Literature
LITERARY REVIEW Richard Hopton, Sherborne Literary Society
Elegy for a River by Tom Moorhouse (Doubleday) £14.99 Sherborne Times Reader Offer Price of £13.99 from Winstone’s Books
‘C
onservation science,’ Tom Moorhouse writes, ‘is founded on a wild hope.’ His new book, Elegy for a River, is a learned but light-handed and witty account of how this works in practice. ‘Each threatened species is a glittering, ecological puzzle box’: it is the ecologist’s job to find the key to unlock the box. Once this is done, it might become possible to save an endangered species. In pursuit of this dream, Moorhouse has spent years on the banks of – and in – Britain’s rivers and canals. The particular object of his research and, increasingly, his affection was the water vole. Water voles, immortalised as Ratty in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, had been ubiquitous in Britain’s rivers and waterways but, by the late 1990s, they had nearly vanished. Moorhouse set out from Oxford University’s Zoology Department to find out what was happening to Ratty. The first two-thirds of this book tells the tale of Moorhouse’s years of research into the water vole. It is partly a story of ecological discovery, partly one of the joys, frustrations and occasional alarms of fieldwork. As Moorhouse says, ‘Fieldwork is a goddess with a mean streak and a sense of humour.’ Capsizing chest waders or suddenly rupturing dry suits are ever-present dangers for the riparian ecologist. The reader also gets a good sense of the methodical, scientific grind of ecological fieldwork. It transpires that the principal reason for the decline of the water vole is the rapid spread of its main predator, the American mink. By one estimate, in the 1950s Britain’s water vole population stood at
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around eight million; by 2004 there were just 220,000 remaining. Between 1989 and 1998, when mink numbers were peaking, the water vole population fell by 90 per cent. Loss of habitat can shoulder some of the responsibility for this calamitous population decline but it lies largely with the introduction of the American mink into this country in the 1920s by fur farmers. Inevitably, they escaped into the wild where they found a ready, abundant and more or less defenceless food source: the water vole. The sorry tale of the impact of human intervention – for no better motive than profit – in nature on the water vole is mirrored in the case of the American signal crayfish. Introduced into this country in 1976 for commercial reasons, they quickly escaped into the wild where the population exploded. Moorhouse estimates that there are now many billions of them in our rivers and lakes. This problem may be under water and out of sight, but it matters: it’s an ecological disaster with far-reaching results and, as Moorhouse notes bitterly, it’s self-inflicted. Elegy for a River is a well-written book, its style approachable and anecdotal but retaining the scientific heft to make the ecological case. Moorhouse finishes with a vigorous, reasoned plea for vastly increased spending on conservation. His case is economic as well as ecological; the spending would pay for itself. ‘It is,’ he writes, ‘an essential investment that makes sound economic sense.’ sherborneliterarysociety.com
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