Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
complex cultural—ecological story of welcome for rather than resistance to the
coypu, which we can trace in the work of Day, to whom we return below, and in
that of Ellis and his new naturalist colleagues. The new naturalist movement indeed
displayed a general openness to alien species as an inevitable element in an evolving
ecology. Richard Fitter's urban ecology,
London's Natural
History,
offered one
example of such an outlook (Fitter 1945; Matless 1998); likewise James Fisher's
Presidential Address to the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society in 1950
emphasised the need to welcome any future new bird 'invaders' (Fisher 1950). In
his review of
Britain's Nature Reserves,
Nature Conservancy director Max Nicholson
(1957:72) reflected on the coypu:
While opinions are divided, there seems so far to be no evidence that the
Coypu is anything but beneficial, and while there has been considerable
discussion about increasing the area of open water for navigation in the Broads,
the Coypu can claim to have been so far the only creature to do anything
effective about it.
The extent of open water was a key economic and ecological issue: the Nature
Conservancy's 1965
Report on Broadland
recorded increases in open water of
between 14 per cent and 40 per cent in broads on the upper Bure between 1946 and
1952, crediting this to the coypu (Nature Conservancy 1965:20). Many feared the
ultimate disappearance of the Broads through ecological succession, a fear perhaps
accentuated by the discovery in the 1950s that the Broads were the product of
medieval peat-digging (Lambert
et al.
1960; Williamson 1997). If the Broads could
be made so swiftly by human action, and were not natural elements in the
landscape, then might they quickly disappear in a natural loss of unique ecology?
And if this was an artificial landscape, then was its maintenance by an imported
animal against the grain of the place?
Writing on 'The Coypu Threat in East Anglia' for
Country Life
in December
1960, Ellis (1960:1591) noted that 'for a long time the conclusions reached were
that coypus in moderate numbers had a beneficial effect in keeping local waterways
clear'. Ellis weighed up pro- and anti-coypu arguments here, on radio, and in the
Broads
New Naturalist volume, welcoming their clearing of vegetation but wary of
erosive burrowing in great numbers, the threat to 'characteristic plants of the
broads' (though those resistant to coypu were thriving), and the consumption of
crops (Ellis 1965:225-228). Ellis (1960:1591) considered that control was needed,
but that eradication would be impossible 'without annihilating almost everything
else in the area'. The alienness of the coypu is not in itself a problem here; indeed, in
Ellis's writing this alienness is recognised, pondered and enjoyed. The existence of
'moderate numbers' of coypu would be no problem; they could be ecologically
beneficial, provide a source of local income through trapping, and could even be
enjoyed for food. Ellis, who ate the animal regularly and wore a hat of coypu fur,
secretly served the beast to a British Association for the Advancement of Science
dinner in Norwich in 1961 (Stone 1988:102); the Association had made excursions