Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 95

land floor is peculiar in that it is often dominated by a single species,
such as dog's mercury, wild garlic, bluebells, bracken, hart's tongue,
male fern or brambles. These monocultures, like fields of wheat or
rapeseed, may in some cases be the result of human intervention, such
as the extirpation of the boar. To visit the Białowieza Forest in eastern
Poland, which is as close to being an undisturbed ecosystem as any
remaining in Europe, in May, when dozens of flower species jostle
each other in an explosion of colour, is to see how much Britain is
missing, and the extent to which boar transform their environment.
I understand people's concerns about the loss of those uninterrupted
carpets of bluebells that have made some British woods famous. They
are, I agree, stunning, just as fields of lavender or flax are stunning, but
to me they are an indication not of the wealth of the ecosystem but of
its poverty. One of the reasons why bluebells have been able to crowd
out other species in the woods in which they grow is because the animal
which previously kept them in check no longer roams there. Wild boar
and bluebells live happily together, but perhaps not wild boar and only
bluebells. By rooting and grubbing in the forest floor, by creating little
ponds and miniature wetlands in their wallows, boar create habitats for
a host of different plants and animals, a shifting mosaic of tiny ecologi-
cal niches, opening and closing as the sounders pass through. 14 Boar 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.
As the boar I watched were demonstrating, they allow trees to grow
in places currently hostile to them. Another experiment, more
advanced than this one, had revealed that where boar are allowed to
root, both pine and birch seedlings establish themselves freely, whereas
in the brakes without boar there is scarcely any regeneration. 15 In the
enclosure I visited, the researchers had noticed that robins and dun-
nocks follow the boar around, feeding where they have overturned
the ground. It could be that the robin evolved alongside the boar,
rather as the oxpecker has evolved alongside large mammals in
Africa, and that in the absence of boar it has now adopted human
gardeners, who provide the same service.
The British government has washed its hands of the decision for
which it should be responsible: what, if anything, to do about the
returning boar. It has given landowners, both public and private, the