Wildlife in depression, C.1870–1940^151is now endangered.^68 The muntjac deer (Muntiacus reevesi) has been the
most successful of these arrivals. It was introduced into Woburn Park in
Bedfordshire in 1894 and from there, it appears, the 12th Duke of Bedford
deliberately released small groups into the surrounding countryside. They
had not colonized very far even by the 1940s, at which point there were
further releases, again by major landowners, at Elveden in Suffolk, Bicester
in Oxfordshire and Corby in Northamptonshire. Only in the last decades
of the century did the muntjac spread more widely, part of a more general
increase in the numbers of all species of deer in England (below, p. 155). It
is now widespread across much of southern and central England, where it
has even been encountered in overgrown suburban gardens.^69 Muntjac more
than most deer can cause serious problems in ancient woodland, consuming
with relish characteristic plants like primrose, bluebell and common spotted
orchid.^70 They may also compete with the native roe for food.^71
landscapes of diversification
As it became uneconomic to farm large areas for cereals or meat, new forms
of land use were developed with, as I noted earlier, a significant expansion
of dairying, small holding and market gardening. This development also
reflected, of course, the increasingly urbanized character of England in
this period, the decline in the proportion of the population with access to
their own, or local, sources of eggs, poultry and vegetables. Commercial
orchards also experienced significant expansion, both in new areas like the
Fens, south-west Middlesex and southern Buckinghamshire, and in districts
in which they had long been important, such as Kent, Herefordshire,
Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.^72 But a more significant form of
diversification in environmental terms was the development of fur farms.
The Chilean coypu (Myopotanus coypu) began to be kept in East Anglia
in the 1920s. An article in the Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich
Naturalists Society for 1931 emphasized, ominously, the importance of
keeping the creatures securely fenced in, ‘since the damage they might do
to trees, dams, canals, river banks and so forth might be very serious’.^73 By
the mid-1940s, they had indeed escaped and were widely established in the
wild, particularly in Broadland. Besides breeding quickly, an individual adult
coypu consumes about 25 per cent of its body weight daily. The coypu had
some beneficial effects, most notably in arresting the steady encroachment
of scrub and wet woodland across the open fens, but nevertheless ‘in places
their depredations are so intense that they are now considered a serious
pest’.^74 Large areas were denuded of water lilies, bulrushes, reed-mace, and
cowbane, and ‘hundreds of acres of saw-sedge were laid low.’^75 A campaign
of eradiation was launched in 1962: the last coypu was killed in 1987.
More serious in its long-term consequences, although with a negligible
impact within the period covered by this book, was the farming of the