Wildlife needs a bit of wildness in the countryside

Moths are important to Brian Morland because he knows their numbers are dwindling. Every day, he counts those caught in traps and records them on a computer database.

"At the end of the year, you can identify how many there have been, which species, and how many broods. If you do it over a period of years, you can see what is happening, not just speculate about it."

Brian's interest in moths stems from the crucial role they play in sustaining other wildlife. "What a lot of people don't understand is that if you take, say, a pair of blue tits, to raise a family they require about 35,000 caterpillars and each one of these moths lays three or four hundred eggs. This is the bottom end of the food chain.

"Take your moths away and your birds starve. It's as simple as that and unfortunately there is a big decline in the numbers of moths in this country. The main reason I would say is that we are sanitising the countryside to a huge extent.

"Very few people who move out into the countryside will tolerate nettles, rose bay willow herb, thistles, ragwort. What people don't realise is that thistles and ragwort are the main nectar source for butterflies and moths at night, hover flies and bees."

In 1961, Brian started a job as a design engineer with ICI Fabrics. He was a young man and he was not impressed. "It was like joining the Army. You had to start work at seven o'clock, it was hard work."

As a boy, Brian had liked nothing better than to play at his grandparents' house which bordered the River Ure at West Witton and his interest in wildlife had never faded. At ICI, especially in good weather and confined to the design office, he longed to break free and get back to the great outdoors.

"In 1976 it was a hot summer and I just got fed up of looking out and wishing I was outside. What settled it was a guy, he was 50, came in and started talking about what he had seen on Coronation Street the night before, and I thought, 'God, if I get to 50 and all I can talk about is Coronation Street, I might as well blow me brains out now'. So I just got a big box, poured everything in it and walked out. I never went back."

Brian was able to make a living writing about nature and wildlife and publishing books. After four years, he had saved up enough money to buy a gravel pit near Knaresborough to turn into a fishery and wildlife area. His other favourite rural refuge was a site on the River Ure at West Tanfield, a few miles downstream from where he had played as a boy.

For years there had been gravel extraction on the land here surrounding Bellflask House, a disused farm worker's cottage. By the 1980s, most of the gravel extraction had become low key. In the 1990s, production increased when Hansons took over and several new gravel pits appeared. Another company, Heidelberg, who took over the Hansons aggregates company, now pays for the restoration of the area as a part of their planning conditions.

This gave Brian the opportunity to make further use of his conservation skills. "I've always had a lease on the river for fishing and to monitor wildlife. Part and parcel of taking the lease was to ensure that the wildlife was looked after. As soon as the estate and the quarry started digging the lakes, I was asked if I would develop a fishery.

"One area of land has been quarried and restored. We also run it as a commercial fly-fishery for trout and it brings in an income,to pay for the privilege of leaving other land for the wildlife. There are other lakes on the quarry which will eventually be restored for wildlife.

"I enjoy catching fish and looking at fish, the same as we catch birds here, we net them, we ring them and you can handle them, and look at them up close and that's what you do with fishing. But I don't have to catch lots of fish to enjoy myself."

Brian and his wife Susan now live at renovated Bellflask House and they have set up the Bellflask Ecological Survey Team. "We've planted lots of reeds because in Yorkshire reed beds are quite a rare habitat. We've now got a thriving colony of reed warblers in there.

"Eventually, if the reed bed gets big enough, there's a possibility of bittern breeding here. We've got bittern in winter, usually migrants from the continent. For the last four years, we've had a winter bittern, now we're hoping that in the long term – probably 20 years down the line – they will establish a breeding colony."

The bird's natural habitat, the reed bed, is dwindling in East Anglia and it is one of the rarest birds in the country, so rare that it is

on the Red List of threatened species.

Brian also has his heart set on another rarity beginning to make a comeback in this country, the osprey.

"We get them on spring migration and autumn migration and very occasionally we do get them in summer. They will nest here eventually, they're into Northumberland, they're breeding at Kielder, they're breeding at Bassenthwaite in the Lake District. Sure as eggs is eggs, they're going to be breeding in Yorkshire in the next five to 10 years."

Brian counts the moths caught every night in traps around the gravel pits.

"We go out and we put traps on. We've got one-horsepower generators that will run all night, and they've got a 160 watt mercury bulb basically sat in a plastic dish with little flues.

"The moths are attracted down by the light into a big cylinder where we've put in egg cartons and the moths go and settle under these.

"In daylight they become dormant, so we take the lid off, take them all out, identify them and record them."

He has identified a big decline and is forthright on why that is so. "When you go into the countryside, all the approaches to everybody's houses, everything's mown. We've got no sparrows because our houses are so well looked after these days there are no places for them to nest. We've got loft insulation and all the cracks and crevices have been filled in.

"The biggest threat is development. It's the urbanisation of the countryside that I find difficult. Everything's got to be neat and tidy even on a lot of wildlife reserves. They've got to be managing it all the time, and if you're managing it to that intensity it becomes gardening."

CW 11/9/10