Waddell started as a gamekeeper when he was 16. He was brought up by his uncle who was a farmer rather than a keeper, but he remembers him as a man who had terrific respect for the natural world. “ There was a generation of gamekeepers like that, men who were great naturalists,” he told me.

During the time Lindsay was a keeper, his profession transformed. Shooting used to be a pastime that depended on harvesting a small but sustainable surplus of wild game, such as grey partridges and hares. But over Lindsay’s career, it became big business. In the uplands, medication was used to sustain artificially high numbers of grouse, and in the lowlands, more and more reared game birds were released to sate ever-growing demand. In the early Eighties, it was reckoned that 10 million pheasants were shot in England during the season. Five million of those were reared and released, and five million were wild. Forty years on, it’s estimated that we shoot some 70 million pheasants each year, of which only a very small percentage will have bred naturally. “There were people in the Nineties who were just upping the ante all the time,” Lindsay told me, as we watched oystercatchers wheeling through the rain beyond the window, “it was man’s greed that took over.”

This summer, there has been a steady drip of news stories about gamekeepers losing their jobs because of avian flu on the Continent. Agricultural intensification means it’s almost impossible, in many parts of the UK, for wild hen pheasants to find quiet, insect-rich corners where they can raise a brood, and intensively rearing game birds in the UK is banned. Consequently, in normal years, shoots import some 20 million pheasants and 15 million partridges from France. The weather there is better suited to rearing game. We’ve destroyed vast swathes of habitat in under 100 years, but no matter: importing birds allows us to keep shooting while pretending everything’s fine.

Or it did anyway, until the spring of this year, when Defra announced a temporary ban on the import of game birds from parts of France where bird flu was running rife. Almost 13% of shoots have said that they aren’t going to operate at all this season and the National Gamekeepers Organisation believes that 111 keepers have been let go. Every time the papers cover the story, Shooting Times, gets tagged in jubilant posts on social media. The Twitter consensus is damning: shooting is awful and keepers deserve every bit of misery they get.

More from this author

Why Scotland sacrificed its wilderness

By Patrick Galbraith

There can be little doubt that the sport has become bloated, and it’s generally recognised that releasing excessive numbers of hungry birds denudes the land of invertebrates and flora. But it’s absurd to suggest that gamekeepers are the architects of shooting’s explosion. When Lindsay was a boy, many more keepers were employed, and far fewer birds were shot.

I know one keeper who has been at the same estate in East Anglia for 30 years. Initially, he had two lads beneath him, and they were tasked with running a wild bird shoot, which at that point, was let to an old bachelor who was happy to pay vast sums in the hope of a day or two of good sport. When the grey partridges on the estate bred well, he shot, and in poor breeding years he didn’t. All these years later, on that same estate, they sell three shoot days a week, 200 French partridges a go, and the keeper works singlehanded.

Like Lindsay, that East Anglian keeper is a naturalist at heart, and he’d love to be running a wild bird shoot. But when the old bachelor died, he was replaced by a shoot tenant who is a businessman first and foremost. Admittedly, there are fewer and fewer people able to fork out for shooting as it used to be. Britain is a different country now — the rural rich aren’t as rich as they once were, and labour is expensive.

Suggested reading

Britain's forgotten King of the North

By Dan Jackson

Last Christmas, Gerald Gray, formerly the headkeeper at one of Norfolk’s best wild bird shoots, told me he’d spent his life managing his boss’s expectations: often, he had to deliver the news that they wouldn’t be shooting at all, because the weather hadn’t been kind and the chicks hadn’t made it. If they’d gone ahead and shot, they’d have killed all their breeding stock for the following year. With reared birds, nature has been taken out of the equation and there’s no requirement for delayed gratification. Late capitalism promises us that we can have what we want, whenever we want — cherries in December and a 300-bird partridge day just as soon as the cheque’s made out.

It’s not that there are leagues of keepers out there wanting to go bigger and bigger; it’s that the people employing them make money out of doing so. When those Twitter users attack gamekeepers, they’ve got the wrong man.

Demonising gamekeepers can have grievous consequences. It’s tough and lonely, and keepering is a career with a suicide rate that’s three times the national average. On more than one occasion recently, I’ve been told by keepers who are under pressure that the struggle is often compounded by coming home to a slew of uninformed vitriol on social media. The natural word has been destroyed, the narrative runs, and it’s all their fault.

Suggested reading

Humans are born to hunt

By John Lewis-Stempel

Of course, not every keeper is an angel. There are still people out there illegally killing badgers and birds of prey, to limit the loss of game — but I’m not convinced they’re hellbent on destroying the natural world. Shooting has been turned into a numbers game and, too often, jobs depend on those numbers adding up. But I’ve met impressive keepers over the years who’ve handed in their notice when they’ve been asked to do things that go against their principles. The shooting world is a small one and walking away from a salary, a truck, and a place to live takes grit.

