British wildlife is small, gentle and almost entirely harmless. There is nothing in the countryside that can seriously hurt you, which visitors from countries with bears, snakes or spiders find either reassuring or faintly disappointing.
Nothing dangerous
Britain has no large predators. Wolves were hunted to extinction by the eighteenth century, bears and lynx a great deal earlier. The only venomous snake is the adder, which is shy, rarely seen, and whose bite has caused around fourteen deaths in over a century.
The most dangerous animals are, statistically, cows — which occasionally trample walkers crossing fields with dogs — and deer, through road collisions.
The familiar cast
- The robin — voted Britain’s national bird, fiercely territorial despite its reputation, and inseparable from Christmas cards. It follows gardeners because it evolved to follow wild boar turning over soil.
- The hedgehog — consistently the most loved British mammal, and in serious trouble. Numbers have fallen by around half in rural areas since 2000. Cutting a hedgehog-sized hole in a garden fence is now a recognised conservation act.
- The red squirrel — native, and largely displaced by the introduced grey, which carries a virus fatal to reds. Survives in Scotland, Northumberland, Cumbria, Anglesey and the Isle of Wight.
- The badger — nocturnal, striped, and at the centre of a long and bitter argument over culling to control bovine tuberculosis.
- The fox — thriving, and now more urban than rural. City foxes are a familiar and divisive presence in British gardens.
- Deer — six species, only two native. Numbers are the highest for a thousand years, with no predators and considerable damage to woodland regeneration.
The sea and the coast
Better than the land, and underrated. Britain hosts internationally important seabird colonies — puffins, gannets, guillemots — on the Farne Islands, Bempton Cliffs, Skomer and St Kilda. Grey seals breed around the coast in large numbers, and basking sharks, dolphins and minke whales are seen off the west of Scotland and Cornwall.
The depletion
Britain is, by the standard biodiversity intactness measures, among the most nature-depleted countries in the world — regularly placed in the bottom 10% globally.
The reason is time rather than industry. Britain cleared its forests, drained its wetlands and enclosed its land for agriculture over a thousand years, long before the Industrial Revolution. Only about 13% of the country is wooded, against a European average above 35%, and much of that is plantation conifer.
Farmland bird populations have fallen by more than half since 1970, and flying insect abundance has dropped sharply.
Coming back
There is a genuine and growing rewilding movement, and some real successes:
- Red kites — down to a handful of Welsh pairs by the 1930s, reintroduced from the 1990s, and now a common sight over the Chilterns and much of England.
- Beavers — extinct in Britain for 400 years, reintroduced in Scotland and Devon, and now legally protected.
- White-tailed eagles, ospreys, cranes, pine martens and large blue butterflies have all been reintroduced or recovered.
- Knepp in Sussex, a former intensive farm turned over to free-roaming grazing animals, has become the flagship British rewilding project and now supports nightingales, turtle doves and white storks.