Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 221

The author of this book is both farmer and ornithologist, who has lived and worked through the modern agricultural revolution, and has first-hand experience ofits environmental impacts. He is also an agricultural historian, so is able to set these recent changes into a longer temporal context. In this book, he traces the major agricultural changes that have occurred in Britain over the past 250 years (beginning fairly arbitrarily at 1750), and assesses their impacts on bird populations. Whether you are interested mainly in agriculture or mainly in birds, you are likely to find much of interest in this book.

In Britain, we are fortunate that the recent history of agriculture has been well documented in books and journals, as well as in the ‘June Census Statistics’ on the extent of crops and numbers of stock, which have been 222 the agricultural gathered annually since 1866 by the Agriculture Departments. These publications form the main sources of information on the agricultural aspects, some of which are nicely illustrated by old drawings and photographs belonging to the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading. Likewise, the history of our bird populations has been relatively well documented, but with progressively increasing accuracy and precision into recent decades. During the last forty years, the abundance levels and distributions of most of the species discussed have been monitored by the British Trust for Ornithology, providing good quantitative data, and many species have been individually studied by numerous biologists working in various parts of Britain. So both the agricultural and ornithological aspects of the book are based for the most part on solid information, and the book is well referenced. The author takes a broad view of ‘farmland birds’, including most of the country’s breeding landbird species. This is not unreasonable, considering that almost all the open parts of the British landscape, from sea coast to mountainsides, are used for some type of crop or meat production, and are therefore at the mercy of agricultural policy.

After introductory chapters dealing with the farming background and the birds respectively, subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects of agricultural change, including the development of arable farming systems, enclosure, hedges, drainage, weeds and pesticides, grassland and stock, labour, machines and buildings. From his review of the evidence, the author concludes that, throughout the period considered, continual changes have occurred in the distributions and abundance levels of birds, in association with every major change in farming system. However, it is the revolutionary developments over the past half century, and especially over the past thirty years, that have caused the most widespread and devastating declines in bird populations. (One could of course extend this conclusion to other animals and to native plants.) The impacts of modern farming have created in western Europe what many regard as the major conservation problem of our age. The main drivers of the wildlife impacts are the large-scale use of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers, widespread land drainage and the change to more intensive grassland management, excessive stocking densities and overgrazing of the uplands, the switch in the lowlands from spring to autumn cultivations, and the progressive change over much of the country from mixed farming to arable monocultures. As far as the birds are concerned, these changes mean much less habitat and much less food, and in some species increased vulnerability of eggs and chicks to machinery, trampling by farm stock and perhaps also predators. history review Nowonder almost all bird species have declined on farmland in the past thirty years, some by more than eighty per cent. Much of this revolution has of course been brought about by state subsidy and intervention. Increasingly, then, the decisions taken by farmers have come to reflect not the most sensible land management options, but whatever will reap the biggest subsidy. In theory, some lessening in the environmental consequences of modern farming could come from widespread adoption of the recently introduced agrienvironment schemes, providing that they are sufficiently well financed; but in the view of the author ‘past experience suggests that not too much environmental optimism should be placed on that’. Only time will tell.

In conclusion, this book provides the most comprehensive review of the relationship between British farming and birds yet written, with much discussion of the factors that have driven the various changes over the years. I enjoyed the book, partly because of the mass of interesting historical and contemporary detail that it contains, but also because it is eminently readable.