Endemic
Did you know that Britain has around 700 species and another 200 or so sub-species which exist only here, and nowhere else? In this edited extract from his new book Endemic: Exploring the Wildlife Unique to Britain conservationist and ‘pan-lister’ James Harding-Morris explains why these unique species matter – and how we can look after them
Here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine that one day Britain sank beneath the sea and was lost forever. Ireland is safe, as are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, but Wales, England, Scotland and their surrounding islands (including Orkney, Shetland, Skomer, Anglesey, the Isle of Wight and the Isles of Scilly) are all gone. Let’s also imagine that the human population was safely teleported away somewhere else so that you don’t have to dwell on the apocalyptic imagery.
What, from a natural history perspective, would be lost? Of course, the answer is ‘everything’, so a more insightful question would be: what would be irreplaceably lost? Which species would vanish entirely from planet Earth? This is when you realise that most of our wildlife also exists elsewhere: badgers roam across most of Europe; the range of the so-called ‘English’ or pedunculate oak stretches all the way to Asia; and purple saxifrage blooms in the Alps, Greenland, and the North American Rocky Mountains. If Britain disappeared, the global populations of these species wouldn’t really suffer. Then there are species like the Eurasian curlew, where Britain holds about a quarter of the world population. The loss of Britain would be a huge blow, but the species would survive elsewhere. Similarly, we have around 50 per cent of the global population of bluebells. An enormous loss if we went the way of Atlantis, but bluebells would still survive in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and beyond. So how many of the approximately 70,000 species that call Britain home are only found here?
I first pondered this question in 2017 when I started working on the Back from the Brink project; a grand collaboration of conservation organisations dedicated to saving some of England’s most threatened species from extinction. Amongst the 200+ species we were aiming to save were a handful that are only found in Britain: the frosty-looking and highly-endangered prostrate perennial knawel that is only found in a few spots in the Breckland of East Anglia; the interrupted brome, a mysterious grass of arable farms that appeared and very nearly vanished entirely within the span of a century and a half; and the Cornish path moss, a minute baize fuzz of a plant whose entire global population covers 0.16m2 – about half the size of a doormat. These, and others like them, are our endemic species.
The entire world population of Yorkshire sandwort (or English sandwort) is found within a stone’s throw of Ribblesdale, a place I’d been dozens of times in my life, and I’d never even heard of it. On 23rd June, my friend Heather and I started up the gradual flank of Ingleborough, the stepped summit still far in the distance. Heather, an ecologist, and I had originally met when working for the RSPB. She has enormous patience for my adventures; all the walkers around us were here to summit Ingleborough, but she was happy to help me find this tiny, porcelain-white flower instead.
The yellows of mountain pansy mingled with the purples of heath milkwort and we passed stands of cottongrass with their fluffy seedheads nodding gently in the breeze. Skylarks sang overhead, and meadow pipits occasionally flicked up and over the tussocky grassland.
It didn’t take long to reach a crossroads with tired climbers descending the mountain heading east, and eager walkers full of energy heading west. Backtracking slightly, we explored the pasture to the south, looking for the crisp white flowers and lime-green cushions of Yorkshire sandwort. We found gone-over early purple orchids with wilted petals hanging like tattered flags, cushions of prickly juniper and – with a flash of white that got my heart beating in excitement for a moment – the fuzzy flowers of mountain everlasting. We criss-crossed the pasture for nearly an hour, hope fading.
Then Heather found it. On the edge of a dried-up stream, near a patch of carnivorous butterwort, were two fist-sized patches of Yorkshire sandwort side by side. A tangle of maroon stems with tiny, thickened, almost-succulent, fresh green leaves made a small, domed mound. This mound was then topped with flowers – some finished, some in bud, but many open stark-white to the sky. Five oval, paper-white petals against the sharp star-shape of the sepals, the flowers larger than the leaves, making each stem look top-heavy.
I gently touched a flower, which nodded softly. It was awe-inspiring to see a plant that exists nowhere else on the planet, and to realise that everyone who has ever seen it must have once visited these same Yorkshire pastures.
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After returning to Lincolnshire I read up on the Yorkshire sandwort in more detail and learnt that it is not thriving in its only home. Two outlying populations have vanished since the 1990s, and overall numbers over the past 30 years have seen counts of thousands of plants drop into the hundreds.
How is this not a pressing conservation concern? Have you ever heard of the Yorkshire sandwort, donated to its cause, seen it featured in a nature documentary? Probably not. Unlike the capercaillie, the beaver or the white-tailed eagle, which, having all been lost from Britain have since been reintroduced from abroad, this little plant exists nowhere else on Earth. If we don’t save it, then it’s gone forever. Shouldn’t all our endemics – the plants, animals and fungi that we have total global responsibility for – have the highest conservation priority?
With this realisation, I decided to discover and tell the stories of endemic species in Britain. If these are our most precious species, then shouldn’t they have their moment in the limelight? A chance for recognition and acknowledgement as something uniquely British and special?
Endemic: Exploring the Wildlife Unique to Britain by James Harding-Morris is out now, published by Bloomsbury. You can buy a copy here.