This year, my book on Britain’s endangered birds was published. It only took a couple of weeks for people to start telling me I’d wasted my time. One conservationist said that, frankly, he was disappointed I’d spent so much time talking to keepers about saving wildlife rather than organisations like the RSPB. I’ve met some wonderful RSPB staffers, but the myopic elitism of suggesting we should ignore a group of people who spend all their days, from dawn until often long after dusk, caring for a patch of ground is shameful.

While some who purport to care about wildlife take to the internet, gamekeepers are hard at work out there. They maintain woodland and hedges, manage moorland, and plant crops for game birds that provide sustenance for other wildlife. It’s hard to put a price on what they do, but the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association reckons that the UK’s 3,000 full-time keepers carry out roughly £140 million’s worth of conservation work every year. When bird flu puts 111 keepers out of a job, we’ll lose a few who are doing things they shouldn’t. But we’ll lose many more who are doing their best to save endangered species, including the curlew, the capercaillie, and the black grouse. Farewell to them all.

A book by an ornithologist may seem an odd recommendation to be giving the Cabinet. Britain’s brief love affair with hearing birdsong was a feature of the lockdown at its most unforgiving: a reminder of the economic deep-freeze that ministers are desperate now to put behind them. The country needs to get back to work. People need jobs and homes. The great engine of the economy needs to be set humming again. The Government will live or die by its ability to fill roads, and offices, and shops.

More from this author

Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

But this only renders my recommendation the more pressing. The solace that people over the course of this unsettling year are finding in the natural world will not have come as a surprise to Mark Cocker. As brilliant a stylist as he is a naturalist, he has a genius for articulating what is felt by many of us, when we take pleasure in the spectacle of wildlife, as something inchoate and unconsidered. In Crow Country, he explained and explored his fascination with the raucous corvids of a single Norfolk valley; in Birds and People, he provided a panoramic analysis of the hold that birds exert on the human imagination across the sweep of the entire globe. Neither book, though, is my recommendation to ministers.

Instead, I offer them Our Place. A study of the role played by conservation charities over the past century, it may — on the face of it — sound rather niche. The kick, though, comes in the subtitle: “Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late?” The answer that Cocker gives to this question is precisely why ministers need to read the book so urgently: “Nature is slipping from these islands: slowly, steadily, inexorably, field by field, dyke by dyke. Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.”

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

Why, in a country that, measured statistically, is the most nature-obsessed on the planet, is this being allowed to happen? Cocker’s book is eye-opening in the way it zeroes in on a bleak irony: that the very obsession of the British with the natural world may have contributed to its degradation. An alphabet soup of charities committed to saving wildlife has served to frustrate any attempt at coherent campaigning — and to break up ecosystems into unsustainably tiny fragments.

Conservation organisations ranging from the Forestry Commission to the National Trust have destroyed swathes of deciduous trees and wild uplands by replacing them with “a loathsomeness of conifers”. The Common Agricultural Policy “effectively bound the country into a federal farming state, against which there was no redress, apart from internal reforms instigated by the EU itself.” The result, over the course of the past half century, has been the ecological equivalent of a doomsday machine.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Why should this matter to ministers grappling with a horrendous array of other challenges and crises? For two reasons. The first is that — with Britain’s departure from the EU — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has opened up to set environmental law on a wholly new track. Those suspicious of the Government’s green credentials may well be justified in fearing the worst — but there is cause for hope as well as pessimism.

As Michael Gove — during his tenure as Environment Secretary — efficiently demonstrated, there is political advantage for the Government in identifying itself with the conservation (or even the re-introduction) of wildlife. It is not only dread-locked activists who fret about extinction. So, too, do fly-fishermen in the Tory shires. And herein lies the second reason. Voters’ appreciation of what the natural world had to offer them during the lockdown will not have faded now that the lockdown itself has been eased. Ministers have a political as well as a moral responsibility not to let the “cold stains of absence” in the map of this country’s wildlife spread any further.

If they do want guidance on the sheer monstrous scale of the problem, and the possible solutions to it, then Cocker’s book — at once a hymn of love to our flora and fauna, and a sombre jeremiad — is the place to start.

Fort, former Fishing Correspondent for the Financial Times, is a confirmed anguillophiliac. Which is reasonable. Eels are extraordinary things, seemingly put in the waters to make us wonder, and remember the continents of mysteries still left unsolved. They can slither headless. They also have the startling, un-fishy ability to travel overland. And they can live for an extraordinary length of time: an eel kept as a pet in Sweden — the creature was even given a name, Putte — turned silver belly up in 1948, at an estimated 88 years of age.

