Fieldwork: Introducing ‘the sit’, rewilding and illegal lynx releases

Rewilding and illegal animal releases in fiction and real life.

Sitcom is short for ‘situation comedy’ and whilst we often think about the comedy bit and the characters who make us laugh, the situation they are in is also important. The best situations are well defined, often restrictive, perhaps even a bit claustrophobic. The Good Place is set in the afterlife. Ghosts in an old house. Cabin Pressure on a plane. You get the gist.

Fieldwork is set in a field station, a residential research facility which acts as a base for the characters’ ecological data-gathering trips. When I started thinking about this sitcom, I thought that ‘remote field station’ would be a clear enough ‘sit’. But when I started digging deeper into the science my characters are doing, in order to inform my plots, I came to understand that I needed to know a lot more about their scientific context. Science isn’t done in a vacuum (unless you’re a particle physicist); every project has some sort of wider milieu.

I thought it would probably help to have all four main characters working on different aspects of the same project, in order to give them shared goals, shared problems and the ability to accidentally mess with each other. In Community, the characters are all studying for a degree at a community college. In Schitt’s Creek, they are all coping with the loss of their fortune and status. In Sex Education, they’re all trying to deal with their early sexual experiences (or not) at sixth form.

So Fieldwork will see our characters joining forces to rewild an overworked farm with ecologically barren fields and perhaps even a wildlife-unfriendly coniferous wood. This will give them a chance to work together, as well as work on their own specialties, and will give me some juicy plot opportunities!

Rewilding in fiction and the news

The ideas behind Fieldwork, which was started with the aim of promoting ecology and ecological careers, are not dissimilar to those behind the world’s longest running radio drama, The Archers. First broadcast in 1951, The Archers was developed in part to help teach farmers modern farming techniques, and it continues to tackle the issues faced by rural communities now, some 20,500 episodes later.

I’m not the only one to see the parallels between Fieldwork and The Archers, so I thought that I had perhaps better give it a listen. I was delighted to find that the first episode I dropped in on, from New Year’s Day, features rewilding very prominently. Rex and Kirsty discuss the ridiculously high cost of reintroducing beavers, and the mountain of paperwork that they’d have to do and which would take years to complete. So Kirsty suggests that they do a wild release: the illegal release of beavers onto their land.

An interesting story arc, I though, but one that is surely restricted to fiction.

But then came the news that someone had illegally released two lynx in the Scottish Highlands at some point on Wednesday. Although no risk to humans, the lynx appeared to be too tame and there were concerns about their wellbeing, ie that they might either starve or end up being shot. By Thursday night, they had been captured and are now in quarantine and are being cared for by Highland Wildlife Park until they are Edinburgh Zoo. Friday morning, we found out that there are two more lynx on the loose, which were also rapidly captured.

(Update: On Friday, it was reported that one of the recaptured lynx had died. A postmortem will be carried out to try to identify the cause of death.)

Large predators like lynx are important ecosystem engineers. Rewilding Britain says:

[Lynx] change the behaviour of prey species through the so-called ecology of fear. Through faeces, urine or scrapes, lynx leave scent marks that advertise their presence. This keeps animals on the move, which helps to prevent overgrazing and allows tree saplings and other vegetation to establish.

Lynx also prey directly on roe deer, which are overabundant in much of Britain. They will take on larger ungulates such as red deer or reindeer when other prey is scarce. Lynx also eat foxes, rabbits, hares, rodents and birds. Carcasses left by lynx provide food for other species and help fertilise the soil as they decay.

The Scottish Highlands are a feasible location for the reintroduction of lynx. But, as The Archers’ Rex and Kirsty find out, setting up a rewilding project that involves reintroducing species is not quick, cheap or easy. And just as they became frustrated enough to consider breaking the law, so it has been suggested that the lynx releases happened because someone, or some people, were so frustrated by a lack of progress that they took matters into their own hands.

Yet random releases of animals that are unsuitable for a life in the wild, perhaps because they are too tame, don’t have the right hunting skills, aren’t in an area where they are protected from humans, or are released at the wrong time of year, doesn’t help us to rewild. And they certainly don’t help convince the skeptics that bringing back large predators like lynx or dam-building rodents like beavers, is a good idea.

Rewilding isn’t just about reintroducing species, though. There’s a lot of pretty simple stuff that could be done to make land more ecologically diverse and abundant, such as increasing the amount of scrubland, protecting veteran trees and culling deer. And the more I read about it, the more fascinated and excited I become about Fieldwork, not just as a fun writing project, but as one that can perhaps help to move the conversation about rewilding along.

So a remote (well, by British standards) field station located near a farm that’s rewilding its land, and where they are working on long-term wildlife surveys and selected interventions to improve landscape quality, is a great context for my characters to live and work within. Though possibly without the lynx.