Mary Creagh

We have given some consideration to the question of introducing the lynx. At the moment, they are classed as a dangerous wild animal under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976, and all dangerous wild animals have to be kept in a fenced enclosure. A massive fenced enclosure would be needed for a lynx. At the moment, the policy in the legislation makes it challenging. We need to balance that and work with stakeholders. Like beavers, they are animals that need a range, a habitat and the ability to roam around and breed. The question is: what happens when they breed and produce offspring? One pair of lynxes could end up being eight or 16. What is the management plan going forward? There are certainly some policy wrinkles in that—I will come back to deer, but that would need to be in very large forests with a lot of room to roam. To go back to Kew Gardens, I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Kevin Martin, who is the head of tree collections at Kew. He has been going over to Kazakhstan in central Asia to collect tree seeds and do research on the seeds of the future and what our changing landscape will mean as we have hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters. I also went out with somebody to look at trees, and we looked at this amazing lime tree with all its heavy nectar. He said to me, “For bees, that is like having a meadow in the sky.” Our city trees and the lime trees that grow along the embankment might be a bit of a nightmare from an allergy and pollen point of view, but for the bees of our capital city, and all our great cities, they are meadows in the sky.