Hairstreaks and habitats

One of my simple pleasures in life is going for a walk in a bluebell wood in Spring. It’s something I really missed when living in Africa, and during lockdown, so we try to make an annual pilgrimage to a local wood.

We pick a time when the wood is covered with a blue carpet of flowers, together with pale yellow primroses and white wood anemones. It’s a joyful Creation experience.

Yet, as readers of this column will be aware, all is not well with Creation. The secular scholars Jared Diamond, Edward O. Wilson and others have adopted Biblical imagery to speak about the horsemen of the ecological apocalypse. They’ve been described in various ways, but one useful summary is that the four horsemen are habitat destruction, over-exploitation, pollution, and invasive species, with a fifth horseman representing our disconnect from nature. I plan to deal with each in turn over the next few columns, starting with habitat destruction.

We are all-too familiar with images of the destruction of tropical rainforests: mighty trees being felled with chainsaws or burnt to ashes to make way for cattle ranches or palm oil plantations. But, tragic though this is, habitat destruction – albeit on a lesser scale – takes place in our own backyard too. Recently I’ve been visiting a number of sites around the UK which have either been lost or are threatened with loss and damage.

One very foggy and frosty morning I stood on a small nature reserve in the middle of England peering through a security fence to see heavy machinery busy moving vast quantities of earth. These were groundworks for HS2, the high-speed railway that will connect London and Birmingham, and potentially beyond. At this particular location the route sliced a strip about 100 metres wide off the side of the nature reserve. What was once woodland and scrub, home to all five species of hairstreak butterfly, was now simply bare ground.

Coincidentally, on the day I was there, The Wildlife Trusts published a report re-assessing the ecological impacts of HS2 which showed that the developer’s approach hugely undervalued the nature that’s being destroyed. A TV crew came out to the site to interview my guide. While the site I was visiting was not ancient woodland, over 100 ancient woodlands like my local bluebell wood are threatened with loss or damage under current plans. Although HS2 disputes this, the scale of new habitat being created doesn’t add up to what’s being lost – and you can’t compensate for woodland that’s been around for centuries.

Just a week later I was in Scotland visiting a golf course near Aberdeen. Some years ago, a certain Donald Trump made a very controversial proposal to build a championship golf course and resort on an outstanding area of unspoilt sand dunes. It’s about as different a habitat as you can get from ancient woodland but is similarly an irreplaceable, complex ecosystem.

The public inquiry concluded that the economic benefits of the proposal outweighed the damage to nature, and the Scottish Government gave the green light. The golf course opened and, as predicted, the nature conservation interest was damaged to the extent that seven years later the official designation of the site was rescinded. The economic benefit, in terms of the resort and associated housing, has never materialised.

These are only two examples of many I could mention, and the threats haven’t gone away. If you live near a special place for nature, there are many ways to get involved in protecting Creation; finding out what your favourite wildlife or countryside charity is doing would be a good place to start.