A conservation masterclass

Reflections: What wildlife needs and how to provide it. Avery, M. 2023. Pelagic Publishing, London, UK. xv + 237 pp. £20.00 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-78427-390-3.

I have met Mark Avery occasionally at wildlife conservation events. He is a larger-than-life personality, sometimes outspoken, but always informed and rational. He often rages but never rants. He worked for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a British conservation charity, for 25 years and was its Director of Conservation from 1998 to 2011.

Compared with his earlier books, this is gentler and more reflective, as the title suggests. It deserves to be his most influential book yet. It is an object lesson in simple, almost conversational writing, aimed at capturing the interest of anyone with a broad interest in the natural world, then gently leading them into considering difficult policy issues. Yet, it does not speak down to those of us who think we know something about those issues. All of us in conservation science, wherever we are in the world, could take lessons from his style and approach.

As Avery concedes, the book is very much English in its focus, right from its rather twee front cover of idealized English countryside with iconic English wildlife. Will it appeal to an international readership? To be frank, some of the scenes evoked in his first chapter, “Glimpses of Wildlife,” do not even resonate with me as a Scot! I do not have a local wood where I lament the disappearance of the nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), and reintroduced red kites (Milvus milvus) do not gladden the skies above my home. However, I can easily transpose my own local perceptions instead: the disappearance of the house martins (Delichon urbica) that once nested in the eaves of our old house and the reintroduced white-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) that take my breath away with their sheer size as they soar occasionally over our neighboring craggy hillside. The experiences he writes about are ones we can all identify with, wherever we live, even if his examples are mostly English.

Chapter 2 is about the state of wildlife in the United Kingdom. Some of that wildlife is internationally important, like the UK's seabird populations, but many of the lessons he draws from the British experience, its successes, failures, and current challenges hold lessons for other parts of the world. He identifies “Four Horsemen of the [Ecological] Apocalypse”: invasive species, overharvesting, pollution, and habitat loss. I thought I had found a rare oversight. I would have proposed habitat mismanagement and undermanagement as a fifth rider, but he later expands his fourth category to “habitat loss and deterioration,” which is fair enough. I am pretty sure those horsemen are just as destructive throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand, North America, and other parts of the world that I know less well.

His chapter “What is Wildlife Conservation?” has clear international relevance. I welcome his criticism of those in political circles who increasingly refer to the “wildlife and climate change crisis.” That is not one crisis but 2. Sometimes measures to address one also help the other, the restoration of peatlands or the management of old-growth forest, for example. However, the planting of serried ranks of trees for carbon sequestration, whose impact on climate change is controversial, is valueless for wildlife.

I hope international readers will draw inspiration from the chapter on wildlife conservation successes in the United Kingdom. The British have been doing wildlife conservation for longer than many other countries. We have made mistakes along the way, which hopefully others might be guided to avoid, but we have done some things well. The Protection of Birds Act 1954 was a progressive and ambitious piece of legislation, and 70 years later, it is still proving its worth. So are measures to ban pesticides that once affected so dreadfully populations of peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus). Private projects, like the rewilding of the 1400-ha Knepp Estate in West Sussex, are inspirational examples for others in the United Kingdom as well as internationally. The spread of the pine marten (Martes martes) from a refuge in northwestern Scotland across Scotland and into northern England is a heartening success story. It is largely thanks to the colonizing ability of the species itself after the decline in trapping pressure following World War One, although far-sighted reintroduction projects in mid-Wales and southern England have accelerated that range expansion.

The story of the Flow Country in northern Scotland may well bemuse international readers: an unforeseen quirk in tax laws led to massive planting of non-native trees across internationally important peatlands. The eradication of rats from the seabird breeding island of Ailsa Craig in southwestern Scotland perhaps should not count as a UK success because it was inspired and advised by the work of conservationists in New Zealand.

Inevitably, branding something a success is a hostage to fortune. The story of Fonseca's seed fly (Botanophila fonsecai) should be truly inspirational—and it was at the time when Avery drafted his text. It is a small fly, endemic to around 100 m of a coastal dune system in northeastern Scotland, where yet another links golf course was proposed. A coalition of wildlife organizations campaigned to protect the fly and its habitat, plus the scarce plants that grew alongside it. The local authority approved the planning application for the golf course, but this decision was eventually overruled by the Scottish government. Conservationists celebrated, and the fly presumably breathed a sigh of relief. But then, in 2022, as Avery notes in the appendix to the book, the developer resubmitted the scheme with only minor modifications, and the outcome of that bid is still awaited. Perhaps the real (international) lesson here is that developers in pursuit of profit can usually afford to be more patient and perseverant than conservationists.

