Richard Collins: Wild Europe may soon be just a memory

Les Gardiennes depicts the trials and tribulations of a farming family during the Great War of 1914-18.

The men of fighting age are away at the front; the women must run the farm, their endless toil paralleling the merciless struggle of the soldiers in the trenches.

Ploughing, making charcoal, harvesting with scythe and sickle, are shown in exquisitely composed motion equivalents of Barbizon school paintings.

But the world of Millet’s Gleaners and The Angelus is nearing its end; the first tractor arrives and a new-fangled machine mows down wheat, as its machine-gun equivalents kill soldiers at the front.

Watched in awe and fear, such technology will soon change everything.

The agricultural revolution transformed lives, bringing huge benefits to people worldwide, but there was a price to pay; wild creatures have not fared well.

A skein of wild geese flies in V formation over the farm in Les Gardiennes, hinting at impending departure.

German research has revealed a 75% reduction in flying insect numbers; the days of car windscreens covered in squashed moths and craneflies now gone.

Pastures, bland green swards, are no longer peppered with the colourful wildflowers beloved of landscape painters.

Michael Clarke, of the RSPB, blames agricultural practices for the disappearance of 420 million birds in Europe since 1980.

Corn bunting numbers fell by 66% between 1980 and 2009. The skylark population declined by 46% and there are 62% fewer linnets. Grey partridge numbers are down an ominous 82%.

Wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham warns that a ‘natural catastrophe’ is ushering in an increasingly ‘green and unpleasant land’.

He claims that Britain has lost 90 million individual birds. Turtle doves, nightingales, cirl buntings and stone curlews may soon be gone.

The 2016 State of Nature Report puts Britain ‘among the most nature-depleted countries in the world’.

In its foreword, David Attenborough writes that ‘climate change and modern land management mean that we continue to lose the precious wildlife that enriches our lives and is essential to .. health and well-being..’

Linnets seem to be holding their own in Ireland, but our overall situation is similar.

The corn bunting’s evocative ‘jangling bunch of keys’ song is no longer heard; the bird is extinct here now and there’s concern for the future of another bunting, the yellowhammer.

Few people ever hear a corncrake or cuckoo nowadays and without the Trojan efforts of the Irish Grey Partridge Trust, another farmland bird would also be gone.

According to BirdWatch Ireland, ‘farmland bird populations in Ireland.. are at their lowest levels since records began’.

Packham thinks that, facing an ‘ecological apocalypse’, most wild species will survive only in nature reserves and parks.

Outside managed areas, few creatures will be encountered.

In ‘the Ireland that we dreamed of’, the countryside ‘would be bright with cosy homesteads’, where ‘firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age’ prophesied Éamon de Valera.

Now magpies feral pigeons and grey crows, rather than the ‘contests of athletic youth and the laughter of happy maidens’, haunt the rural landscape.

The agricultural genie is out of the bottle; returning to the Ireland of The Quiet Man or the France of Les Gardiennes, are not options.

Packham despairs.

Attenborough is less pessimistic; if we ‘all pull together’, he writes, ‘we can provide a brighter future for nature and for people’.