To understand why there is continued acrimony over our uplands, with the illegal killing of raptors, such as hen harriers, still a major point of contention, you have to realise this is not just – or even mainly – about birds.
Birds of prey, waders and even songbirds are all collateral damage (or, in some cases, winners) in a much bigger conflict about what these areas – the Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors, the Peak District and others – should look like.
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It’s about areas of deep peat called blanket bogs, for which the UK is the most important country in the world, and which store vast quantities of carbon. It’s about what makes these uplands special, how we keep them that way and who pays for it.
What are the arguments for burning moors?
The people who own these moors say that they love the moors. They want to see wildlife – including birds of prey – thriving, and they say that grouse shooting is the best way to do that.
In order to have sufficient numbers of grouse for shooting, you have to effectively farm them, and you do that partly by burning heather. Adult grouse feed on fresh, tender heather shoots, and the best way to get the plant to rejuvenate is to burn it. Moor owners argue that burning heather both increases biodiversity and helps to store carbon, and there is plenty of science to back this up.
For example, one long-running and ongoing study by scientists at the University of York looked at three management options for peat-dominated moorlands, and found that both burning and cutting were effective ways to increase sphagnum moss cover, along with shrubs and sedges.
“The burned plots had the highest species richness and diversity from around two years after management,” said the scientists in a report called Protecting Our Peatlands, which was published in 2023.
Indeed, argues Andrew Gilruth, chief executive of the Moorland Association, a diversity of habitats is exactly what you want. “You’re looking for a mosaic of different heights of heather,” he says. “In one area, you want fresh shoots, and in others you want cover for the grouse to escape from birds of prey. They do not benefit from a monoculture.”
Another necessary action is to control predators such as foxes and crows, which would otherwise take grouse chicks. This has the knock-on benefit of allowing other ground-breeding birds to thrive. Research also shows that curlews and golden plovers, for example, achieve the highest rates of reproduction on grouse moors. The other thing to remember is that, while grouse moor owners are undoubtedly wealthy, they don’t necessarily make a lot of money out of shooting.
“For a lot of landowners, grouse shooting as a business model is marginal,” says Nick Hesford, Scotland director for the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. While there are many benefits for local economies in terms of jobs and spending, grouse moor owners themselves are not making money out of grouse shooting, he argues.
What are the arguments against burning moors?
Wildlife conservationists dispute many of the grouse moor owners’ arguments in favour of the field sport. They rightly point out that the position of organisations such as the government’s wildlife advisor Natural England and the IUCN UK Peatland Programme is that burning has negative impacts.
The latter’s ‘position statement’ on burning is that it results in “damage to peatland species, micro topography and wider peatland habitat.” It concludes, “Healthy peatlands do not require burning for their maintenance.”
Conservationists’ biggest complaint is that, in order to maximise the number of grouse, gamekeepers have to illegally kill birds of prey. Birds such as hen harriers, peregrine falcons and golden eagles are all targets because they take grouse and their chicks, and this can have a substantial impact on how many are available by the time the Glorious Twelfth – the first day of shooting in August – comes around.
The RSPB says there are up to 110 confirmed incidents involving the illegal killing of protected raptors every year. Bob Elliot, who previously worked as its head of investigations and now runs the lobby group Wild Justice, says it happens all the time. “They need to find a way of managing their land without killing birds of prey and committing wildlife crimes,” he says.
Staff at the RSPB’s Geltsdale reserve in Cumbria, he says, have had to supplementary feed two hen harrier nests this year because the males have gone missing. The chances are they strayed from the reserve onto neighbouring shooting estates and were killed, he adds.
Tom Aspinall, the RSPB’s senior uplands policy officer, argues that even the fact that waders do well on grouse moors is a mirage. “You might get good curlew and golden plover numbers, but you don’t get a lot of other Red List birds because grouse moors are simplified landscapes,” he says.
“Our Eastern Moors reserve [a former grouse moor] has a lot of birds that don’t get much press, such as tree pipits and redpolls, and that are associated with more mixed habitats.”
And this is perhaps where we get to the nub of the issue. Conservationists say they want to see a more varied habitat on our uplands than grouse moor owners. A great swathe of purple-blooming heather might look fabulous in July and August, but it’s just a monoculture to someone trying to increase the diversity of birds and plants.
What's the solution?
So can the issue be resolved? The first thing to note is that the biggest change in a generation has taken place in Scotland in the past year. Any landowner wanting to shoot grouse now requires a licence to do so, and any evidence of illegal activity – killing of birds of prey, for example – could result in that licence being taken away.
The RSPB supports this move and would like to see it introduced in England and Wales. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think grouse shooting should be regulated across the whole of the UK in a similar fashion,” says Aspinall. Shooting in Europe and the USA is regulated, he points out.
Grouse moor interests are less positive about the benefits of licensing. Andrew Gilruth says more regulation will deter owners from managing the land properly. “Anyone who thinks it’s in the interests of raptors to no longer have gamekeepers working in the hills, just wait and see,” he warns.
“In the Republic of Ireland, the golden eagle population is collapsing because no one is managing the land and the prey base has gone.”
There is no indication the government will introduce a licence system, but there is one change in the offing. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) carried out a consultation earlier this year that, if its recommendations were adopted, would increase the area of peat in England and Wales on which landowners are not allowed to burn by more than 1,000km².
Again, this is supported by groups such as the RSPB and largely opposed by moor owners, who also say that reducing burning will increase the fuel load on the moors, leading to more wildfire outbreaks, which are already reaching dangerous levels.
Gilruth says the problem with the conservationists’ position is they don’t have an idea of what the end point is. “If you want to replace one thing with another, you have to ask yourself what’s wrong with what we’ve got and why, and whether your solution is sustainable in the long-term.”
Is heather burning unsustainable? Is predator control that benefits other breeding birds wrong? And if not, is there really a problem – persecution of birds of prey aside – with grouse shooting?
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Top image: red grouse in Scottish Highlands.
