One duty of churchwardens in the 17th and 18th centuries was paying bounties for exterminating the local wildlife – killing species that were considered vermin. In those days these local worthies were also the local government, mending roads and bridges and looking after the poor – so the task was more part of a national war on nature than a religious duty.
In Wing, a village in Buckinghamshire, the churchwardens listed buzzards, hedgehogs, kites, polecats, starlings, stoats, weasels, and sparrows in their annual accounts, all of which had merited payouts for the hunters because they had been slaughtered. And yet, surprisingly these “vermin” species – except kites and polecats – seemed to have clung on in the area. And now even those two are in resurgence; kites returned 20 years ago via a reintroduction programme and now polecats, Mustela putorius, have arrived on their own; spreading back from Wales where they managed to survive. Like other predators they eat species we value – frogs, rabbits and birds – but in winter they also eat a lot of rats. Polecats, which have distinctive banded facial markings likened to a bandit’s mask, are now a protected species and considered a valuable part of the countryside ecology.
This is the time of year when their litters of five to 10 young are beginning to spread out to find new territories. Their worst enemy now is the motorcar, rather than the churchwarden.
