A Buzz in the Meadow (31 page)

You might question whether this matters. If we never even knew they were there, who is to miss them? As the broadcaster and journalist Marcel Berlins wrote in the
Guardian
newspaper in 2008:

Should we worry about the endangerment of all species? Pandas and tigers for sure, but armadillos? I passionately believe in saving the whale, the tiger, the orang-utan, the sea turtle and many other specifically identified species … Will the world and humankind be very much the poorer if we lose a thousand or so species?

I hardly know where to start in explaining how misguided and ignorant this is. Berlins seems to be under the misapprehension that there is only one species of whale and sea turtle for a start, but that is a minor point. His lack of regard for the humble armadillo is disturbing – I've always found them to be rather endearing. He seems to think that species are only important if we have identified them, which presumably means that he thinks the large majority of life on Earth is irrelevant. His choice of examples suggests that the only important species are big ones, which reflects a very poor understanding of ecology, but then who said journalists need to know anything about their subject before spouting their ill-informed opinions to millions? We do not stand to lose ‘a thousand or so' species, but are probably losing this many every month. The true foolishness at the heart of Berlins's statement is best explained by another quote, from Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 1981 book
Extinction
:

As you walk from the terminal toward your airliner, you notice a man on a ladder busily prying rivets out of its wing. Somewhat concerned, you saunter over to the rivet popper and ask him just what the hell he's doing. ‘I work for the airline – Growthmania Intercontinental,' the man informs you, ‘and the airline has discovered that it can sell these rivets for two dollars apiece.'

‘But how do you know you won't fatally weaken the wing doing that?' you inquire.

‘Don't worry,' he assures you. ‘I'm certain the manufacturer made this plane much stronger than it needs to be, so no harm's done. Besides, I've taken lots of rivets from this wing and it hasn't fallen off yet. Growthmania Airlines needs the money; if we didn't pop the rivets, Growthmania wouldn't be able to continue expanding. And I need the commission they pay me – fifty cents a rivet!'

As the Ehrlichs go on to explain, no sane person would fly on such a plane. At some point in the future the wing will fall off, but that point might not be at all predictable. In exactly the same way that plane-rivets perform a vital role, we know that the Earth's organisms perform a whole range of important functions. Bees pollinate flowers, flies recycle dung, bacteria in root nodules fix nitrogen from the air, plants release oxygen for us to breathe, store the carbon that we release and provide us with fuel, food, clothing and drugs. Carbon and nitrogen cycles, which are vital to the health of ecosystems, involve hundreds or thousands of species, as do the processes that produce and maintain healthy soils. We rely on complex webs of interactions between species for food, clean water and clean air – interactions that we are only just beginning to understand. As with the rivets, we cannot say which species are vital and which are not. We haven't named perhaps 90 per cent of species on Earth, let alone worked out what they do. We cannot say how many species we need. What we do know is that we are losing species – popping rivets – at an unprecedented rate, and that this is reducing the ability of the Earth to support us.

There is already evidence that there are not enough pollinators to visit our crops in some parts of the world, and that as a result yields are dropping. In the apple and pear orchards of Sichuan in China, farmers have to resort to hand-pollinating every flower on the trees, sending their children clambering up to reach the flowers on the higher branches, because insects have been eradicated by the heavy use of pesticides. In India yields of insect-pollinated crops such as many vegetables are falling, due to a shortage of bees. Analyses of data from around the world by the Argentinian scientist Lucas Garibaldi have recently demonstrated that yields of insect-pollinated crops have become variable and unreliable, compared to wind-pollinated crops such as wheat. Pollination is one of the most tangible, readily explained examples of man's dependence on wildlife, but there are many more.

For all our intelligence, we do not seem to have learned from our mistakes, or seem willing to take the dire predictions of our scientists seriously. Our track record since we walked out of Africa is not good. If we continue on our current trajectory, the future is bleak, just as it was for the Easter Islanders. As we erode the capacity of the Earth to support us, so food and water shortages will become more common, probably leading to famines and wars over the dwindling resources. The human population will inevitably drop, one way or another, and that process is not likely to be a pleasant one. There will simply not be enough resources to support our large cities, and it seems likely that our civilisation will crumble. Our children will lead much poorer and harder lives than we do today.

