So how is our wildlife faring? The details

Until now this book has considered the factors which impact on our wildlife and how we can best manage our countryside to try to mitigate the problems that beset our fauna and flora. In the chapters that follow I will endeavour to give, as accurately as possible, a picture of how individual groups of wildlife have fared over the last 50 years, together with attempts to predict where the future lies for these plants and animals. Fulfilling these promises is less straightforward than it might seem, partly because when species were very abundant there appeared to be little point in counting them. Now that they are scarce, we would desperately like to know just how abundant some of these species were, and how the previous abundance was distributed around our geographical regions. Thus people of my vintage can remember as children walking through fields, in my case on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where skylarks provided a constant overhead serenade and every few steps meadow brown butterflies would fly up from the grass. Of course memory can be deceptive, and these fragments of recollection are not trustworthy without proper tabulated data.

I will try hard to be even-handed in the accounts that follow, neither glamorising the detail nor being intentionally despondent. But be prepared for a somewhat negative picture.