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Silent Fields: The long decline of a nation's wildlife
Since time immemorial mankind has taken it upon himself to wage a war against nature - against those species of birds and mammals which he believes conflict with his livelihood. This remarkable book is about that war of attrition against the native mammals and birds of England and Wales from the Middle Ages to the present day. There is a widespread knowledge about the huge declines in popular species such as song birds, farmland birds, otters, and pine martens, however, there is less understanding about the deep-rooted causes of these losses, or about the complex relationship between mankind and these species.
Roger Lovegrove has undertaken years of unique by searching through parish records of 'vermin' trapped, hunted, and killed over the generations, he has revealed an unprecedently accurate and detailed picture of the history of a nation's wildlife, and of the often devastating impact and extinction that we have forced on our ecology. Consisting of species-by-species accounts, accompanied by beautiful, specially-commissioned illustrations, this book outlines the history - and often the future too - of a wealth of wildlife species, from badgers, bears and beavers, to wolves, kingfishers, the golden eagle and the humble house sparrow.
The geographical scope is British, but the subject will be of interest to conservationists around the world because of the unique historical material that will be included. The topic has enormous relevance today, as public concern about the environment rises, and controversies rage about hunting, wildlife management and reintroduction of ancient species.
Roger Lovegrove has undertaken years of unique by searching through parish records of 'vermin' trapped, hunted, and killed over the generations, he has revealed an unprecedently accurate and detailed picture of the history of a nation's wildlife, and of the often devastating impact and extinction that we have forced on our ecology. Consisting of species-by-species accounts, accompanied by beautiful, specially-commissioned illustrations, this book outlines the history - and often the future too - of a wealth of wildlife species, from badgers, bears and beavers, to wolves, kingfishers, the golden eagle and the humble house sparrow.
The geographical scope is British, but the subject will be of interest to conservationists around the world because of the unique historical material that will be included. The topic has enormous relevance today, as public concern about the environment rises, and controversies rage about hunting, wildlife management and reintroduction of ancient species.
416 pages, Paperback
First published February 22, 2007
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About the author
Roger Lovegrove
17 books1 followerRoger Lovegrove (1935 - 1923) was an Enlish school teacher and naturalist. A native of Devon, he lived in mid Wales for the past 30 years. In 1971 he left teaching for a full-time career in wildlife conservation, joining the RSPB staff as Wales Officer.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 23, 2009
This was quiet hard going to start with but once you got into the individual species accounts it was interesting and enjoyable. This is a thoroughly researched and detailed book and certaintly illustrates the degree to which man has been interfering with Nature especially where there is a perceived conflict of interests. I found the last chapters on modern methods of control and management very interesting. The book also manages to give all sides of the arguement without compromising on the author's own point of view. A wealth of useful information, a must read for anyone interested in the history of our countryside and man's effect on it.
May 13, 2024
[2018] A sorry tale of our nation's attitude toward our wildlife. This book is a relatively easy read, more than you think it might be. It is meticulously researched over many years and largely from primary sources. Many years spent trawling through parish registers and thinking carefully about the history of the natural species of the country. It is broken down into small chapters and never gets dense. It was wonderful to hear our traditional counties being treated with the respect that they deserve and being used as the structure of the study. It demonstrates how the Government's changes over the years has simply not worked.I thought that there were some strange omissions such as rabbits and hares.
Also, there was a mistake - Saltash is, of course, in Cornwall, not Devon. The other thing which really grated was the use of the word Schizophrenia to describe two conflicting views (on three occasions). This not only demonstrates a lack of understanding of the term, but also is disrespectful to people who suffer this serious psychiatric disorder. The other puzzle about this book is the title - a very good geographical spread, but no mention of Northern Ireland. So probably not the correct title. Overall a very good book which creates a sense of the determination of our ancestors to obliterate our wildlife and shows how attitudes have changed over the years.
Also, there was a mistake - Saltash is, of course, in Cornwall, not Devon. The other thing which really grated was the use of the word Schizophrenia to describe two conflicting views (on three occasions). This not only demonstrates a lack of understanding of the term, but also is disrespectful to people who suffer this serious psychiatric disorder. The other puzzle about this book is the title - a very good geographical spread, but no mention of Northern Ireland. So probably not the correct title. Overall a very good book which creates a sense of the determination of our ancestors to obliterate our wildlife and shows how attitudes have changed over the years.
