The Conservation Prison - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 216

Wales, which enforces the rules for managing the site, he disputed
some of what the trust says,* but he agreed that some of the rules
should be re- examined.
The owner of the land must keep its 'interest features' - particular
plants and animals, habitats or geology - in 'favourable condition'. 5
The guidelines defining this are quite strict. In places like Glaslyn, for
example, whose interest features include blanket bog and upland
heath, they insist that scattered trees or scrub should cover less than a
tenth of the bog and less than a fifth of the heath. 6
These standards reflect European rules, which list the kind of places
that countries must protect. 7 † Among them are wet heaths, moor-
grass, blanket bogs and other such sheepwrecks, of the kind
represented at Glaslyn. 8 One of the official reasons for choosing such
places is that they are internationally important, because they possess
'assemblages of key species'. 9
We have an international duty to preserve blasted heaths, bare
bogs, acid grasslands and other such sheep-scorched places because
they support a particular community of plants or animals or fungi or
lichens. But every habitat - whether a rainforest or a railway track -
supports a particular assemblage of species, a combination found
nowhere else. The assemblage is a product of the physical habitat. By
managing the land to protect one combination of species, we prevent
other combinations from developing there.
For example, the display board at the entrance to the Glaslyn reserve
explains that the species being protected there are red grouse, wheatear,
skylark and ring ouzel. The land is managed partly to maximize their
populations. But why? All four are close to the bottom of the list of
species considered to be 'of European conservation concern'. 10 It is
true that most are declining in the United Kingdom (the ring ouzel in
particular), but that applies to many birds, plenty of which are in far
greater trouble than these. In fact their relatively high numbers in Brit-
* Morgan Parry told me: 'We feel that we've had a fair degree of flexibility . . . I think
the staff involved would say that they actually have come quite a considerable distance
in terms of meeting objectives other than sustaining a barren upland environment.'
† The rules concerning the proportion of plants that may or may not grow in these
places are national interpretations of the European rules.