BRITAIN: A NATION TIED IN KNOTWEED - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 53

Bedford at Woburn Park. Some of the duke's herd escaped into the English countryside in the 1940s.
Since then, its numbers have dwindled back home along the River Yangtze. Of the ten thousand be-
lieved left in the wild, Britain has a thousand. (Another outlier population inhabits the demilitarized
zone between North and South Korea.)
I find the fear of foreign species in Britain and the United States distressing and perverse. So I was
interested to find that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds now often takes a benign view of
new arrivals—perhaps because many of its million members like nothing more than a new bird to go
and watch. Britain is a happy hunting ground for new bird species, often because of the attractions of
changing climate. Twenty new wetland species have arrived since 1960 alone, including the little egret,
which first bred in Britain in 1996; the Eurasian spoonbill ( Platalea leucorodia ), in 1998; the pector-
al sandpiper, in 2004; the cattle egret, in 2008; the purple heron, in 2010; and the great white egret, in
2012. “We are not against all exotics,” the RSPB's Grahame Madge told me. “We have many colonists
arriving from Europe, partly probably in response to climate change. We won't introduce them or help
them, but if they come then we will ensure that they are at home here.” They won't be taking shotguns
into their protected areas, he says. “The birds that have established here have been relatively benign.
The little egret, for instance, is a favorite now.”