, funded raptor persecution in the name of late-Victorian game protection on estates, surely forces us at the start of the 21st century to similarly seek to redefine our relationship and carve out a more sustainable future for our bird of prey populations, not just because they are beautiful and we cherish them, not just because they attract us in our thousands as wildlife tourists, but because they are also key indicators of the health of upland ecosystems in the 21st century.

Roy Dennis, doyen of British raptor conservation, who cut his teeth in the field as a youthful and passionate warden at Loch Garten in the 1960s working under George Waterston, has always sought a dynamic and visionary future for birds of prey, politically, socially, culturally and geographically. Roy sees no harm in challenging established conservation doctrine, challenging public perceptions and pushing boundaries (both cultural and spatial). His travels in North America and Central and Eastern Europe (Dennis, in Lambert, 1998, pp5–7) have convinced him that people and predators (both avian and mammalian) can live well together, and as Director of the Highland Foundation for Wildlife (founded in 1995) he urges a new (re)wilding vision for the UK, based on species reintroductions, species translocations and species education programmes. At the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club (SOC) Annual conference in Inverness in March 2010, Roy urged that we needed to be bold now, not to think in terms of individual bird species as we have in the past, but rather in terms of broader functioning ecosystems. Our biggest failure, he warns, ‘is not that the project we tried failed, but that we never tried’. He asserts that the major constraint against all this (re)wilding ambition is social and cultural, not ecological (Dennis, in McMillan, 2010, p138). Roy is unashamedly ecologically radical in his future vision; he dislikes inactivity by conservationists or their political masters; rather he celebrates proactive wildlife management and innovative conservation research. This societal and political aspect of the nature–people relationship was picked up in a remarkable photographic essay (2007), and later touring exhibition, addressing our complex, changing and contradictory response to predators in Britain.

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