To some extent this depressing future is unavoidable, for the damage we have already done is considerable. The Earth's climate will continue to warm for decades, regardless of whatever action we take now, leading inevitably to famine and hardship. Countless species are already extinct, or exist only in relict populations that are doomed to extinction. But that is no argument not to act – and to act now. At a global level, conservation efforts so far have been a dismal failure. We need to up our game. The sooner we stop ravaging the Earth, the less awful our future will be.

This book is intended to inspire, to encourage everyone to cherish what we have, and to illustrate what wonders we stand to lose if we do not change our ways. Biodiversity matters, in all shapes and forms. Conservation is not just about Javan rhinos and snow leopards; it is just as much about bees and beetles, flowers and flies, bats and bugs. Places such as Chez Nauche are islands where nature can thrive, but at present they are too few and far between, and they are being lost far more quickly than they are being created, particularly in the tropics, where the majority of biodiversity lives.

Go outside, look and listen. The wack-wack bird is calling. For how much longer will we hear its lonesome cry?

Epilogue

The wack-wack bird may have so far eluded identification, but the ferocious snake- and owl-eating beast finally gave up its secrets after nine years. It taunted me in the meantime … by leaving partly eaten corpses, not just of the owl and snake, but also of two kestrels, presumably snaffled from their roosts in the eaves of the house, and a rat. The occasional footprints in soft mud or on the Velux windows showed it to have five clawed toes, front and back.

After eight years during which we had made no progress whatsoever in identifying the beast, I decided to buy a trap. Cage traps are readily available in France – most hardware stores sell them – although I dread to think what they are generally used for and what happens to the animals they catch. My boys and I spent a summer setting the trap in places where we had seen the footprints, baited with all manner of delicacies. We tried eggs, raw meat, cooked meats and peanut butter, all to no avail. We tried peaches, grapes and apples, but the beast was not impressed. We tried cheeses – surely it could not resist my favourite, Saint Agur? It seemed that it could. Even the dormouse's favourite, Cantal cheese, drew a blank. In desperation we moved on to more exotic temptations: a selection of patisseries, including
pain au chocolat
,
tartelette au citron
, chocolate éclairs, but still with no success.

We moved the cage from place to place, trying all sorts of locations, and with an ever-growing pile of different baits in the trap. Finally, early one drizzly morning towards the end of the stay, the boys came sprinting back from an early-morning reconnoitre shouting, ‘We've got it!' Success! I jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and sprinted to where we had placed the trap, near the horse-chestnut tree at the top of the drive. Inside the trap was a large, bedraggled and very angry feral cat. I was pretty sure this was not the mythical beast – cats' claws retract, so they are not visible in footprints. Releasing the cat was a nerve-racking business as it was hissing and spitting, seemingly intent on revenge for its incarceration.

The next year I tried a different approach – a camera trap. This nifty gadget has a motion-sensitive camera and an infrared flash, so that it can photograph in darkness. We set it up, starting in one of the barns, with the camera trained on a chicken's egg. The camera has a digital display on the front, which reveals how many photographs it has taken during the night. On the first morning it had taken three pictures – although the egg was still there. It was very exciting to download the pictures on to my laptop and look through them, but there was nothing there: the camera seemed to randomly take occasional snaps, perhaps set off by passing moths or other tiny creatures.

We tried again, running through another vast selection of French titbits, to little effect. We photographed endless mice and a few voles. They at least seemed to appreciate our efforts. On one occasion a large piece of bread and peanut butter simply disappeared from right in front of the camera – there were early-evening shots, with the bait sitting there, and then shots with no bait, but no pictures of the moment when something had snuck in and made off with the bread. Clearly the camera wasn't entirely reliable, unless we were dealing with a creature that moved faster than the speed of light.

We started combining the camera trap and the cage trap – baiting the cage trap and sprinkling food all around it, and then setting up the camera to photograph anything that came near. We caught two more furious cats in the cage, and managed to photograph a nocturnal visit by a stray dog and even a roe deer, but no beast. But nine years after I purchased Chez Nauche, long after we had become resigned to the fact that the beast would elude us for ever, suddenly there it was. Four photographs, in sequence, showing a magnificent beech marten – a chunkier European relative of the pine marten – sauntering slowly around the cage trap. It was a beautiful animal, with a rich chocolate-brown coat, a creamy chest and a huge bushy tail. In the final photograph it looked disdainfully at the camera, its nose in the air, as if sniffing the wind. And then it was gone.

Notes

1. A Stroll in the Meadow

2. The Insect Empire