For millennia, the eel’s life cycle baffled humans. Aristotle believed that eels emerged from “the entrails of the earth,” while Pliny the Elder, usually a fairly sober scientist, concluded that eels replicated by rubbing their bodies against rocks, and “from the shreds of skin thus detached come new ones.” It would be easy to scoff, except that the fantastic truth of eel reproduction was only fully proven in 1921. “In so far that a story about a fish can have a human hero,” Fort writes “it is the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt.” Sailing the Sargasso Sea, at 26°N, 54°W, aboard the good ship Dana, Schmidt finally discovered the species’ breeding grounds, ending millennia of speculation.

More from this author

A compassionate carnivore's manifesto

By John Lewis-Stempel

Eels spawn in the Sargasso wastes of the Atlantic, then the offspring — elvers, or ‘thin heads’ — drift with the current to Europe, where they become a freshwater species (another metamorphosis). They snout their way up estuaries and rivers; live 10, 20 years — or 80 if kept in a tank and fed by Swedes — then return to the ancestral spawning site one dark night, under some deus ex machina prompt. There, they mate in a giant, thrashing orgy, only to die and sink three miles down to the ocean floor. In this dark graveyard, their million macabre corpses are finally scavenged by the lowest form of marine life, holothuria, a creature that “breathes through its anus.”

Schmidt may have discovered the breeding grounds of Anguillia anguillia, but to this day no-one is sure how mature eels navigate the thousands of watery miles to their birthplace. As Seamus Heaney so memorably versed the riddle of eel migration:

Who knows now if she knows
Her depth and direction
She’s passed Malin and
Tory, silent, wakeless,
A wisp, a wick that is
Its own taper and light
Through the weltering dark

Eels also happen to taste very good, though they are now out of culinary fashion, except with the few remaining proper Cockneys and a couple of up-scale cooks — the former liking the fish stewed with ‘liquor’ (green parsley sauce), the latter smoked. Jane Grigson considered the eel quite possibly her favourite piscatus, the meat being “delicate but rich.” Then again, the proles and the posh have always tended to be nerveless about food, its eating and its killing; it’s only the middle classes who squirm. The same goes for war.

How times change. Eel fishing on the Thames, once a bustling business, is down to one solitary commercial fisher, Dave Pearce. His mates think he is “fucking mad.”

Suggested reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Sure. Who wants cold, hard graft? Someone should put a conservation order on Pearce. It is not just species of animal that are threatened with extinction, but species of people: the traditionals. Reading Fort’s book, I was reminded of the poacher in the Herefordshire village of my 70s childhood, who liked a tasty eel from the Wye, along with a spanking big salmon (sold out the back carpark of The Moon pub), both caught with illegal nets at night, which is the eel-time. Are there any real poachers like Percy left? Those absolute villains who were consummate naturalists, who knew the ways of the hare, the grey partridge, the roe deer? The eel?

Eel numbers have plummeted since the 1970s, so it is probably just as well we have lost our taste for its sweet white flesh. In 2007, the eel became “critically endangered.” This for a fish whose numbers were once so vast that on the night of 4 October 1697, the fishery at Comacchio in Italy caught 300 tons of migrating specimens, about three quarters of a million fish. In a single night.

Like everything about the eel, the reasons for its calamitous decline are mysterious, although shifts in the oceanic currents which bring the elvers to Europe and the pollution of waterways are causal contenders. And it is the eel’s bad luck to be enigmatic rather than charismatic. If it were feathery or furry, rather than serpenty and possessed of a catholicity of appetite (encompassing cannibalism), re-wilders would be launching 38 Degrees petitions on its behalf. But instead the beavers and the bison get all the love.

Suggested reading

Let loose the lynx!

By Tom Chivers

First published in 2002, Fort’s book did not do good cash, or as he puts it, “it cannot be said to have been a resounding commercial success.” Well, nature writing was dead in the water then. Now the genre — the oldest in the world, if you think about it, dating back to pictographs on cave walls — is in full flood, with writers such as Robert Macfarlane and myself making the Sunday Times bestseller chart.

So you would expect a book as good as this (marred only by some repetitiveness in eel-catching scenes towards the tail) to do well. I fear it won’t. Fort is swimming against the ideological current. With some notable exceptions, the New Nature Writing — which ironically thrives in inverse relation to actual nature — is more about human ego than about birds, bees, butterflies and beasties. Schematically, one might say that it boils down either to Heroic Me (author on Odyssean quest in search of hundreds of beetles/moths/raptors/whatever), or Misery Me (author saved from the megrims by a close encounter with nature, a ‘nature cure’).

There is, further, a definite eco-cultural consensus around re-wilding, and against the human usage of animals. Farming is the F-word in these circles. And vegetarianism the V for victory.

And unfortunately for Fort, he is a man who believes an eel’s place is on the plate as well as in the river, and who is only present in his text to humanise and explain, which is exactly the humble method of Britain’s Ur nature writer, Gilbert White, the Vicar of Selborne, born 300 years ago, whose meticulous country diaries, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, have, extraordinarily, been in print continuously since publication in 1789.

The Reverend White would have loved The Book of Eels. You can bet he liked a dish of eels too.