On a grouse moor in the Peak District National Park thin white sticks protrude, marking the sites of small boxes containing medicated grit. Swallowed by the grouse to help their digestion, the grit is an ingenious way of getting the birds to take a course of antibiotics. But this year, it seems, the drugs don’t work.
“Normally, I’d expect to see hundreds of grouse,” said Tim Melling, senior conservation officer with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as he walked on the moor last Friday. “It should be peak time just before the 12th of August. It definitely doesn’t look like being a good year.”
Indeed. This year, the “Glorious Twelfth”, the start of the shooting season, may not be so glorious after all. The grouse are plagued by a parasite, the strongyle worm, which depletes their numbers and seem to be particularly virulent at the moment. Melling believes the intensification of grouse rearing has made the birds more vulnerable to parasitic disease. Put simply, rearing ever-larger numbers of grouse creates population cycles of boom and bust. He walks along a plastic, turquoise road recently built on deposited spoil that runs past scorched patches of heather, burned to provide the perfect environment for grouse to eat and breed. The unsightly track, which connects two moors allowing shooters to be transported quickly by Land Rover across nationally protected parkland, has been funded by the taxpayer in the name of conservation. Melling shakes his head at the irony. “Nowhere else in the world do they industrially manage moors and drive the grouse to the shooters. It’s all about getting more shots in.”
Some would say this is not a bad ambition. The Countryside Alliance suggests shooting brings in nearly £2bn a year to the rural economy and employs 100,000 people. A grouse moor is divided into a number of beats. Each beat plays host to around 12 shoots during the shooting season, which runs from August to December. Convert more land into beats and shoot organisers make more money.
This hard-nosed approach to exploiting moorland is unsurprising. Many of the new owners of Britain’s grouse moors have City backgrounds. The days when fusty aristocratic families maintained Britain’s moors as some sort of noblesse oblige are long gone.
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But Mammon and mother nature rarely sit well together, with both sides claiming the high ground.
“What puzzles us is that the enormous amount shooting does for conservation is largely ignored,” said Barney White-Spunner, executive chairman of the Countryside Alliance, who is unhappy about how the debate about grouse moors is framed.
“We see a school of thought that sees shooting to be in some way cruel and elitist whereas in effect it is neither of those things.”
At the end of the plastic road, Melling arrived at the top of the moor from where he could see across swaths of Lancashire and Yorkshire. He was looking for vivid yellow spahgnum moss which thrives in upland wetland areas. But there was little to be found. Intensive burning and draining of upland areas to allow heather to thrive has dried out much of the blanket bog, the moss’s natural habitat. In the distance a helicopter landed. “They’re repairing the bogs,” Melling said. “You burn and drain bogs and they can’t protect themselves.”
According to a recent study by the RSPB, the number of burns on Britain’s moorland is increasing by around 11% each year. The society claims a third of this takes place on deep peat soils. This has repercussions for everyone because peat is an important carbon store.
Last year, the RSPB called on politicians to act to preserve the moors. Shortly before the election, it urged political parties to introduce a “robust licensing system to govern driven grouse moor management”.
The shooting world was incensed. Within weeks a new organisation, You Forgot The Birds (YFTB), fronted by shooting enthusiast Sir Ian Botham, had been formed.
Set up by a PR consultant and former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Ian Gregory, the group rejects accusations that it is an “astroturf” organisation representing the interests of wealthy landowners. It labels the RSPB as “deckchair conservationists” who favour birds of prey because they are money-spinners that persuade the society’s 1m-plus members to dig deep.
Who funds the group is unclear. But last week a hedge fund manager, Crispin Odey, revealed he is a supporter; he accused the RSPB of waging a class war, and being “locked in a battle with who they saw as the enemy, which was strangely the shooting community”.
Then YFTB upped the ante against the society, issuing a press release stating that the government was going to publish figures that “show that there were 12 hen harrier nests in England this year of which six succeeded and six failed. All six of the failures were on RSPB-controlled land. All six of the successful nests - which were on or next to grouse moors – had no RSPB involvement.”
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The truth is rather different, according to the RSPB supporters. None of the pairs was on a grouse moor. Three of the pairs were looked after by the society. And the government did not publish any figures.
That the hen harrier has become a pawn in a proxy war between bird lovers and gamekeepers was inevitable. Unlike other birds of prey that take grouse chicks, such as buzzards, peregrine falcons and goshawks, the harrier’s only habitat is moorland. The mere presence of a harrier on a shoot day can ruin the day’s sport as the grouse are scared off. Once they were common in England: in the mid-1980s there were 26 breeding pairs in the Forest of Bowland alone. Now they are extremely rare.
Quite why divides both sides.
“We’re always being told hen harriers are being persecuted on grouse moors but, then, why are hen harriers not nesting on all the other uplands that aren’t used for shooting?” said White-Spunner. “There is a suspicion that the hen harrier debate is being used to have a go at grouse shooting per se.”
For its part, the RSPB points to a government commissioned report that identifies illegal persecution, particularly on land managed for intensive driven grouse shooting, as the primary factor driving down hen harrier numbers.
Each year the RSPB produces a report logging incidents of poisoning and shooting of birds of prey on moorland. In some cases, gamekeepers and other parties are prosecuted. But in many the culprits evade detection. As the RSPB report notes: “The chances of offences being detected are very low.”
Today is “Hen Harrier Day” and rallies at 10 different locations from Dorset to the Isle of Mull are being held to draw attention to the “illegal persecution” of the bird. Relations between the two sides of the bird debate are bad, but they might be about to get worse. Somewhere in a room in Whitehall is a report that is causing deep consternation in the shooting community. Commissioned by Defra and the Food Standards Agency, it examines the impact of lead ammunition on the food chain.
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Produced by a body called the Lead Ammunition Group, whose stakeholders include the Countryside Alliance, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the RSPB, the report is expected to call for a ban on lead ammunition, according to emails released under freedom of information laws.
Lead, a hazardous toxin, is favoured as an ammunition because of its ballistic qualities. Almost all grouse is shot with lead ammunition and the prospect of a ban appals the shooting world. The Countryside Alliance and the GWTC have withdrawn from the LAG, alarmed at the way it is leaning.
“We are quite satisfied that lead as currently used and in the minute quantities that it’s consumed, poses minimal risk to humans and wildlife,” said Barney White-Spunner, executive chair of the Countryside Alliance.
Whatever the report decides there will be outrage. Neither side appears keen to sue for peace in the perennial conflict of man versus nature.
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Last Friday, as Melling made his way off the moor, he spied a mountain hare. The animal was introduced from Scotland in the 19th century, to provide an alternative target to gamebirds. But the hares carry ticks that pose health risks to grouse and are now considered pests. Melling watched the hare dart through the burned heather.
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“The shooting community like to go on about how they do so much for nature,” he said. “But driven grouse shoots came about for two reasons, the breach-loaded shotgun and the railway. Nothing natural in that.”