“It felt so hard to live a conventional life”

What Steven asked Carol Donaldson, ecologist and author

Carol Donaldson is the author of two books and has been working hard with farmers on the Hoo Peninsula to return land to wetlands. With Carol contributing to our Kent Current title, we sat down with her to discuss the work that she does, her time with wolves in Russia and why she got evicted from living in a caravan in Hoo.

Carol Donaldson

What is your official occupation?
Two things. The one that pays is being an ecologist. I do wildlife conservation. I give lots of advice to farmers on the Hoo Peninsula, north Kent marshes and some in Essex about managing their land for breeding waders, lapwings and redshanks. I design wetlands and hopefully get some money to fund those wetlands. I've had some lovely successes of land that was bone dry with no wildlife on it, and then you do all this work and suddenly it has wildlife, and it's a lovely thing to do. Also, I organise the farming cluster of the Hoo Peninsula. That's basically a gang of farmers, partly a social thing, but also it's getting them to work together across the whole landscape to benefit wildlife, and we've chosen certain species to focus on, lapwings, turtle doves and hares. It's getting all of those farmers together and saying what can we do together as a group to improve that whole landscape for wildlife. They're very enthusiastic, particularly on the peninsula. They've been fantastic. I've got a lead farmer who's well respected, leading the way and doing stuff on his own land. Then I do lots of river surveys that advise on managing rivers, reducing pollution and preventing flood risk. That's the day job.
Then I am a nature writer and travel writer. I do travel writing for the Guardian. I've had two books published. A nature memoir, I think they're officially called nowadays.

You mentioned a few species there. Why would someone want to breed them if they had a farm? There's no commercial benefit?
A lot of the land that they're breeding on would have been flood plain grasslands. It would have been a lot wetter in the past. Sometimes, the farmers were encouraged by government subsidies to drain the land and turn it over to crops. But those crops often didn't grow very well because the land naturally wanted to flood, and sometimes the soil was very salty as well because it had naturally been part of the salt marsh. Now the farmers get subsidies for managing the land for wildlife. A lot of the land is protected. There's not a lot they can do with it other than just graze cattle on it. In some ways, the funding that they get for looking after the wildlife is very helpful to them. Sometimes it's financial reasons. I think a lot of people think that farmers will only do things if they're paid, but that's not true. They'll do it because they’re people who for generations have been guardians of the land, and maybe they see that they were encouraged to do things that have really depleted the countryside for wildlife. They want to put a bit back and do something decent for wildlife. Sometimes the older farmers, they remember a countryside that had these birds on it, they see that they've gone. They want a better legacy for the future. Certainly, the stuff that I do with the farmers, it's as much to do with being able to read people and knowing what will incentivise a person as much as it is about knowing what's the right thing to do for the wildlife. A lot of it is people skills, really.
My mother sold double glazing when I was very young. She was a marvellous saleswoman. Because she was so brilliant, I was given a job at 14 selling double glazing. Well, no one wants to buy double glazing from a 14-year-old, and I had no incentive. I just didn't care. I was 14, I didn't care about double glazing. I didn't know what it was. But a lot of those skills I think that my mum had, and I learnt from my mum, I now use in the service of something that I really do care about. A lot of it is knowing when to push and knowing when to hold back and when to be polite and when to be quite cheeky, and I think it's as much that as anything else really.

You mentioned turning land back over to becoming a wetland. Can you give us an idiot's guide on what happens in that process?
A lot of the land was drained in Victorian times, some of it was drained in the 1980s. Before I go out and do this stuff, I often look at old Google Earth, which can fly back in time to the 1940s. It makes me very sad because, from a wildlife point of view, you can see this loss, and you can see that in the 80s and 90s, farmers were given money to drain land that was never going to be great for crops. The first thing you do is break all those underground drains. You basically get a digger, and you smash all the joints. That psychologically can be quite hard, because often their father would have overseen that work and they're setting back what their fathers and their grandfathers did. You've got to respect that. It's their land, they've put centuries of work into that. But you smash the drains. That stops all the drainage of the land. Often with old marshland, you're trying to hold water on the land. If you can hold water on that land and you can get cattle on at the right time to graze it, then you'll get the lapwings back. It's instantaneous.
The next year, the land is exploding with wildlife because these birds are quite desperate, particularly in Essex, but also in Kent. They're quite desperate, and if they fly over in February and if they see that looks alright, they'll come down and if it feels like it's got what they need. Then next year you've got lapwings, and I've had farmers almost with tears in their eyes because they've never seen the birds on the land. Their father, their grandfather, might have told them about them, but now they're back, and they've put them back on that land through what they've done. It is amazing. To do something just for the goodness of doing it for another species could be a powerful thing.