Writing in the early 1980s, the historian Keith Thomas asked, “Who today has ever seen a red kite in England? Yet in sixteenth-century towns kites were so common that they would swoop down and snatch the food out of children’s hands.”[1]
The L-shaped fields north of the A40 that had previously been drenched in herbicide, have finally been ploughed. They must still have had some life in them, because the ploughing attracted about 30 red kites in a spectacle that many motorists must have witnessed in recent years while driving through the Chilterns. In Eynsham, kites are a familiar presence once again but not, as far as I know, a danger to hand-held lunchtime snacks.
It seems likely that the ploughed fields will simply be sowed with basic grass in a kind of life-restricting monoculture. We wait and see. But it is almost certain that, before they are built over by the garden village, they will not have time to return to the riot of wildlife, alongside food crops, that the previous tenant farmer so carefully created over a number of years.
From these fields, we recently saw, high on the circular ridge surrounding the O’Malley industrial site, a magnificently silhouetted roe deer watching us from a safe distance. We used to see up to eight roe deer at a time around here, but roadkill has relentlessly taken its toll of the local population.
The cynic might say, with some justification, that this is just as well, as deer no longer have natural predators and have become a menace to the balance of nature in some parts of the UK. Keith Thomas pointed out that “in the days of Aelfric”, the Abbot of Eynsham Abbey, shepherds “had to guard their flocks by night” because of the wolves. The wolf may have survived in high parts of England until the fifteenth century.
Probably, if we managed to force ourselves out of the house to walk the fields earlier in the morning or later in the evening, we would see more wildlife than we do. But occasionally we strike lucky. In a short space of time in a single morning in late May, we saw a quail on the drive, a sparrowhawk in the garden, a hare and buzzard in one field, and skylarks, swallows, finches, and other more common birds. We can only hope that planning law and practice is at last turning effectively and sufficiently fast towards preserving such local biodiversity.
In 1653, in more religious times, the English physician John Bulwer discussed whether it was lawful for humans “to destroy any one species of God’s creatures, though it were but the species of toads and spiders, because this were taking away one link of God’s chain, one note of his harmony”. As Keith Thomas says, you don’t need to believe in God to understand that removing any link in the ecological chain is dangerous.
[1] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800.