Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Ben Gow

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Review by Liz Dexter

If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you wish, on the other hand, to restore fading species for nature conservation purposes, then you have to fill in 90-page documents which will be thoroughly scrutinised eventually and returned to you with a further suite of impossibly complex questions. Why is it, when nature’s ebb is so low and when so many good people want to do good, that there is no easy ‘one stop’ shop that tells you want is best to do with your land, or your money, or your time to help. Why can’t you just cultivate endangered plants and grow them in your garden, buy packets of glow worms and distribute them with glee, released pool frogs in your pond or adders in your meadows. Why does everything have to be so slow?

You might know Derek Gow as the man who reintroduced the beaver into Britain’s rivers, and indeed he wrote his book, Bringing Back the Beaver, on this very topic. He’s also known as somewhat of what one might call a maverick, being keener on doing nature conservation than on paperwork and red tape. This has brought him up against colleagues, bosses and larger organisations, something he makes no apology for and doesn’t try to hide in this, his memoir of a rather extraordinary life. 

After the first few introductory sections, the chapters are loosely based around animal breeds, so Heck cattle, water-rats/voles, wildcats, etc. This is a sensible way of doing things and allows Gow to introduce how the species has been doing and then talk about his efforts to support them. We work through his life from farmer to conservationist, although he’s always been interested in breeding rare and threatened species, moving from rewilding his own farm to being involved in crowdsourcing purchasing a patch of land to save it quite recently. 

I wouldn’t say this book is for the faint-hearted or squeamish. Starting from his very first pet lamb, the animals he tries to conserve, reintroduce and breed in captivity, as well as other animals he discusses, seem determined to die out all by themselves without human aid, though of course humans have also killed millions of animals, too. Where they’re not dying or appearing as corpses, they are attacking the people who are trying to help him – fortunately for me, the wildcat section wasn’t too hairy, but there’s a memorable story of a wildcat who wasn’t keen on being examined by him! He discusses the studies he and others have done on creatures, finding out how not to work with them as well as how to, and is never ashamed to admit a mistake, it appears. 

We get lots of tales of people, too, in this slender volume, who Gow has worked with or sometimes come up against. There are some real characters, of course, Gow being firmly one of them. He rails against the rigidity of the big organisations that are supposed to protect nature and rather sweetly lists the kinds of people who can actually help: 

You need the right kind of people to help. Grim foresters, able gamekeeping organisations, sharp Belgian scientists, competent conservationists, sympathetic smallholders, children to help carry cages. Parents and grandparents to lend them a hand. People of this sort are everywhere caring and wanting to assist. Relishing the opportunity to do so time and again when they can.

We need people like Gow to show up inconsistencies and errors and fight for our nature, while I believe we also need frameworks – well, he does too, just not the frameworks we have. This is a really interesting read. 

Each chapter has an illustration drawn by Gow, and there are full notes to the chapters (with footnote numbers) and an index. 

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Liz Dexter is very interested on rewilding and is doing it inadvertently in her garden. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.

Derek Gow, Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species (Chelsea Green, 2024 (pb)) ‎ 978-1915294616, 199 pp., ill. hardback.

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