A land fit for duck?

Swathes of wonderful wetland duck habitat have been lost to industry and agriculture, but Mike Swan says there are reasons for optimism

- Mike Swan

Looking at the worked-out gravel pits as we travel the motorways and the new ponds on many a farm, it’s easy to think that Britain is a fairly duck-friendly country. It is certainly the case that lots of new wetland habitat has been created over the past few decades. But, prior to that, a lot was lost and much of it on a grand scale.

Reclaiming the land

Exactly when the first person decided to improve the drainage of a piece of land to grow better crops is lost in the mists of time, but big-scale efforts go back much further than you might suppose. Victorian attempts at reclaiming land from the sea, particularly along the east coast, are well known. In places, you can see progressively bigger sea walls, one outside another, marking the progress of drainage projects.

The truth is, though, that this all began long before the industrial age. Many older Shooting Times readers will have fond memories of the writings of Alan Savory, whose books Norfolk Fowler and The Shore Shooter inspired a generation of wildfowlers. He also wrote eloquently of the loss of our wildlands, pointing out that vast swathes of East Anglia had been progressively claimed from the primordial swamp.

Here, I think, is a great point. We are lucky still to have extensive saltmarshes along many coastlines, but inside the sea wall enormous areas of once wonderful duck habitat have been drained and turned to agriculture. Once upon a time, the Norfolk Broads, the Fens of Cambridgeshire and much other prime farmland were networks of slow-moving rivers and rushy swamps. They were basically freshwater marshlands, but still under the influence of the ebb and flow of the tide, even though the salt did not extend that far inland.