Enough is Enough

Following on from the previous post, Enough, and on a similar theme, I report another conversation with a conservation officer, this time about the sheep pasture on Blacka. Doesn’t the despoiled look of this grazed land pinpoint the absurdity of the conservation management approach, said I? I explained that difficulties with the grazier last year left the land free from sheep and cattle for months on end and the result was a fine display of wild flowers. But this year sheep in their hundreds were back and the result is no flowers, simply acre upon acre covered with sheep sh*t. Doesn’t this show that conservation grazing and conservation management is totally ‘up the spout’? His answer to this was one I’ve heard before from those who need to get out more, being indoctrinated through too much exposure to industry dogma, and it goes thus: the sheep are necessary to create the conditions for the wild flowers and that proves they are doing their job properly and the management is on the right lines. Almost certainly it’s an answer he is reporting from one that he’s heard given by a fellow traveller or on a course somewhere. Once again, flawed office thinking, flawed bureaucrat planning with complete disconnection from the real world where the grass grows and sheep crap. Do they ever walk in these places, and if they do is it with eyes wide shut?
To promote the conditions for beautiful wild flowers to grow, this theory goes, you must saturate the area with sheep and their faeces so that they will crop all the grass and eat all the flowers. And you must do this all the time, every year! When you point out that this means nobody will ever see the wild flowers unless there’s a serious and unforeseen malfunction in the grazing programme so it’s pointless, they say simply that they disagree or, tellingly, they remain silent. For in neither the management plans nor the SSSI reports and designations is there any scope for leaving sheep off the land. I confess that on one level I find this utterly delightful– it completely vindicates my view that conservation people are either stupid or not of this world at all – i.e. office zombies.

One of the more determined claims made for putting sheep on this land is that it benefits the ‘fungal interest’. Now I rather like the waxcaps mushrooms. They are a lot more worth looking at than the sheep s*** that is the only other feature on the ground. Only since the recent rain have they appeared this year. The trouble is that much of the pleasure in seeing them is seriously diminished by the amount of the, er, other material that is around and the lack of natural vegetation near them. The grass in which I found them is not identical with a cricket pitch but it’s just as artificial. Appropriately, of the five waxcaps I found in a close area, three had sheep **** actually deposited on top of them. Over the years I've asked several times that the sheep be removed for a period of time before the mushrooms appear, only to be met with blank looks.



The fungi that are benefiting more than most are the dung mushrooms.


I await the information from the Rural Payments Agency that will tell me how much of our sorely stretched public funds are going into the annual grazing programme approved by Natural England to conserve the conditions favourable for this unit, unit 70, of the SSSI. And please, no more alternative wordings for the SSSI acronym; enough is enough.