Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
were feeble creatures, unable even to dig burrows. They were essentially domesticated animals, kept for
food and fur. King Henry VIII had people dig burrows for them.
37
Only in the nineteenth century, when
their commercial value began to fade, was the new, improved, self-reliant version let loose across the
English countryside.
Another naturalized alien of longer standing is the house mouse, which hails from the Middle East
and probably reached Britain with the Romans. Fallow deer came with William the Conqueror in the
eleventh century. That was also about when rabbits arrived from Iberia. Both were introduced for the
same purpose, to provide a source of meat on poor heaths. Britons also seem relaxed about common
pheasants, brought by the Saxons under Edward the Confessor and highly valued since Tudor times.
Many “native” birds are not so native. The little owl (
Athene noctua
), for instance, first arrived from
Italy in the nineteenth century in the luggage of the eccentric traveler Charles Waterton. He had bought
a dozen in a bird market at the Pantheon in Rome. Five made it back to his estate in Yorkshire, where he
released them. It is not clear if they survived, but a later flock set free in Kent by ornithologist Edmund
Meade-Waldo in 1874 spread widely, and they have been at home ever since.
38
The distinction between alien and native, and between domesticated and wild, is perhaps most con-
fusing with wild boar (
Sus scrofa
). This is the only species known to have become extinct in Britain
but then to have returned of its own accord as a free-roaming creature. In the Middle Ages there were
a million or more boars roaming the woodlands of England. They disappeared from the wild some five
hundred years ago, and they vanished from managed estates in the eighteenth century. But when their
meat became popular again in the 1980s, foreign animals were brought in to stock new boar farms.
There were soon escapes. An especially expansive wild population was established in South East Eng-
land after the Great Storm of 1987 destroyed the fences of a boar farm.
39
The new wild boar has had bad press. Some see it as an alien that should be repelled. In 2014,
the British government began culling a herd of around eight hundred animals that had been rampaging
through gardens, panicking horses, and rooting up crops around the Forest of Dean in the West of Eng-
land, on the grounds that the animals could be carrying diseases.
40
But is the wild boar an alien or a
returning old English native? In law this matters a lot. Aliens are to be expunged, but the return of nat-
ives is a policy priority. Maybe the robins in the countryside have got it right. Robins follow the rooting
boars around as assiduously as they do human gardeners digging the soil, and for similar reasons. Envir-
onmental journalist George Monbiot says, “Boars are the untidiest animals to have lived in this country
since the Ice Age. This should commend them to anyone with an interest in the natural world.”
41
I agree.
Many of those invading species accused of pushing out natives have simply moved into ecological
space created by the decline of the natives. This is a recurrent theme in the story of aliens. The American
mink (
Neovison vison
) spread widely across Britain in the mid-twentieth century, after escaping from
hundreds of fur farms. It was widely blamed for the collapse of the number of otters (
Lutra lutra
) along
British rivers at that time, the argument being that it outcompeted the otters for food along riverbanks.
But in the past twenty years, otters have made a strong comeback—at the expense of mink. It begins
to look more likely that the mink simply took advantage of the otter's decline, rather than causing it.
Something else saw off the otter—mostly likely agricultural pesticides. As the worst of the chemicals
have been withdrawn, the otters have returned.
42
Deer too create a problem for our simple distinctions between good natives and bad aliens. The nat-
ive red deer (
Cervus elaphus
) has become a major pest across Scotland. An adaptable animal, it has
thrived too well since its former woodland habitat across Scotland was erased. Now its grazing prevents
new saplings growing. Meanwhile, Britain's population of Chinese water deer (
Hydropotes inermis
) is
of growing global importance. Its British population began as an import in the 1890s by the Duke of
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