Beak, Tooth and Claw

Why Predators are needed for a healthy British Countryside

Mary Colwell

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008354770
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Foxes, buzzards, crows, badgers, weasels, seals, gulls, kites – Britain and Ireland’s predators are impressive and diverse and they capture our collective imagination. But many consider them to our competition, even our enemies.

The problem is that predators eat what we farm or use for sport. From foxes and ravens attacking new-born lambs to weasels eating game-bird chicks, predators compete with us, putting them directly into the firing line. Farming, fishing, sport and leisure industries want to see numbers of predators reduced, and conservation organisations also worry that predators are threatening some endangered species. Other people, though, will go to great lengths to protect them from any harm. This clashing of worlds can be intense. So, what do we do? One of the greatest challenges facing conservation today is how, when and where to control predators. It is a highly charged debate.

Mary Colwell travels across the UK and Ireland to encounter the predators face to face. She watches their lives in the wild and discovers how they fit into the landscape. She talks to the scientists studying them and the wildlife lovers who want to protect them. She also meets the people who want to control them to protect their livelihoods or sporting interests.

In this even-handed exploration of the issues, Mary provides a thoughtful and reasoned analysis of the debates surrounding our bittersweet relationship with predators.

1

Setting the Scene

May 2000, Babati, northern Tanzania

It is a warm, dry night and we are filming traditional honey gatherers preparing to search for wild bees for a BBC documentary. During the day we had hauled generators into a clearing in scrubby forest to light a set of a few logs placed around an open fire, which now spits and crackles. It is not far off midnight. Within the circle of dancing flames and glaring lamps the atmosphere is intense and upbeat. The throb of the generators is an underscore to the chatter of local women who are tending large pots of steaming stew; we will be here for hours. The stars of the scene, the honey-hunters, are crouched on the logs and deep in discussion; the crew are busy with equipment. I curse myself; I need some notes I had made earlier in the day but they are in a jeep parked a hundred metres down a rough track. Without telling anyone, I take a torch and go to get them. Within seconds it is dark. The comforting arena of light is confined to the set and the moonlight is subdued by cloud. The hubbub quickly fades. I am alone, virtually sightless and breathing fast.

The African night is unsettling for a city-dwelling westerner and panic rises at any sound. The heat pulsates with the rasp of cicadas and the darkness beyond the trees is impenetrable. I feel vulnerable and wish someone had come with me. Even though there is no visible enemy, I am on alert, but the rough ground makes it dangerous to hurry. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but I feel I am being watched. At the car I grab the notebook, slam the door and swing the torch round to find the track. The beam stops dead just metres away at two eyes. They are at waist height and glint in the torchlight, holding a steady gaze. Something deep and primordial wants me to run but fear keeps me rooted to the ground. For what seems like an age the world is motionless. Then, silently, the spotted hyena turns and pads away. I watch its drooping head and sloping back disappear into the bush.

Years have passed since that encounter, but my memory of it is clear and the anxiety lingers whenever I recall that night. Large carnivores inhabit our psyche, ghost-like and prowling. Our survival instincts were honed in sub-Saharan Africa, on that uncompromising continent of opportunity and danger. Ancestral fears of being vulnerable and preyed upon still swarm in the pit of the stomach.

The jaws of hyenas are terrifying bone crushers, ten times more powerful than our own, and our thin hide covering a puny structure makes us easy meat. Hyena attacks on humans are very rare, but that is cold comfort when face to face with one in the loneliness of the night. Bones of ancient humans from half a million years ago in Morocco show signs of hyena gnawing, and in a cave in France the teeth of a Neanderthal child have been found in an ancient den, their surface smoothed by the acid in the predator’s stomach. Wariness, though, is deservedly mutual. Many archaeological sites reveal butchering areas where the scored and scratched bones of hyenas were de-fleshed using flint knives. We killed them, and they ate us; in a way it was a raw and honest natural contract.