October 29, 2012
Kindled for £8.64. This book details the decline of wildlife over the last 500 years. It focuses on species which have been considered pests (mammals and birds). It goes into great depth about the various pieces of legislation of the sixteenth century, especially the preservation of grain act in 1532, considers the impact of the control, and then moves to considering the pest control by game estates in the eighteenth-twentieth century period. Lovegrove’s main sources are the parish records which detail all bounties paid for animals under the grain act, together with the game estate records (game estates covered a massive swath of the landscape in the nineteenth century). He does not study these comprehensively (they are too exhaustive) but looks at a portion from each parish (dictated especially by those that survive). He estimates his sample is about 14% of the total. Also has some discussion of the importance of the fur trade on lowering numbers of beaver and pine marten. There’s a table from Dumfries fur fair but i can’t read it. Sumptuary laws making some furs very high class. He also finishes with a set of profiles on the most persecuted creatures (birds of prey, mammals and songbirds) and studies each region of britain independently (Scotland and wales apparently are one region). Especially interestingly he points out that old references to “rats” may actually have been supposed to refer to the now extinct “fossorial water rat”, a land-based version of the water-rat whose burrows would have caused great problems to agriculture before it was extirpated. Chough, wildcat, polecat, otter, raven, sea-eagle, red-kite, osprey, hen-harrier, golden-eagle, goshawk and buzzard recovery programs of the last 50 years are summed up.
{Fairy bounties in the historical record?!}
Although I would never question the undoubted presence of ‘little people’ in this land of myth and legend, my credulity was stretched when I found them listed under bounty payments in the nineteenth century. On the north coast, adjacent to Tintagel, the parish accounts of St Teath for the year 1812 contain the unambiguous entry shown in Figure 25: ‘To 2 Fairy’s Heads 4d’. It took time to get to the root of this entry but the solution is no less interesting than the entry itself. Figure 25. An entry from a page of the St Teath (C’wall) churchwardens, showing payment for fairies heads (aka Weasel). Reproduced by courtesy of the Cornwall Record Office. ‘Vair’, more frequently ‘vairy’ or other similar variants, was a dialect word, now obsolete. It was used in south-west England, Glamorgan, and Pembrokeshire as vernacular for Stoat or, more frequently, Weasel.
{phases of animal control in Britain since C16}
Phase one was the 250-year period which lasted from the first legislation (1532) relating to vermin control, up to around 1800, throughout which time organized vermin control was carried out in the parishes of England and Wales, based on a system of financial rewards. The second phase was an indiscriminate war of attrition against predatory species embarked on by the new sporting estates in England, Scotland, and Wales, from the late years of the eighteenth century up to the time of the Second World War. In the post-war decades, the third phase was characterized by an upsurge of public concern about wildlife. One of the results of this was a labyrinth of twentieth-century legislation that was designed to respond to this concern, and to protect many species that had previously been subject to a permanent open season. Finally, in the early years of the twenty-first century we enter a difficult period of growing controversy about what constitutes the legitimate control of wildlife species.
{Scottish connections in modern history}
Passenger coaches had run between London and Edinburgh as early as 1658, but the journey took three weeks! Mail coaches, which took four passengers inside and three outside, were introduced in 1784. This was obviously an improvement but the journey still lasted several days and was only for the determined and dedicated.
...
For the southern sportsman the real breakthrough came in the middle of the nineteenth century. The opening of the railway to Edinburgh in 1843 meant that the Scottish capital could then be reached in ten hours. Initially, horse-drawn coaches continued the journey from there northwards as far as Inverness, until the rail connection was eventually completed in 1863.
{Fairy bounties in the historical record?!}
Although I would never question the undoubted presence of ‘little people’ in this land of myth and legend, my credulity was stretched when I found them listed under bounty payments in the nineteenth century. On the north coast, adjacent to Tintagel, the parish accounts of St Teath for the year 1812 contain the unambiguous entry shown in Figure 25: ‘To 2 Fairy’s Heads 4d’. It took time to get to the root of this entry but the solution is no less interesting than the entry itself. Figure 25. An entry from a page of the St Teath (C’wall) churchwardens, showing payment for fairies heads (aka Weasel). Reproduced by courtesy of the Cornwall Record Office. ‘Vair’, more frequently ‘vairy’ or other similar variants, was a dialect word, now obsolete. It was used in south-west England, Glamorgan, and Pembrokeshire as vernacular for Stoat or, more frequently, Weasel.
