We will fight them in the beeches...

The Johnny Foreigners of the animal kingdom have designs on our nest-holes and gardens

So much is happening at the moment – the searing climax to Big Brother, the white-knuckle tension of lawn bowls at the Commonwealth Games – that you may not have not have noticed a small but significant news trend over the past week or so. Nature is on the move. It is invading itself. Considerably more rutting, killing and inter-species hostility seems to be happening than is the norm.

Some readers, in plumply complacent holiday mode, might assume that a bit of extra animal action is hardly their concern, particularly at a time when a more impressive natural phenomenon, a mighty asteroid, is hurtling through space like a mighty cue-ball about to knock us into the pocket of oblivion.

But it turns out that some of these nature stories have a human dimension for, at this time of the year, the behaviour of wildlife seems to follow a pattern. A couple of years ago, the middle-class tabloids reported in alarmed fashion on the imminent arrival in Britain of a bird described as the German black woodpecker. Ornithologists had apparently concluded that German blacks, resident in Europe, were about to cross the Channel. If they gained a beak-hold over here, they would pose a terrible threat to our own smaller, sweeter woodpeckers, whose numbers were already falling. The favourite pastime of the German blacks was to yank other birds out of their nest-holes and set up home there themselves.

As it turned out, this story had several serious flaws. The species name was the black woodpecker, not the German black. All woodpeckers take over the holes of other birds. Two out of our three native species are positively thriving. Oh, and the threatened flight across the Channel did not take place.

This summer's foreign invasion is more alarming. "They're aggressive, bad-tempered and from France. The Euro-wasps are back," one newspaper warned darkly, on the way to revealing that gardeners in southern England were on red alert for a peculiarly unpleasant wasp which was twice as big as the good old British version. It had a sting containing 100 chemicals, and a "fearsome reputation for attacking in swarms".

Do you see begin to see a pattern here? Last week, it was claimed that the malign influence of foreignness was also being felt in the duck world. According to a news report: "4,000 British ducks are facing slaughter to satisfy Spanish conservationists". Ruddy ducks from Britain have apparently been cross-breeding with their considerably rarer and more endangered cousins the white-faced ducks, whose largest colonies are in Spain. The ruddy behaviour represented, according to Euro-experts, "a genetic menace". A spokesman from an organisation called Animal Aid told journalists that the birds sometimes had to be shot 13 times and took as long as two hours to die (an argument strangely not deployed by members of the animal rights lobby when they argue that foxes should be shot rather than hunted).

Again, the way this story is written is revealing. Ruddy ducks are, of course, not British but American – they escaped into the wild here as late as 1952. If the white-faced duck had been mainly resident in England, the ruddy duck marauders would doubtless have been portrayed as foreign rapists polluting the purity of our duck bloodline. As it is, they are presented as victims of those footling agents of European meddling, the Spanish conservationists.

It seems that, in the summer months, nature serves a useful cultural purpose for paranoiac xenophobes. With careful selection, it can provide a series of metaphors pointing how even the Johnny Foreigners of the animal kingdom have designs on the inhabitants of our little island, brutally seeking asylum in our nest-holes, spreading Euro-poison in our gardens.

These attitudes run deep. On occasions when I have argued that the brown hare, with its declining numbers, should not perhaps be hunted, coursed, shot or served up in smart restaurants, at least one correspondent will write to point out that, since hares were introduced by the Romans, they were not indigenous and are therefore, it is implied, less worthy of protection than a true-Brit species. When grey squirrels are spotted on the Isle of Wight, we are reminded that these are American intruders who have decimated their purer, nicer red cousins but, if ravening hoards of hedgehogs snuffle up the eggs and chicks of rare seabirds on South Uist, it is the adorable little Tiggywinkles who are portrayed as the victims.

It is probably unwise to take this species racism too seriously. On the other hand, our attitude towards animals does tend to be revealing and these silly-season stories about woodpeckers, wasps and ruddy ducks perhaps have more to them than meets the eye.

terblacker@aol.com