Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve been looking and back and forth over agri-environment schemes over the last few days. Part of this is for work, but mainly it’s to get a broader understanding of how farmers are being rewarded for the conservation work they do. Under the agri-environment and climate change scheme (AECS), land managers are allowed to apply for a number of options targeted at various outcomes. There are payments available to boost pollinators and rewet peatlands, but of course my eye is always drawn to schemes which support wading birds.

It’s good to know that farmers can claim for some aspects of predator control to benefit waders under the AECS, and this clearly represents progress towards common sense. We now have a vast weight of evidence to show that predator control can drastically improve the breeding success of some waders, and there’s a general direction of travel which has begun to normalise the management of abundant predators like foxes and crows. By allowing public money to be spent on predator control, lawmakers and civil servants have recognised the practice as an important conservation tool.

But at the risk of probing this subject to the point of pedantry, farmers are only eligible to claim money for predator control if they’re also undertaking relevant habitat management work. That makes sense to me, since the two go hand in hand together. But things become inconsistent when you try to reverse that link because you can receive payments for habitat management work without any obligation to undertake predator control.

Most mainstream conservation organisations have stopped trying to increase wader productivity on the basis of habitat management alone. It doesn’t seem to work, and waders have declined so rapidly that we’ve had to take a different tack. It’s pretty unusual for well-funded teams of ecologists and conservationists to produce an increase in waders without corresponding work to suppress predators, so it’s downright ambitious to expect farmers to do it.

Of course it’s wildly provocative to insist that predator control should be a mandatory condition of these schemes. People hate the idea of killing, and the public would be outraged to think of their money being spent on bloodshed and wire cages. It can be hard enough to get land managers tuned into the AECS without this additional burden of death and destruction, so no wonder it’s slipped off the radar. But in terms of incentivising people to kill wildlife, there are some good precedents already in place. If you take money to create a piece of woodland, you can be penalised for failing to shoot sufficient numbers of deer which might otherwise harm the public’s investment. If you don’t like the idea of killing deer yourself, there are plenty of contractors who’ll do it for you – you can wring your hands and moan into the low clouds, but there’s no argument. Lots of work has gone into raising public awareness so that most people can now rationalise the death of a deer to protect a tree, but I’m afraid that we’re still years away from accepting the death of a fox to protect a lapwing.

I’ve got no doubt that the AECS has delivered some real benefits for farmers who want to improve the diversity of their land, but this is clearly an inconsistent approach towards scientific evidence and the hard facts of predator control. Elsewhere in the funding documentation, it explains that you can use payments to buy larsen traps, but not “larsen mate” traps (ie clam traps). “Larsen mate” traps are more controversial and their use has been under review, but they’re perfectly legal and there’s no objective reason why they shouldn’t be financed. It’s just another fine detail which points to the fact that we’re in a grey area. The government has accepted the empirical need to manage predators and now we’re in a process of gentle compromise which factors in less concrete notions of aesthetics and subjective personal taste. 

I describe this as a “direction of travel” because I hope that predator control will continue to be normalised and land managers might be proactively encouraged to do some more of this work. Much of this work is based on education and the proactive management of public awareness, but I just hope that we arrive at that destination before it’s too late to save wading birds.