Rewilding

It's been any interesting week. On the TV BBC autumnwatch have been showing the arrival of the Barnacle geese at WWT Caerlaverock, whilst up on Islay they are preparing to shoot a quarter of the birds that migrate there. I imagine the production team have had to put done some strong rules about what the presenters can say.

They did however have a supplementary programme that went out online with George Monbiot  talking about rewilding. His argument is to allow area's of the UK to revert to their natural ecosystems by reducing or removing Sheep, Grouse moors, and deer stalking from the uplands and reintroducing keystone species, such as Lynx, Beaver, etc to these areas. You can see George explaining the idea to the National parks here: Time to go wild
Or read his excellent book Feral.

This idea sounds quite idealistic at first but it has been shown to work. The reintroduction of Red Kites and White tailed eagles has been very successful, Wild boar numbers are increasing (from escapes rather than reintroduction) and there are noe Beavers on the river Tay. This week plans were announced to reintroduce Pine Martens into upland forests areas in Wales.  This project could lead the way to reintroduce Red Squirrels as the Martens will predate the greys.

Of course these ideas will be ridiculed by the farming and hunting lobbies, but as George points out in the video these people survive due to the huge subsides they receive from the EU and government (ie you and me). More and more people and organisations are coming around to his way of thinking, hopefully in the near future a large scale trial might be allowed to take place, we can only keep putting pressure onto the various bodies that control our countryside and try and educate the land owners in to the benefits it would bring.