Move the bats, eliminate the rats

My recent column in The Times is on wildlife
conservation:

On the day last week that the House of Commons was
debating a private member’s bill dealing with bats in churches,
conservationists were starting to eliminate rats from the island of South
Georgia by dropping poisoned bait from helicopters. Two very
different facets of wildlife conservation: the bats stand for
preservation of pristine nature from human interference; the rats
for active intervention to manage nature in the interests of other
wildlife. Which is better value for money?

Bats love roosting in churches, but those who love bats and
those who love churches are increasingly at loggerheads. Bat pee
has damaged many of the brasses in British churches, and stained or
eroded precious medieval monuments and paintings. Expensive
restoration work is often undone in a matter of months by
micturating bats.

Vicars and church wardens are tearing their hair out, but there
is little legally they can do. Excluding bats from a church, or
even disturbing them, is forbidden, and building a bespoke bat
roost elsewhere rarely works because the bats must choose to leave;
they cannot be evicted.

While one arm of government, English Heritage, enforces EU
directives to preserve cultural heritage, another, Natural England,
enforces a directive that churches may not disturb bat roosts. Both
demand the spending of money, which is thus circular. Church
wardens complain of officious bullying by amateur and self-trained
busybodies from the Bat Conservation Trust, to whom the task of
enforcing the bat rules has been delegated by government.

Relishing their role, these amateur bat policemen demanded that
work was stopped in one church because of a single dropping, which
was probably from a mouse. Elsewhere, they reported a church
architect to the police based on the false presumption gathered
during a snap inspection that he had ordered work on a roof. In
another case, they suggested a monument be wrapped in plastic to
protect it.

Most bat species are not rare or declining, but it makes no
difference. The whole system wastes money, time and goodwill
towards bats (there are huge incentives to eliminate them
surreptitiously) while doing very little to help to conserve rare
species, and contributing massively to the desecration of our
cultural heritage. But it is all highly lucrative for the bat
people: building managers must order expensive bat inspections from
the bat folk themselves before converting or repairing
buildings.

For a tenth of the cost of this system, the active provision of
special bat roosts aimed at the rarer species, as a quid pro quo
for giving people the right to exclude bats, would achieve more.
And therein lies a lesson: active conservation is better than
passive preservation.

The bat policy preserves an outdated model of what wildlife
conservation is: the passive preservation of a supposedly pristine
natural system — though churches designed for worship, not bat
roosting, are hardly natural habitats anyway. For better or for
worse, human intervention is messing up wildlife all over the
world, and active human intervention is necessary to un-mess
it.

For example, the demise of the water vole in much of England was
caused almost entirely by the spread of the mink, an alien invader
from North America, released by people. Protecting river banks from
disturbance would do almost nothing to help water voles;
eradicating mink would and does make all the difference. Likewise
protecting red squirrel habitat achieves little unless alien grey
squirrels are removed.

More invasive pests are on the way. A friend recently
encountered a raccoon in her hen house, eating her hens. Escaped
pet raccoons are beginning to establish themselves in northern
England with potentially devastating consequences for native
wildlife. Escaped Chinese raccoon-dogs have already ravaged the
ground-nesting birds of Finland and are starting to escape here
too: why are on earth are they allowed as pets?

Signal crayfish and killer shrimps in rivers, Himalayan balsam
and rhododendrons, mitten crabs, ash dieback — wherever you look,
the urgent conservation priority in Britain is the eradication of
invasive aliens, not the officious preservation of habitats for
species doing just fine.

By far the commonest cause of species extinction globally is the
spread of invasive alien species. This is especially true on
islands. On Gough island in the south Atlantic, sweet little house
mice, released by people, feed by gnawing at the flesh of albatross
chicks, killing them slowly. Even the demise of the dodo on
Mauritius was actually caused by the introduction of alien species
— monkeys, rats and pigs — rather than humans themselves.

Of the 190 species of mammal and bird that are known to have
become extinct in the past 500 years, all but nine were found
exclusively on islands (if you count Australia as an island) and
most of the extinctions were caused by the introduction to islands
by people of goats, cats, rats, snakes, sparrows and all sorts of
pests and parasites. So this month’s ambitious plan to eradicate
the remaining rat infestations on South Georgia (two thirds of the
island has already been cleared) in order to revive the seabird
colonies there, is exactly what conservationists should be
doing.

In the Pacific, 34 islands have already been cleared of rats and
other invasives. In December the charity Birdlife announced that
all the goats and rats had been eradicated from Monuriki, the
100-acre Fijian island where Tom Hanks
filmed Castaway. This is good news for the
wedge-tailed shearwaters and Fijian crested iguanas that live on
the tiny island.

Birdlife recently published a report identifying 25 islands among the
2,500 in the UK Overseas Territories where eradication of invasives
should begin. The most crucial include Henderson, a large,
uninhabited and almost impossibly remote island 3,000 miles from
the nearest continent, where rats are eating 95 per cent of the chicks of
breeding Henderson petrels and threatening 54 other species found
nowhere else. Getting rid of the rats is the single most valuable
thing British conservationists can do to save species. The first
attempt failed, but conservationists are trying again.

Just imagine if you took all the money spent on bat surveys in
churches and other such futile tick-box conservation bureaucracies
and redirected it to active rat eradication on such islands, and to
the eradication of the mink, the grey squirrel, the raccoon and
other invasives threatening British wildlife. That’s true
conservation.