This is a tale of two wildlife lovers, one a professional scientist, the other an obsessive amateur mammal spotter, who go on adventures – often with one of their children in tow – to try to assess the current state of British wildlife.
They have a specific interest in Britain’s wild mammals, and take us on delightful journeys in search of declining numbers – generally speaking – of beavers, wild boars, pine martens, voles, bats, squirrels, hedgehogs and seals.
These stories are relevant to Ireland. We have many of the same native mammals also suffering official neglect and hostility from vested interests.
The authors’ sadness is clear, yet the text is more readable because they don’t take themselves too seriously, and scatter the text with memorable details.
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For example, it was news to me that some people like to rub specially prepared boar urine on the noses of children in order to rid the little ones of worms. Or that 20,000 red squirrels – imported from Europe – were sold in London in 1837 alone, where it was fashionable for Victorians to keep them as pets.
Readers also learn about the rise of beavers, in areas like Devon, where animals have been dropped illegally on to the landscape – “beaver bombing”.
The beavers’ success in recolonising many rivers and landscapes they had disappeared from has triggered the ire of anglers, who say they block salmon and trout from migration upriver due to their tree felling and dam building.
The stories of conflict between native mammals and powerful forces who want them dead and gone are repeated in place after place, all around Britain.
In the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, for example, wild boar thriving after escaping from a local boar farm are portrayed as a threat to human safety.
That’s despite the fact that all the evidence shows the boars mind their own business, stay away from humans, while they dig, root and turn over the soil; a process biologists say leads naturally to an explosion of plant biodiversity.
Britain, and Ireland, too, have become hostile places to our mammals, due to deforestation and changes in our landscapes, as well as human hostility.
The authors say the situation requires urgent official interventions to save species from oblivion. Yet, with Britain ranking 189th out of 218 countries when it comes to biodiversity intactness, the suspicion is that more native mammals will follow the wolf, brown bear and elk into extinction.
