Welcome back to our ‘Reading Rivers’ series, where we explore how our waterways inspire the written word. Today we’re looking at Elegy for a River: Whiskers, Claws and Conservation’s Last Hope by Tom Moorhouse. First published in 2021, the book documents 11 years of conservation fieldwork spanning Yorkshire, Norfolk, Somerset, and the home counties. Moorhouse himself is a research ecologist, currently based at the University of Oxford.
The book opens with a fascinatingly candid look at the world of practical conservation work. It is methodical, but often messy: there are downpours, mosquito bites, sweat, and sunburn. Sleeping in flooded tents and living on cheese sandwiches. Equipment covered in duct tape and fingers striped with sticking plasters. Getting totally soaked is a regular occurrence. Why, you start to wonder, would anyone do this to themselves?
The answer to this question forms the backbone of the story. Moorhouse praises the joys of being outdoors; of seeing stoats, kingfishers, and swallowtail butterflies. But his greatest motivation is the hope that understanding nature’s decline will allow us to rescue it from oblivion. Years of work might result in failure, or in a species being pulled back from the brink. This is the risk that all researchers take, he explains, “to save something we love”.
For Moorhouse, this hope was mostly focused on Britain’s water voles. He skilfully captures the huge personalities of these “approximately spherical” furballs, which most of us will know as Ratty from The Wind in the Willows. He delights in watching them munch bankside plants and plop into the river, affectionately explaining their squabbles over territory. A surprising amount of his time is spent carefully bundling them into Pringles tubes.
Less surprisingly, this work is necessary because their numbers are plummeting. The life of a water vole was always fraught with danger: as a tasty snack for pikes, foxes, weasels, and herons, they usually live for just eight months. But Britain lost 98.7% of them between 1939 and 1998 – 14,000 years of survival, gone in under a century. Their rate of decline was faster than that of Sumatran tigers, mountain gorillas, and white rhinos.
A key factor in this decline – American mink – slink through the book’s pages, wiping out populations as they go. One scene, with its blood and claw marks, is like something from a horror film. We also see the destruction caused by signal crayfish; the bank-burrowing, disease-carrying rivals to our endangered native species. But Moorhouse refuses to villainise these animals – after all, it was humans that chose to bring them here.
This is a recurring theme throughout the story. Moorhouse mourns the global toll of pollution, effluent, abstraction, and habitat loss. He simmers with fury that our rivers – the cradles of civilisation – have been damaged for profit. He feels the heavy responsibility of stopping the “silences that pool beneath shady margins […] the shredded plants, bare beds and stirred murk that spread beneath our waters’ glistening surface”.
Despite all this, Moorhouse continues his tireless and admirable pursuit of a positive future. In the book’s closing chapter, he reflects on the accuracy of its title – a lament for the lost – and urges us not to lose hope. Nature’s salvation is within our collective grasp, if we can find the courage to reach for it. As it turns out, he has something in common with his beloved water voles: a fierce determination to persevere against the odds.
Overall, this is a heartfelt, thought-provoking, and often very funny book about the joys, challenges, and importance of conservation work. You can borrow printed and e-book copies from your local Hampshire library, so grab your free library card today! You can also hear from Tom Moorhouse himself at our Tales from the Riverbank Literature Festival this June. This project is part of the Watercress and Winterbournes scheme.