Super-sized and twice as heavy as those in Africa today, hyenas were part of the wondrous, outsized fauna that roamed European landscapes for much of the Pleistocene, otherwise known as the Ice Age. For the past two and a half million years the wobbling of the earth on its axis has caused intermittent periods of cold and warm; heat and ice have toyed with each other in a climatic tug of war, with warmth winning for the present. Beating to this rhythm, tracking the air temperature, life came and went in great swathes of migrations. Alongside the hyenas, predators such as scimitar-toothed cats, the size of modern lions with sharply serrated upper canines that reached down to the bottom of the lower jaw, and cave lions, the largest lions ever to have sunk their claws into flesh, preyed on an array of giant herbivores – woolly mammoths and rhinoceros, giant elk, aurochs, bison. And when we arrived in Europe, us too.

Modern humans – Homo sapiens – joined the shifting throngs over 40,000 years ago. We became part of the dance of the ice ages. We had lived alongside carnivores in Africa, and now we were neighbours in Britain. Archaeology has shown that we not only hunted for the same prey but also competed for the same shelter. At times we scared them away from good sites and guarded caves for ourselves, but at others we held an uneasy truce, occupying different caverns in the same system. It is hard to imagine this in Britain today, where our largest land predator is a badger.

Our modern, man-made environments have extinguished any active memories of living among dangerous wild creatures, but we still carry them in our depths. As night falls and something moves just out of sight, primal instincts stir. But then, it isn’t really that long ago – a mere 30,000 years – since spotted hyenas were just one of a range of predators that lived alongside us in Britain. Recent research shows that our brains still prioritise the movement of people and animals, far more than man-made objects:1 ‘Better change detection for non-human animals than for vehicles reveals a monitoring system better tuned to ancestral than to modern priorities’, as the paper concludes. Even though a fast-moving car is a greater threat to most of us than a tiger, recognising it as such is not how we have evolved. The first journey I made for this book was to try to reach back through time, to reconnect with that lost world where we battled with beasts.

On a bright winter day, I drove to the south coast of Devon, to the area known as the English Riviera, to visit Kent’s Cavern, a naturally formed limestone cave high up on a valley wall. Pastel-pink houses with white fascias line the roads to Torquay; they looked pretty against the blue sky and distant sea. The small road leading to the cave comes suddenly and it is easy to miss the fingerpost off a steep hill. Ancient hunters used this area as home: the cave would have commanded a good view of their prey funnelling along the valley floor – a conveyor belt of protein.

When Beatrix Potter visited Kent’s Cavern in 1893, she had to walk along a muddy trail that wove its way through woodland to a wooden door flush against the rock. For a young girl with a vibrant imagination it was transformed into an enticing and magical front door to the cosy home of Mrs Tiggywinkle. Times have moved on. The track has gone, replaced by an access road and car park, and the door is enclosed by a 1930s entrance hall, café and shop.

Two centuries of excavations at Kent’s Cavern have unearthed tens of thousands of animal bones buried in an accumulation of sediments that stretches back half a million years; a layer-cake of past life. In 1927, a small fragment of human upper jawbone came to light. It turned out to be at least 30,000 years old, the earliest remains of Homo sapiens in Britain. This tiny fragment is all that is left of a real person who lived alongside giant predators on our shores. I joined a public tour to discover more.

We gathered in an antechamber next to the Beatrix Potter door. Brightly lit cabinets displayed the skulls, teeth and bones of all kinds of ice-age life, including ancient humans. It was my first encounter with the hunters who lived here, but I found it uncomfortable that human bones were laid out in a row, clinical and cold. At some indefinable point in history human remains become an exhibit rather than an individual deemed worthy of a burial.

The guide led us through Mrs Tiggywinkle’s door, locked it behind us, and we found ourselves in the first of an intricate system of caves and narrow tunnels that stretch back into the hillside. Thin shafts of light from ceiling lamps created bright pools on the floor; otherwise the darkness was deep and disorientating. The drip-dripping of water as it seeped through cracks echoed around the chamber. The air was dank and stale and infused with the acrid smell of wet rock. A disembodied voice boomed out a recorded history, telling us about the long occupation of this cave system. Eerie music and the sounds of snarling beasts added drama to the story of ancient hominins, now long extinct, who made their camps here. Both Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals left their hand axes buried in the dirt as glimpses of their practical lives, but of their thoughts and beliefs we know very little. Eventually, modern people arrived, anatomically identical to us, as evidenced by the jaw. They would have stood on this spot where we are gathered, dressed in skins and carrying spears, living or dying by their wits. We visitors were wearing fashionable coats and clutched our mobiles, otherwise there was little difference.

