In Conor Jameson's brilliant book Silent Spring Revisited, he reminds us how long it took for the UK Government to ban the class of pesticides that was decimating our bird of prey populations in the 1960's. Despite long being aware of the toxic nature of these chemicals, it was not until 1972 that they were banned. It took nearly a decade of campaigning by the RSPB and others to finally convince the old MAFF to do the right thing.
Persistence is one of the most precious ingredients of good environmentalism.
Want to strengthen wildlife laws? That's about 8 years of your life.
Want to see off a planning proposal that threatens a precious wildlife site? That might take five years or more. And even then, those pesky proposals have a habit of cropping up again (viz plans for a Severn barrage or a Thames airport).
Want to reform the Common Agriculture Policy? That's a lifetime's effort. Even then you might need a few children or grandchildren to help you with that one.
And when it comes to habitat recreation (a hot topic in the current biodiversity offsetting debate), you need to plan wisely and think in the long term.
To create a functioning reedbed good enough for breeding bittern, you may need anything up to 15 years, for wet grassland it may take a decade, but for woodlands you obviously need longer (maybe 60 years before a new Caledonian pine forest is good enough for capercaillie) and as for peatlands - well they take even longer - anything up to 10,000 years.
But the return on investment can be massive. My recent visit to Sutton Fen reminded me of the fabulous strides that we have made in restoring reedbeds over the past decade and a half: through two large-scale collaborative EU LIFE-Nature projects, at least 300 ha of reedbed has been created and 700ha restored in Britain. We know this has clearly benefited bitterns, which have increased from 11 to 120 booming males since 1997, but we now also know they can be fabulous for other wildlife.
Our ‘Bringing Reedbeds to Life’ project run by RSPB in partnership with Natural England and others, was established in 2009. Through a series of reedbed audits and a more detailed study of the habitat requirements of reedbed invertebrates, amphibians, fish and mammals, our ecologists assessed whether reedbeds are currently providing suitable conditions for specialist species to thrive and what needs to be done to improve them.
The main findings are outlined in an article in this month's issue of British Wildlife. The study demonstrated that despite being dominated by just one plant species, the Common Reed, reedbeds support a wealth of wildlife including many species of conservation importance with many of these living in the older drier and littered areas but also a high number benefitting from the newer, wetter and more open areas - the parts of reedbeds that are seldom visited.
We now know, that to maintain the quality of a reedbed, we need to rotate the management to provide the range of successional states at any one time and increase the variety of structure whilst looking to protect the existing importance of the existing importance of the old littered areas or those that are botanically diverse.
More frequent and higher impact management may be required to create vibrant, species-rich habitat. We are currently trialling such ‘rejuvenation’ through rotational drying, cutting, grazing and then re-wetting of areas on some of our reserves but it will be several years before we know how successful this has been.
As with so many areas of our work, because we are a persistent (and patient) bunch, we'll keep going until we find the answers to perfect reedbed management for wildlife...
Tony - am all for fireworks - they can be very exciting. But they need to be used in the right way on the right issue and at the right time. If we had bonfire night every single day of the year, people (maybe not me, but certainly others) would tire of them.