{phases of animal control in Britain since C16}
Phase one was the 250-year period which lasted from the first legislation (1532) relating to vermin control, up to around 1800, throughout which time organized vermin control was carried out in the parishes of England and Wales, based on a system of financial rewards. The second phase was an indiscriminate war of attrition against predatory species embarked on by the new sporting estates in England, Scotland, and Wales, from the late years of the eighteenth century up to the time of the Second World War. In the post-war decades, the third phase was characterized by an upsurge of public concern about wildlife. One of the results of this was a labyrinth of twentieth-century legislation that was designed to respond to this concern, and to protect many species that had previously been subject to a permanent open season. Finally, in the early years of the twenty-first century we enter a difficult period of growing controversy about what constitutes the legitimate control of wildlife species.
{Scottish connections in modern history}
Passenger coaches had run between London and Edinburgh as early as 1658, but the journey took three weeks! Mail coaches, which took four passengers inside and three outside, were introduced in 1784. This was obviously an improvement but the journey still lasted several days and was only for the determined and dedicated.
...
For the southern sportsman the real breakthrough came in the middle of the nineteenth century. The opening of the railway to Edinburgh in 1843 meant that the Scottish capital could then be reached in ten hours. Initially, horse-drawn coaches continued the journey from there northwards as far as Inverness, until the rail connection was eventually completed in 1863.
June 18, 2014
This book is remarakable for the depth and care the author brings to the subject. It is well documented that the UK's wildlife has suffered from changes in land use, habitat, and climate. But the focus of this book is the extent to which man has deliberately sort to hunt a wide range opf species to the point of extinction (at least locally). Under the Tudor 'vermin' acts individuals were rewarded for killing a remarkably wide range of animals - vermin here includes things like otters and eagles as well as all kinds of rodents. These payments were administered by church wardens and thus widely recorded and the author follows the paper trail for two or three centuries. Some of the results border on the bizarre: hundreds of thousands hedgehogs were killed, apparently because they sucked milk from recumbant cows. Millions of sparrows were killed at the same time that one of their main predators was also being persecuted. What comes through is the sheer atavistic belief that man was the centre of everything and could (should?) do whatever he liked.
Notwithstanding widespread slaughter this activity was always somewhat amateur, although considerably ingenuity was shown in devising ways of trapping animals and birds. It is not clear what the impact was at the species level, although larger birds and mammels became less common away from the margins of the country. What really caused a change of gear was the widespread growth of game shooting in the nineteenth century. Killing any bird or animal that might possibly pray on grouse and partridge became the responsibility of professional gamekeepers and within a century birds like the Osprey and the Sea Eagle were extinct in the UK, and mammals like Wild Cats and Polecats weren't far behind.
Throughout Lovegrove, who previously worked for the RSPB, is admirably balanced. He acknowledges that life was precarious, and that any animal threatening the food supply was likely to get short shrift. He is also clear that hunting has a key economic role in rural communities. But his painstaking work clearly comes down on the side of the hunted more than the hunter.
(Painstaking is the word as well: the book does suffer from repetition and the prose is more careful than spectacular. But the sense of the record being set straight is palpable).
Notwithstanding widespread slaughter this activity was always somewhat amateur, although considerably ingenuity was shown in devising ways of trapping animals and birds. It is not clear what the impact was at the species level, although larger birds and mammels became less common away from the margins of the country. What really caused a change of gear was the widespread growth of game shooting in the nineteenth century. Killing any bird or animal that might possibly pray on grouse and partridge became the responsibility of professional gamekeepers and within a century birds like the Osprey and the Sea Eagle were extinct in the UK, and mammals like Wild Cats and Polecats weren't far behind.
Throughout Lovegrove, who previously worked for the RSPB, is admirably balanced. He acknowledges that life was precarious, and that any animal threatening the food supply was likely to get short shrift. He is also clear that hunting has a key economic role in rural communities. But his painstaking work clearly comes down on the side of the hunted more than the hunter.
(Painstaking is the word as well: the book does suffer from repetition and the prose is more careful than spectacular. But the sense of the record being set straight is palpable).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews