What’s a white stork got to do with England’s football match against Germany this evening? To find out, we have to start with the aurochs, the prototype ancestor of every cow on earth.
The last aurochs died out in a Polish forest, under the strict protection of the king, in 1827.
If you are interested in that sort of thing, which you are, it was the first recorded extinction, and it was followed about fifty years later by the Dodo. After a slack start, we’ve got better at killing off species, and our current rate is about a million times quicker than the old one.
In the 1930s, the Nazis got seriously interested in recreating the aurochs by a process called ‘back breeding’, by which two seriously unpleasant zoologist brothers called Heck kept breeding back into cattle that they fancied looked quite like the aurochs might have. This was all in the interests of kicking 20,000 people out of a different Polish forest- (you really don’t want to know)- and then preserving it as an example of what pure nature could look like for true Aryan hunters. It didn’t work, but you can still find descendants of what they created in the Dutch re-wilding park of Oostvaarderplassen.
Right now, a much more scientific attempt is being made to recreate the breed, which it is felt would be a wonderful conservation grazer in the many tracts of land that are currently being re-wilded across Europe. Set your alarm clock for 2040, when they reckon the first one will be ‘re-introduced’.
It’s a funny old word, that ‘re-introduction’ one, because it conjures up the pedantic question of when exactly a re-introduction is so old that it is actually an introduction. Beavers, for example, are back after 495 years, which has been enough time for us to have killed off most of the rest of our wildlife. Wolves, if we put them back in Highland estates, haven’t been seen since 1680. But the top prize goes to the Knepp estate in Sussex, who proudly got a white stork to breed last year, for the first time in 606 years. Meaning a year after the Battle of Agincourt. A white stork re-introduced the the Home counties, no less.
Me, I don’t buy it. It is great that we are bringing these things in, as just about all efforts to increase biodiversity in this most de-natured country on earth are to be applauded, but let’s not kid ourselves. The only reason that beaver is in place is because about 55 conservation organisations have made it possible; the only reason that stork bred was that every possible obstacle in its way was cleared away by, er, Man. One slip of our attention, and they’ll be gone again.
Which is what I felt when I heard the crowd at Wembley this evening starting to sing ‘It’s coming home’. I mean, how so? The concept of coming home conjures up the image of someone who has popped down to the pub for the evening, or perhaps had a month or so abroad. At the very most, a soldier who has been stationed abroad for a couple of years.
To the best of my knowledge, the last time our football team brought back any silverware was approximately twenty thousand days ago. I was seven. Matt Hancock was a full dozen years from inflicting himself on a carefree world that knew no better.
So I only want to ask in what sense is football coming home? If we win three more matches, surely it won’t be so much coming home as touching briefly down, like a hot air balloon on a windy day. If ‘it’ came home to Germany, France or Spain, for example, it might at least be familiar with a couple of the local landmarks, know its way to the off license, even. Make no mistake, I would love this to happen, if only to move on from the endless 1966 references.
But at least the white stork built itself a nest.
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