A month ago, we learned that the osprey had returned to Rutland Water In fact, it did not have much choice. Migrating ospreys instinctively return to the place where they were born, which in this case was a cage overlooking a reservoir. The youngsters had been reared, and, after release, fed with regularly replenished fishy snacks. And in case they have any difficulty settling in after their winter holiday, artificial nests have been built for them. This year anyone visiting Rutland Water will be able to see an osprey, providing they pay up £3 for the privilege.Since projects like this are expensive and need partnership funding, they are likely to be confined to big, impressive animals (sponsors have been hard to find for endangered beetles or water snails). Even so, we may soon have “planted” beavers in Argyll, choughs in Cornwall, martens in southern England, and – who knows – maybe wild oxen in Oxon or lynx in Lincs. But where does nature conservation turn into zookeeping? Does the “wild” in wildlife matter?Nature conservation has come a long way in the past 20 years.

As a business, it has blossomed and flourished, turning from a minority pursuit with an income of less than £10m to a popular crusade with an annual turnover of at least 20 times that. With growing wealth and influence has come a much more businesslike approach, and a sophisticated public-relations machine. Wildlife is commonly “sold”, using attractive animals such as otters to attract more custom in the form of membership subscriptions and legacies. To do so more effectively, they borrow the aspirant language of government and businesses.

The Wildlife Trusts partnership talks confidently of “green shoots of recovery starting to come through” The Woodland Trust is busy “planting the seeds of hope”. The general sense of what they are saying is that the losses of wildlife we have experienced are recoverable, once “environmentally friendly” policies start to kick in, and so long as we go on supporting the trusts.If so, it has to be said that there is not the slightest sign of it so far. It would take a hard heart to mock David Bellamy’s vision of “skylarks singing over every home in the land”, but the sad truth is that skylark numbers are going down, not up, having fallen by more than half since 1975. And they go on falling, despite supposedly environment-friendly farming schemes like ESAs (Environmentally Sensitive Areas) or Countryside Stewardship. The well-researched reason is that the larks cannot find enough to eat in the modern British countryside. We are just too efficient.The idea of happy families living in close harmony with larks or cuckoos or otters is a touchy-feely, human fantasy.

The truth is that, as a species, our attitude to the natural world is ruthless and exploitative To which one might add, hypocritical. The Government’s support for GM crops threatens to finish off the skylark in sugar-beet growing areas Another government policy is to increase skylarks. Meanwhile, their natural habitats continue to suffer eradication by a thousand cuts.A recent report by the Wildlife Trusts and Plantlife reveals that counties have lost up to half of their remaining meadows during the past 10 years. In other words, since conservation schemes like stewardship and environmentally sensitive areas were introduced. Many meadows are too small and isolated to qualify for support, but we are also in the ridiculous situation where a farmer receives three times as much money to sow a new meadow as he does to preserve an old one. It is as if government believes that wildlife is a kind of crop that can be created by agricultural methods Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.