ABSTRACT
This may seem, at first glance, a chapter that sits uneasily alongside many of the others in this book as it does not directly address the alien species debate as we might strictly know it. I take my title, slightly changed, from an upbeat piece in Walk (the magazine of the Ramblers’ Association) about, ‘the return of the natives’ (Rowe, 2008), and from an essay on the problem of exotic species in the reader Bio-Invaders (Johnson, 2010). The chapter’s relevance lies in a more broad and interactive nature–people relationship across time and space, and it starts with the notion that here in Britain (and indeed, in much of the rest of the Western world) we have learned to live (be it locally, regionally or nationally; be it for tens of years or hundreds of years) without many top predators. Indeed in the recent past many of these birds of prey and mammalian carnivores were as ‘alien’ to us, as much loaded in the sense of ‘the other’, culturally and socially, as many of the invasive alien species confronted in this book. Now that some have come back (either through natural colonization, reintroduction programmes or translocation schemes) they are, if you like, strangers, not in a strange land but in a familiar land. But we have rallied to their cause and started to embrace them as familiar. We lost most of the top mammal predators in Britain over the 10,000 years since the last Ice Age, for a variety of environmental, climatic or human-induced reasons. Indeed, historical biologists and species historians have charted that decline well, none better than Derek Yalden (1999; 2003) or Andrew Kitchener (1998). Birds of prey hung on for much longer in our crowded and overexploited island, but the death knell for many species came with the culturally loaded label ‘vermin’. This we can trace back to the medieval period at least, and it reached its heyday in the 19th century (mid-Victorian) era when the new waves of gamekeepers on private estates launched an all-out assault on predatory animals. Environmental historians, working with primary sources such as estate papers and hugely illuminating ‘gamebooks’ (records of slaughter), have documented and charted what was a structured and well-organized wholesale modification of the natural world across that century. This was to protect and nurture game species that we considered profitable, or had been labelled as ‘most noble’ to pit one sporting talents against, be they red grouse, salmon or red deer (Smout, 2000; Lovegrove, 2007). To do that, estate owners paid others to shoot, trap and hunt down birds of prey and predatory mammals. We also shot them for sport, for mere target practice, or as sporting trophies; and in the case of some birds of prey, we took eggs for egg collections (be it scientific oology or the profitable trade for private collections) and skins for taxidermy (McGowan, 2009; see also Harvie-Brown archives). It is a salutary catalogue of loss upon loss, and here in Britain we lived with the consequences, ecologically and culturally, for much of the late 19th century and across the 20th century. The fates of individual British bird species do reflect a huge part of our socio-cultural and intellectual history in these islands (Cocker and Mabey, 2005; Birds Britannia, BBC, 2010). In an era of rampant globalization, we ponder and worry a great deal about our cultural separation from other human societies or groups and how we might ‘rediscover’ and reconnect with them, but rarely do we think these thoughts in an intraspecies context.