‘We’ve reached the period when modern people, or Homo sapiens, are using the caves,’ said the voice. ‘Much as their forebears, they shelter here making tools, cooking and preparing for the next day’s hunt. The cave is also home [the voice lowers and becomes more dramatic] to a pack of hyenas [sound of hyenas cackling]. Our small group of hunters are protected by the fire. However, thirty-one thousand years ago, a young member of the clan strays too far into the darkness [sound of loud snarls and yelping]. A small piece of human jawbone, found right next to where you are standing, gives us the evidence of this deadly combat.’ We all looked around on the floor, half-expecting, half-dreading to see any other remains of death by hyena – a tiny femur or small bony hand poking up through the soil – but the floor was swept clean and worn smooth by the millions of feet that have trodden this tourist trail since 1880. Who knows whether this hapless, ice-age toddler was actually killed by hyenas or was scavenged after death, but it makes a good story in this atmospheric cave, and it gives an idea of the dangers that our ancestors faced and the forces that shaped our instincts.

In the darkness I tried to picture what it must have been like to have called this labyrinth of caves a home, to have looked out of the cave mouth to see a scimitar-toothed cat peering in, even worse a cave lion. It would have been a place where, according to Henry David Thoreau’s observations of the virgin forest in America, ‘there was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man.’2

Packs of wolves would once have dragged deer and horse kills to the entrance and left the chewed bones scattered over the floor, as did hyenas, but predators were not the only danger to us. No doubt many hunters were trampled by wild horses, charged by aurochs (wild cattle) and rhinos and crushed by mammoths. And sailing in the sky, looking down on the battles below, were large birds of prey – their bones too are in the cave deposits.

Eagle owls hunted birds and mammals and often nested in caves. Their soft, lonely hoots would have floated across the hard ground, a remarkably gentle sound for a bird whose wingspan is nearly two metres. Perhaps one of these was responsible for the bones found here of the ghost-like snowy owl, a feather-light killer with the demeanour of an angel. White-tailed and golden eagles, kites and rough-legged buzzards, as well as many smaller raptors, soared over the grasslands. Their remains are found with the bones of small birds, voles and lemmings. As unlikely as it seems, the English Riviera was once the site of so much flesh-ripping menagerie.

Downhill from the cave, where wetlands once merged with the sea, the harsh calls of brent and white-fronted geese, white storks, Bewick’s swans, demoiselle cranes and shelduck would have filled the air. The poignant piping of many species of waders rising from the marshes added to the music of the skies. Out on the sea cliffs, vast, raucous colonies of cormorants, kittiwakes, gannets and razorbills were a seasonal bounty taken in the air or plucked from their nests. Bones of all these are found in ice-age caves. The sound of birds alone must have been overwhelming, but when mixed with the howls of wolves, the trumpeting of mammoths and the deep growls of bears, a surround-sound of fear and beauty must have suffused the daily lives of our ancestors. It is unimaginable today.

The last cavern is a transition between dripping, dark depths and the brightly lit tearoom. It is an exhibition area telling the stories of the first explorers who crawled through mud and rock to discover ever more astonishing bones. One of these was a young Catholic priest from the west of Ireland, John MacEnery, who excavated the caves for a few years from 1825. Digging through the cave floor, he found evidence of humans, wolves, bears and mammoths in the same layer, incontrovertible proof that humans lived here in this extraordinary time. It was a flagrant challenge to the overriding theology of the first half of the nineteenth century, which dictated that humanity was a very recent and specially created addition to the earth, unconnected in any way to the mass of life that went before. We were considered to be just one step lower than the angels in the hierarchy that stretched from earthworms to God; favoured occupiers of a world made solely for our use and pleasure. It is hard for us to fathom how troubling this must have been to a young man beginning his life of holy orders. Faith and archaeology collided in MacEnery’s heart. Lacking confidence in his own reasoning, he sent the bones to William Buckland, a pre-eminent theologian and palaeontologist, who outright rejected MacEnery’s suggestion that people could have lived alongside now extinct creatures, and convinced him that the evidence before his eyes was an illusion. Buckland replied that he had been sent other examples, none of which stacked up as real proof, and he concluded:

