Richard Collins: Mammals bucking the trend with an expansion

With ‘bird numbers plummeting’, ‘the insect Armageddon’, and ‘climate catastrophe only 12 years away’, there’s doom and gloom on the wildlife front. But, said T S Eliot, ‘humankind cannot bear that much reality’; we need something to give us hope.

There is little positive news to hand, but a report by Katie Sainsbury of Exeter University bucks the apocalyptic trend. Writing in Mammal Review, she and colleagues claim that ‘the status of Great Britain’s mammalian carnivores has markedly improved since the 1960s’.