Perhaps Avery tries a little too hard to be optimistic in his celebration of conservation successes. He discusses measures to reform or abolish the very British tradition of the recreational shooting of red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scotica). These are deliberately flushed or driven toward the assembled shooters on moorland areas burned to encourage the highest grouse population. He says that “the Scottish government has committed to licensing both the business of grouse shooting and the burning of vegetation, and in England Defra [the government department with responsibility for the environment] has brought in measures, feeble ones, to limit vegetation burning.” At the time of writing this review, however, it is far from certain whether the Scottish government has the courage or the parliamentary support to take these measures forward. As Avery is well aware, and as this case proves, the so-called sporting landowners are deeply infiltrated into the heart of the British political establishment and have an influence that conservationists can only envy.

Avery also cites “Marine Protected Areas, Highly Protected Marine Areas, or marine wildlife reserves—however you want to describe them” as a success. I disagree that these are synonyms. Most are protected on paper only or, at best, from a limited range of pressures. I question whether any of them in the United Kingdom are highly protected. On land, the British system of Sites of Special Scientific Interest, each notified for a range of special features, has probably helped stop major damage to these sites. However, their decline has been slow and insidious because they are essentially unmanaged. By 2021, only 38% of them were deemed to be in favorable condition, and the state of the special features of some sites had not even been assessed since 2009.

I hope international readers will aspire to rather higher standards of success in their countries. However, perhaps they will also take courage from Avery's reflections at the end of that chapter that “wildlife doesn't need that much help to thrive, it just needs a chance.” Perhaps they will be inspired by another conclusion that “when wildlife is missing, few regret its absence, but when it returns it is widely celebrated and appreciated.”

The course of the book logically leads into its most important chapter, entitled “Why Are We Failing So Badly?” It should be required reading for everyone involved in nature conservation in the United Kingdom, both in governmental and nongovernmental organizations. It is deeply depressing, but it is the product of Avery's 40-plus years of experience. Although the specifics are British, I think the lessons are much more general. He argues that “government has the power and the resources to rectify [the wildlife crisis], but only if it acts as a player, not a bystander….” He explains what he means by this: “In many environmental areas we exhort or incentivize people to do the right thing when we should simply tell them what to do.” I am sure that is something that conservationists should expect of governments anywhere in the world.

In the United Kingdom, we have a plethora of nongovernmental conservation bodies (NGOs), but Avery identifies the most influential, which he calls “the 28.” He talks about a time that he calls “peak NGO,” between the 1980s and 2010, when “the NGO community achieved a massive amount through expanding their horizons, their memberships, their ambitions, their incomes and their power to do good.” Since then, Avery suggests, “they have become tamer, more cowed, more distracted, and have lost focus.” He lists several reasons for this decline: failure to celebrate success, failure to buy more land, failure to call out government failure, and so on. I hope that will be a valuable lesson for other countries and regions where the NGO movement is younger and perhaps has not even reached peak NGO.

One reason for this change, he suggests, is that the bodies have changed the kind of supporters they attract from cause-led supporters, inspired by calls to action, to transactional supporters, those who join NGOs mainly for the benefits they offer in the belief that this helps their work. That certainly fits my experience with the NGOs I once enthusiastically supported. As Avery suggests, “if you recruit transactional members, then you spend more of your time giving them what they want and a bit less giving wildlife what it needs.”

The final chapter is entitled “What Wildlife Needs (And How to Provide It).” I am not going to offer a spoiler by listing Avery's 7 key proposals. Please read the book yourself so that you will see how these proposals fit in place. In combination, they are a powerful stimulus to thought and I hope to action. It will be wonderful if the book leads lots of readers with a general interest in wildlife through the maze of issues afflicting wildlife toward consideration of these proposals and how each of us can contribute to their achievement.

Some of the proposals are perhaps uniquely British. Acquiring larger land holdings is especially difficult in the United Kingdom, where a feudal system of land ownership still prevails. Thirty dukes within the British nobility between them own over 400,000 ha of land. The proposal to rewild the uplands will seem odd in those countries where most upland areas belong to the state and are left largely wild. However, “getting political to change the system” is a pretty universal incitement, at least where the political system allows such engagement.

I have only one very minor quibble with the book: I wish the useful notes, references, and further reading listed in the appendix had been highlighted at an appropriate point in the text, perhaps with a superscript numeral so that I could have followed up on these points individually when I was most inspired by the main text.

It seems appropriate to end with the words of Avery himself from the final paragraph of his book: “There is plenty of hope for the future, but the hope is predicated on action, and the action must be taken by us, not by some nebulous ‘them’—and the ‘us’ needs you to play your part to the full”. Amen to that!