Crane song
Coming back to the boat today, I saw four cranes in flight and heard them call out. This was a moment of awe and wonder for me, leaving me tearful and gasping. Cranes were driven to extinction in the UK, and these four are part of a reintroduction program. They are the first wild cranes I’ve ever seen, and there’s every reason to think they won’t be the last.
Sometimes, when humans mess up, it is possible to restore the balance.
Go back a handful of years and I was involved with a ritual honouring the lost creatures of the landscape. At that point as far as we knew, the cranes and the wild boar had gone. But there are boar in the Forest of Dean, and there are cranes on the Somerset levels, and sometimes, on the Severn.
We won’t see the aurochs again though – giant, hairy cows who used to roam our forests. The last one died in Poland in I think the 1600s. (Dates are not a strongpoint with me.) They are gone, entirely and forever, available only in imagination. They haunt me, and I feel their absence in ways I cannot begin to explain.
Not so many days ago my son and I were talking about symbiotic relationships and co-evolution. He’s doing seed dispersal at school, which prompted it. There are trees that depended on their seeds going through the dodo’s digestive system to get germination started. Without the dodo, the trees do not reproduce, and eventually, they will be gone. I suppose we might hang on to them by grafting; apple species after all depend on this method, your natural apple does not produce the kinds of apples you get in supermarkets. They all come from grafts. But the tree would depend on us, and have little scope for genetic variance. I have no idea what will happen on that score.
In all aspects of life, there are awful mistakes we get to come back from, and ones that, like the dodo and the auroch, are forever. It’s not always obvious until it’s far too late to do anything. The longer we spend refusing to recognise mistakes, refusing to admit we’re messing up, the worse it gets. We nearly lost our otters here in the UK out of blind refusal, for years, to admit that our water systems were being poisoned. We nearly lost our red kites.
This is as true in any aspect of our lives as it is on the ecological front. Sometimes there are no second chances. We’d be a lot better off trying harder not to mess up that badly in the first place. The people who hunted the dodo to death would never have guessed they were also killing a tree. We do not know what else will fall when we mess up fragile eco systems, or human structures, or relationships, or anything else.
Today there were cranes. Today there was something like a second chance, a reprieve, a reason for hope. But there will be no aurochs.
