Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust: I’d dispute that all publicity is good publicity

While working with the media to promote the trust’s work I’ve spent decades trying to raise our profile and I am always looking for new ways to reach the public but I’ve never truly subscribed to the idea that ‘all publicity is good publicity’, writes Erin McDaid of the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust.

As a local charity we usually appreciate any coverage secured in the ‘Nationals’, but recent coverage linked to reports of a wallaby sighting in Nottinghamshire, featured in the Sunday Times, definitely challenge the old adage.

In his column entitled ‘One wallaby escapes and it’s a quick hop to wanting all the non-natives sent home’, columnist Rod Liddle distastefully suggests that the approach taken by conservationists to limit the impact of non-native species on threatened native wildlife equates in some way to prejudiced views held by members of the British National Party.

After quoting my concerns for already threatened native wildlife if a breeding population of wallabies were to become established locally, he suggests that our focus should be on impacts such as housing developments, pesticides and habitat fragmentation — citing people as the common denominator in wildlife’s woes.

I would argue that it is precisely because of the huge impact that these wider threats, including climate change, which wasn’t listed, have had on nature that we cannot stand by when new threats become apparent.

Non-native species are now amongst the top five reasons for the decline of biodiversity across the planet. The establishment of a non-native species can often trigger a tipping point for species already under pressure and my concern wasn’t born out of prejudice against wallabies, but instead reflects the fact that there are now around 2000 non-native species in Britain, with a dozen or so more becoming established each year.

The cost to the British economy of impacts to our ecology and efforts to control them is estimated at £1.8 billion a year. The cumulative impact of non-natives is huge, whether in terms of invasive plants damaging property and blocking waterways or non-natives animals such as Grey Squirrels and Signal Crayfish spreading disease to native Red Squirrels and White Clawed Crayfish respectively — the evidence is clear.

The piece suggests that the Wildlife Trusts and RSPB, which together have over 2 million supporters, make arbitrary decisions based on the national origin of species. In realty, we are having to make difficult science-based decisions to help protect and restore nature. In some cases, non-natives directly prey on British species — an impact dismissed in the piece which claims evidence of introduced non-native mink eating water voles is ‘thin on the ground’. Given that Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust is currently dispatching mink as part of efforts to restore decimated water vole populations, I felt this assertion worth countering.

By sheer coincidence, an article was published in the Sunday Times’ sister paper, The Times, the very next day. It states that ‘American mink can easily destroy fish and large birds and wipe out a water vole colony in a matter of weeks.’ It then detailed the success of coordinated, evidence based efforts to eradicate mink from large swathes of our landscape.

It quotes both a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge and an emeritus professor of animal conservation at the University of Dundee and I’d suggest that if Rod ever wants more information on the impact of mink on water voles, a chat with the article’s author, Will Humpries — The Times’ countryside correspondent — might be a good place to start next time they are both in the office.

The methodologies featured in Will’s excellent article form the basis of our local work to control mink numbers which, alongside positive habitat creation and sensitive re-introduction of water voles, is the largest project so far in Nottinghamshire to safeguard the future of the once ubiquitous but now threatened water vole.

Nobody goes into nature conservation to kill things and just as people are largely responsible for impacts on nature — we also have a responsibility to put things right where they can.

Nobody is suggesting drastic action regarding wallabies in Nottinghamshire, but it does appear that the ‘Calverton One’, as it was dubbed in the Sunday Times piece, has company. Following numerous reports from across the surrounding area, including one between Fiskerton and Farndon and one near Muston, we’d very much like people to keep sending in records of sightings — so at least any future measures can be based on evidence not opinion.

Any wildlife sightings, dead or alive and not just wallabies can be reported via https;//record.nottinghamshirewildlife.org/