Homo sapiens: The Infallible Species

Vast amounts of my time are spent working alone in the woods. Sometimes I will not see a single person while I'm out there for several days in a row. The strange thing is though, considering I'm such a social, gregarious wee soul, I actually like it this way.

You see the things is, the people I do tend to meet out there thoroughly depress me, and I'd rather not be faced with them if I can help it. Bit of an cop out strategy I know, but its all about preservation - specifically: my attempt to cling on to notion that people in general are capable of independent, reasoned thought after all. But the more of them I meet, the more the evidence stacks against them.

The particular mentality to which I'm refering to comes up whenever I'm asked what it is I'm doing out there: "Oh, I'm working on a Forestry project to study pine martens" I will inevitably reply. To this there is generally one of two responses: sheer glee at the thought that perhaps I am going to be removing martens from the forests, OR unabashed suspicion as to why on earth I would possibly be wasting my time studying these "pests".

Most people will try to engage me in a conversation that invariably revolves around how there are just far too many of these animals in the woods today. Just the other day I had a gentleman telling me how rife the north is with them, it being literally "polluted" with them, as he put it. When I questioned why this was such a bad thing, he simply stared at me with a look of complete incomprehension. I haven't quite placed if this look is because they think this is obviously one of the most ridiculous questions one could ask, or, what I suspect may be the case they have never once questioned WHY they think that too many martens is a bad thing. The usual response is; "well, they're vermin aren't they", or, my particular favourite; "well, there are just too many of them aren't there" (I'm not even going to comment on the fact that we don't really have a good idea of how many martens there are and can only guestimate numbers and densities after labour intensive trapping and tracking studies such as mine).

At this point in the conversation I usually want to turn and run away. I know as a scientist I should be trying to communicate knowledge, and you'd think this would be the perfect opportunity to do so, until you factor in that these people do not even entertain the possibility of an alternative view, or listen to valid points of reasoned argument contrary to their own. What they do instead is spout out rhetoric, a typical and traditional view of animals in black and white terms: things you can eat or make profit from = good, everything else = bad. And predators are just about the worst of the worst... "martens are just plain evil though aren't they".

I pressed this particular gentleman further to extract a reason as to why he considered them "evil", to which he responded, "but they eat everything don't they, they eat all the birds". (Again I'm not going to mention the fact that he didn't actually know what sort of birds he knew they ate. He also didn’t even know that you get Scottish crossbill, crested tit AND capercaillie in the very same woods he was so keen to protect from the marten menace. Obviously a avid bird enthusiast and conservationist.) Now if only my supervisors had thought to question this gentleman before agreeing to fund my PhD, it would have negated the need for any further study at great expense. The fact that they did fund me to find out exactly what pine martens are eating because we don't really know didn't matter to him: he obviously knew better. These people know all the answers without exception. They have made up their mind and no amount of evidence will sway them from their holding point. Like I said, there’s no reasoned thought going on here. When I informed him that from the months of scats I have been collecting, as well as the results of previous studies, rodents are by far the overwhelming prey items of choice he responded: "well it'll be those birds of prey too, they're killing all the birds, there's too many of them n’all".

Deciding to take a different tact I threw at him the possibility that if you look at it historically (I was loathe to mention the words "in evolutionary terms" incase that sparked a creationist debate), there have always been birds of prey, and pine martens, and the little birds have gotten along just fine. Predator and prey coexisting. Nature has a way of balancing things (I decided it best not to go into population equilibriums, environmental carrying capacities and functional or numerical responses of predators to prey). What about the possibility that the main difference in the system as a whole is the addition of humans, and their continued manipulation of the land? Couldn't this possibly be a more likely reason why passerine birds are declining? Even if it IS the predators who ultimately eat them, is this not maybe a knock-on effect of OUR actions? Numbers and species of available prey in the environment are continually being altered by habitat modifications, and predators are being squeezed in to smaller and smaller fragments of suitable habitat, increasing the likelihood that they encounter rarer prey species. I cannot argue that pine martens DON'T ever eat birds, even rare ones such as the capercaillie, because they do. But capercaillie for instance, face far bigger threats from human-related causes: climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, increased grazing due to unnaturally high deer numbers, increased mortaility as a result of collisions with deer fences and power lines, and increased predation from domestic cats and dogs. That a pine marten may take a brood of chicks is not going to help a struggling caper population. However, there are perhaps far more effective solutions to their population decline than complete marten removal, it’s just that these will take a lot more thought and effort, and don’t look quite so incisive to the general anti-predator public.

And THAT is what I hate most about the people I have been encountering. They do not seem able to comprehend that perhaps it is humans that are at fault. That things are not so black and white. Predators have consistently and historically been a scape goat for when things go wrong. A farmer suffers heavy livestock losses, so it must be predation rather than an increase in disease brought on by intensive farming and poor husbandry standards. Why take responsibility for a situation when you can go and persecute an entire species instead? I'd like to think that this mentality was held only by a few country folk living in the rural depths, until you actually realise that the view is humoured, if not shared, but the likes of DEFRA who will pander to the whims of the uninformed and their rhetoric.

What we need is a change in perspective. I believe that we conservationists and ecologists should be focusing on trying to change the public’s attitude. People should look at the fact that the north is "polluted" with pine martens as a blessing, not a curse. Here is a species that was brought to the brink of extinction in this country less than a century ago, and yet now is flourishing. Why not make use of a positive such as this in a world where good news seems so increasingly hard to come by? Public opinion is fleetingly fickle, and just needs a little direction. Less than 50 years ago, capercaillie were being shot by foresters as they, and their penchant for eating young pine needles, were deemed harmful to forest regeneration. Now the capercaillie is one of the Forestry’s top conservation priorities, a complete about-turn in opinion, and one which the public seem to have followed.

Pine martens are a conservation success story – and you don’t get too many of those these days! We should be encouraged, and dare I even say proud, that we have turned their story around. The only fight that remains for this charasmatic species is that against traditionalised opinion and persecution.