Many of the caverns have been inhabited by savage tribes who, for convenience of occupation, have repeatedly disturbed portions of soil in which their predecessors may have been buried. Such disturbances will explain the occasional admixture of fragments of Human skeletons and the bones of modern quadrupeds with those of extinct species, introduced at more early periods and by natural cause.3

Despite the fact MacEnery had found flint knives, charcoal and animal bones beneath calcified layers that had not been disturbed, Buckland never accepted any evidence that humans coexisted with ‘antediluvian’ animals (those that had existed before Noah’s flood). Accounts from friends reveal how MacEnery was torn between believing his own findings and being true to his faith and to the persuasion of the most eminent academic at the time. He lost heart with archaeology, turned his mind to heaven and locked away his paper, ‘Cavern Researches’. He stopped visiting the cave; his ideas could find no audience in ‘an apathetic and unbelieving world’.4 Years later ‘Cavern Researches’ was rediscovered by accident and published in 1859, eighteen years after MacEnery’s premature death at the age of forty-four. By then the progress of science and mounting evidence was beginning to rock the philosophy of Creationism to its foundations.

It was a thought-provoking end to my tour, a sad tale of head and heart in disarray when faced with the dizzying concept that humanity once lived with giant, extinct beasts in a world of ice. There has always been a complex interaction between what people want to believe, and our endeavours to understand the planet. Progress is strewn with casualties such as John MacEnery.

The caves shut away behind Mrs Tiggywinkle’s door, I noticed the windows of the tea shop were adorned with cut-outs of cave-men shaking their spears at ferocious bears. Looking out onto the wooded hillside, the air still holds wisps of its ice-age past, and the spirits of these tough, sophisticated ancestors still seem to drift through the trees. If time travel were possible, I would visit them to find out about their loves and fears and listen to their songs, stories and laughter. I would learn much from their resilience in their strange, ferocious world. The local newspaper mused on their lives, too. ‘Torquay has seen some fun times, but perhaps it’s never been quite so wild as it was in the days when the locals used to chase mammoths down what is now the high street.’5 But not everything in that long-gone world would have been unfamiliar.

When the large cats, hyenas and wolves had eaten their fill, and we humans had finished processing and cooking our own kills, the smell of the leftover blood and fat would have attracted those animals that receive far less attention in ice-age guidebooks, but whose bones are nonetheless buried alongside the charismatic giants. Keeping in the background, smaller hunters and scavengers like red foxes and badgers kept a safe distance, closely observing and judging behaviour, looking for signs that it was safe to move in and take the leftovers. They slipped in and out of the shadows, feasting on the spoils. Sometimes they miscalculated and we were waiting to capture them, because their bodies were useful to us too. The bones and skin of all creatures, large and small, hunter and hunted, were used by our ancestors for food, clothing, instruments and ornaments.

It would be wrong, though, to assume our hunter-gatherer relationship with wildlife was purely utilitarian. In Why Look at Animals, John Berger argues it is demeaning of complex societies to assume life was simply gritty survival. ‘To suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a nineteenth-century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.’6

Deep inside cave systems in France and Spain, these messengers are painted on the walls, in creative gestures dating back some 30,000 years. Creatures we needed and feared, admired and worshipped are captured in a few deftly administered strokes in charcoal and ochre. They reveal a profound connection to lions, hyenas, deer, horses, mammoths and bison. The hint of a curve of the haunches, a contrasting coat pattern or the angle of a head to the body instantly identifies each animal. Removed from any depiction of landscape, they float on the rock walls as the sole focus for the eye, caught in the act of running, feeding or charging. There is nothing to distract the observer from their pure essence.

The artists worked in remote chambers away from natural light where they used the contours and irregularity of the walls to give added depth to the creatures’ bodies. When lit by flickering torchlight, perhaps to the sounds of ceremony and incantation, the powerful beasts must have appeared to breathe the ice-age air and to move. These were cave-temples to the natural world, a meditation on the intimate relationship between people and the life around them. Small sculptures, talismans and spear-throwers have also been found, exquisitely carved in horn and bone. They include half-human...