27 July, 2001

John Sheard chooses to concentrate on a rare piece of good news from the countryside this summer.

TO BE frank, I should this week be concentrating on yet another Government cock-up in the foot and mouth crisis. The Prime Minister's decision to suspend cleaning and disinfecting work on culled farms is, quite frankly, totally inexplicable (see Foot and mouth latest, July 24 and 25).

But, like many other country folk, I am sick and tired of all the bad news this miserable summer so I thought I would take the easy (and much more pleasant) way out by discussing the good bit - the fact that, apart from the blue tit, all species of British birds are on the up.

Now I have been writing professionally about countryside and conservation matters for some 40 years and, I have to admit, for much of that time it was devoted to doom and gloom.

For most of that time, I have been in contact with one of the most admirable but least known of our conservation bodies, the British Trust for Ornithology, who have with the aid of up to 30,000 volunteer bird watchers been keeping a census of our bird population.

Up until the past couple of years, the census results regularly made gloomy reading: many of our favourite birds, like the skylark and the plover, were in steep decline, thanks to new farming practices.

Millions of songbirds died or lost their natural habitats as thousands of miles of hedgerows were grubbed out to make bigger fields for bigger machines, a policy now much discredited from the (at last) scrapped MAFF.

New housing estates on green field sites, new motorways and other building development continually nibbled away at the countryside, leaving our wild birds with nowhere to go.

Now the reasons for this are complex: mild winters caused by global warming have meant that more birds survive; birds of prey are less persecuted (although there have been isolated, unwanted poisonings in North Yorkshire); and planners are now much more circumspect - any major new development must undergo an environmental audit before a go-ahead is given).

But, best of all I believe, has been a change of attitude. Suburban gardens brimming with feeding tables and nut bags support millions of birds. Major landowners, whose game keepers once shot hawks out of hand because they fed of game bird chicks, now order them to protect the nests of rare hawks against nest-robbing egg collectors!

And when, at long last, foot and mouth is eradicated (a scenario still not in sight, sadly) there is no doubt whatsoever that our farmers will be urged to return to more traditional methods. With luck, the Government will pay them to do so.

All this is very, very good news, not just for birds but also for mammals like the otter, fish and rare insects like butterflies. As Wellington remarked after Waterloo, "it was a damn close run thing."

We came very close to wiping out whole species of birds. To use another quote from another great statesman, Winston Churchill, who said after the Battle of El Alamein: "This is not the beginning of the end … but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."