Homelife

It's the bigger picture that gets neglected when we struggle with the details. There's a desperate need for wildlife to have a home that's quite distinct from that of farmlife. That's what 'wild' should mean, a word that's too often shockingly abused. A useful way of looking at things and a corrective to some of the arrogance that's peculiar to humanity is to ask who or what belongs here? Once you start to manage and control a parcel of land you're in charge and can't easily see yourself as anything but indispensable, even if you only visit once a week; maybe you think ownership resides in you because you're paid to be 'responsible' and have certain powers. This is a curse of managerialism. But who or what has more right to be regarded as essential than the life that lives here 24 hours a day through all conditions?

It's a good idea when setting foot on natural and semi-natural land to clear our minds of all the jargon and terminology that goes with land management most of which has a political purpose of one kind or another. For me I like to think that ownership is for the residents.

The Robin and the Blackbird have their homes here and care nothing for words like biodiversity and habitats and others which are simply human constructs. Nothing beats direct experience of the land and wildlife. I'm aware that this sounds to some ears as anti-intellectual even philistine and that's not what's intended. We just need to freshen our experiences and cast aside, if only temporarily, the crude biodiversity statistics and jargon that increasingly seems to be the measure of value for the conservation industry workers we often see. But numbers tell a very limited story and I prefer to see the soul of a place differently, more directly.

Deer for example are so crucial to the soul of a place like Blacka yet to some managers the experience of them is inseparable from notions of 'carrying capacity' and vegetation management. It becomes, it would seem, impossible to appreciate real wildlife outside a mindset that's not much different to a livestock farmer's.

Large mammals on a semi natural landscape bring a place to life as nothing else quite can. They are here all the time. This morning was another bright May morning with the keenest of easterly winds testing our endurance so we knew where the local deer would not be. And they were unsurprisingly in a pleasantly sheltered but sunlit bit of woodland. It's now inconceivable that Blacka could be without deer just as without trees. But I sense that some in the conservation world would be untroubled by that, preoccupied as they are by bureaucratic biodiversity targets and action plans, forms to fill in and grants to apply for. How many people when they see the deer or the Robin put themselves in the position of these animals, out here in all conditions?

This is their home. We should respect that as their guests.