FLEEING HUMANITY

A mid-January walk across Rackenford and Knowstone Moor, a Devon Wildlife Trust reserve local to us, and the only large area of rough, unimproved grassland left around here. It’s a wide, open expanse of nature, with views in all directions.

After a few minutes, a question creeps up on me. I’m mildly irritated by it because it’s such a simple thing and yet I’ve not really thought about it before, at least not in detail. A clear answer is not immediately forthcoming.

I blame the local Snipe. I often flush a few when walking here in winter, sometimes as many as 30 or 40, flying up in singles and small groups. The question I’m now pondering, having disturbed a lone bird, is why they - like most other species - flee so emphatically away from us when we venture too close.

Today, as on every visit, most Snipe break cover when I’m more than twenty metres away, often from places where they are well concealed and would no doubt have remained so. They choose not to stay hidden, or even to put just a little more distance between themselves and me. Instead, they tower up into the air at speed, firing off" disgruntled, grating calls, before heading away into the distance. The noise reminds me of the squelch of a boot pulled free from thick mud, entirely appropriate for a bird leaving waterlogged ground for the air above. On misty days it’s easy to lose sight of these birds as they carve zig-zagging lines across the sky, before eventually choosing a new spot to settle. I always feel a little guilty and hope they manage to find somewhere at least as secure and food rich as the place they have just abandoned.

Why do they do this? Such a rapid and energetic flight over such a long distance uses up valuable resources.

The smaller Jack Snipe is a bird I also see regularly, if far less often, up here on the moor. I’d guess I flush one for every thirty or so Snipe. This smaller species is far more easy-going when it comes to human disturbance, showing that other strategies are possible. They fly up only if I get to within a few metres. Sometimes they leave it so late that I almost tread on them. This laid-back approach extends to their escape flights too. They fly up, take a few seconds to pick another spot nearby, and flop down into it. No fuss, no calls of annoyance, little energy wasted. A far more rational and proportionate response - or so it seems from a human perspective.

If there’s an explanation for the larger Snipe’s approach then I struggle to put my finger on it. I wonder whether it’s because of hunting by humans. Snipe is a quarry species, meaning that it can legally be killed in the open season. Fly up too late and you might become an easier target for the shotgun. Fly only a short distance and there’s a risk you will be flushed by the hunter a second time. Perhaps, then, hunting has honed their response and the seemingly exaggerated behaviour makes sense after all.

For a while I’m satisfied with the explanation. I pause at my usual vantage point where I can see the edge of Exmoor, a few miles to the north, and the dark, brooding mass of Dartmoor away to the south - all detail erased by distance and a thin veil of mist.

Up ahead is an area favoured by the Exmoor ponies, conser­vation grazers par excellence. The closely cropped sward here offers welcome respite from the huge tussocks of Purple Moor-grass that cover much of the site. Their long tufts of pale-straw stems remain through the winter, and the dense tussocks with deep troughs between are tricky to walk through while remaining vertical.

And this time it’s Redwings and Fieldfares, rather than Snipe, that take my thoughts back to disturbance. I count over 100 Fieldfares, a few Redwings among them, plus several hundred Starlings, as always packed more tightly together than the thrushes as they frantically probe the short turf for food.

Predictably, they all fly up as I walk towards them, when I’m still more than a hundred metres away. I present no threat. Even if I wanted to kill one, I have no means of doing so. Humans have no interest in shooting these species (at least here in Britain) and even if they did, it would be nigh on impossible to get within shotgun range. Can the birds not come to understand this? Can they not adapt to the situation and learn to save their energy?

The flock circles a few times, the Fieldfares ‘chakking’ to each other, as if trying to work out what to do next, and then - decision made - they drift across to a sheep field just beyond the edge of the moor. Further on, I flush Skylarks and Meadow Pipits from the ground and a Stonechat keeps ahead of me, bouncing from one bush to another, maintaining the required safe distance. Only a diminutive Wren adopts the Jack Snipe’s approach and conserves its energy. It is steadfast in its refusal to fly, and after a few ‘tiks’ of disapproval, it slips away into the heart of a gorse bush.

My hunting theory now feels less secure. It might explain why quarry species, or species often killed as ‘pests’, tend to be more alert and flightier than most birds, but it’s less satisfactory for species that humans don’t kill regularly.

This moor is pretty remote. Frequently, as today, I’ll see no-one in an hour or two of wandering. I can’t help but think back to the work trips I used to make to our capital, a place clogged with humanity. I’d regularly attend meetings at the Zoological Society of London, based at London Zoo, and I’d always be sure to walk across Regent’s Park from the tube to get there. It wasn’t the diversity of wildlife in the park that appealed, but rather the way the wild animals behaved around people. Visitors fed the Grey Squirrels by hand. And in sharp contrast to the behaviour of skittish rural Woodpigeons, those in the park maintained stoic indifference as I ambled by a couple of metres away. Robins, Dunnocks and Blackbirds in the flowerbeds all but ignored the streams of people passing within a few feet of them - and they were not beyond taking advantage of humans by foraging for discarded sandwich crusts and biscuit crumbs beneath the park benches.

This sort of adaptation to humanity is commonplace. It allows wild animals to exploit places from which they would otherwise be excluded through the sheer weight of human presence. They learn, via constant repetition, that humans pose little threat and they adjust their behaviour accordingly. Much the same thing happens on heavily visited nature reserves, to the benefit ofvisitors seeking close encounters with wildlife. On the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland, the breeding seabirds have habituated to the regular boatloads of day-trippers. The Arctic Terns nest right next to the footpath, though they are not beyond a noisy, aggressive reminder that they would rather we stayed away.

Birds clearly can adapt to living with people when they have no choice. They are capable of learning that in towns and on busy nature reserves we pose little threat. And yet in the countryside their behaviour is very different, even among birds that are not killed by hunters. Of course, we once hunted a far wider range of species than we do today. In the V ictorian period, for example, huge numbers of birds were shot or trapped for food, including many of the smaller songbirds. Birds were also killed to provide specimens to stuff and put on display, or even in order to enable identification in a time before good optical equipment was widely available; ‘what’s hit is history, what’s missed is mystery’ was the old adage when birdwatchers roamed the countryside armed not with binoculars but with their weapon of choice. Perhaps then, the cautious behaviour we see now is simply a hangover from historical times.

It would be fascinating to know how birds in Britain reacted to people when the two first came together, many thousands of years ago. No doubt they quickly learnt to keep an arm’s reach, or even a stone’s throw, away. But my guess is they wouldn’t have flown off at long range, as they so often do today, unnecessarily burning their energy reserves. We have encouraged this response through our predatory instincts, allied to weaponry of ever­increasing efficiency. Even for the species we now leave in peace, that instinctive fear of humans, evolved over many generations, remains written into the genes. In places where humanity dominates the environment, such as Regent’s Park or the Farne Islands, birds have little choice other than to learn to put up with us. But in general, evolution plays out over expanded timescales and most rural birds have yet to catch up. They continue to flee from us, despite the hardship this adds to their busy and fragile lives.