Moorland Association says 'Predators rising, Birds disappearing'...

...they would, wouldn't they - but more concerning is how their message has been taken up

(This post was first published on our End Bird Shooting Substack. We are reposting it here as part of our campaign against the start of the grouse shooting ‘season’. For more content just like it, subscribe - for free - to endbirdshooting.susbtack.com)

The ‘Inglorious 12th’, the start of the grouse shooting season, is just days away. It’s absolutely no coincidence at all, then, that the Moorland Association (MA), the lobby group for grouse shooting estate owners, has published an article which essentially claims that everything they do (in terms of ‘predator control’) is good, and everything the other side does (in terms of fighting back against the killing of so much wildlife) is bad.

There is a deep irony to the subtitle ‘Predators rising, Birds disappearing' that the MA uses on their Facebook page to promote their latest PR post (their social media writer may have missed it, but it won’t have escaped anyone who has followed the scandal of disappearing’ birds of prey on grouse moors), but leaving that aside it’s clear that having lost public support for putting lead shot into grouse, the industry is determined to double down on portraying themselves as ‘conservationists’ vital to the health of the uplands.

It’s an understandable (if misleading) strategy, but very much a ‘last gasp saloon’ effort. Tory politicians with BASC briefing sheets may greatly exaggerate shooting’s importance as the only employer in the countryside, but no sensible person accepts that wealthy people sitting in stone butts shooting sentient birds for fun is somehow ‘glorious’ anymore. It gets harder every year to ignore the endemic levels of raptor persecution on their estates (especially as they are increasingly covered by the mainstream media), or to dispute that setting massive fires on our most important carbon stores has rapidly made what was once a local interest issue into a widely-discussed piece of the existential jigsaw being constructed all around us.

As importantly, it’s a strategy that aims to reinforce much of the mythology that the shooting industry wraps itself in. The myth that only they know how to manage the countryside (something expertly dissected by Guy Shrubsole in ‘The Lie of the Land’), that the moors are in a sorry state because they (and their employees) haven’t been allowed to fix them, and that ‘conservation’ has failed wildlife but shooting’s ‘scorched earth’ policy towards predators will return things to a balanced state.

Shooting’s triggers

The thrust of the MA article - and we’re quoting here - is summed up in one paragraph: “This blog examines the growing imbalance, the role of predator control in conservation, and the case for supporting traditional moorland management as a vital tool in protecting upland wildlife.”

All the industry’s key trigger words are right there: imbalance, predator, control, conservation, traditional, management, and wildlife.

The MA has cherry-picked a small number of examples that ‘prove’ its case (their chief-executive, Andrew Gilruth, arrived at the organisation in 2023 with a reputation for doing exactly that), but it also now specialises in doing what it has long accused wildlife orgs of doing: only telling part of the truth and ignoring the much bigger picture.

The blog is very much industry-standard stuff. Some of what it says is accurate, some of it is nonsense. But all of it is geared around selling the idea that the shooting industry is the cavalry riding to save the countryside, and its conclusion is exactly as you might predict.

What struck us most was actually not the article (as we say, it’s a pitch to promote grouse shooting), but the comments left below it on the Facebook page. The people who read what the MA puts out are liable to be pro-shooting (yes, we’re making a bit of a generalisation here), but even so, it’s clear just how entrenched (albeit muddled) certain tropes of the shooting industry have become within some parts of the public.

What do we mean? To save you looking online, the demise of Britain’s ‘ground nesting’ birds is all the fault of Chris Packham. Or maybe badgers. Conservationists are killing everything by not killing enough, while shooting is not allowed to kill enough so everything is being killed. There are ‘too many’ birds of prey. And far too many foxes. Crows are just evil and should be exterminated. And everyone loves Lapwings and Golden Plover, even if (you suspect) most people commenting wouldn’t know a Lapwing if one walked up to them wearing a name badge and pointing at their picture in a field guide…

Lapwing. Photo by Daniil Komov on Unsplash

Yes, animals eat each other

It’s hard to know where to start with all of this, but before we look at the bigger picture (which to be fair the article does sort of consider before reverting back to type), let’s make something clear from the start. It would be idiotic to try to refute the obvious truth that predators eat prey. Of course they do, and you don’t need to be an evolutionary biologist, to have inherited a moorland, or to have spent your working life setting snares to know that.

But it is also ridiculous to suggest that in a natural ecosystem, predators will wipe out their prey and still thrive. Despite what some commenters seem to think, it’s not possible to get to a long-term position where there is nothing in the landscape but predators. They will starve.

More pertinently, there is a question that moorland managers (and the shooting industry as a whole) need to answer when it comes to their favourite scapegoat. If there really are lots and lots of foxes, why are there?

Despite the industry waging a brutal war on them for centuries, we are led to believe that foxes are rampaging through the countryside like brushy-tailed tornadoes. Urban fox numbers are going up because we dump so much trash on the streets, but no one is dumping anything into the countryside surely?

Hang on a minute…Could it be that contrary to what the commenters on the MA’s Facebook page seem to think, if there were a rising fox population it actually has nothing to do with banning fox hunting (which killed a relatively small number of foxes compared with the number shot by gamekeepers anyway but did so with as much cruelty as it could muster) but quite a lot to do with the millions and millions of pheasants and partridges the shooting industry tips out into the countryside every year? Or because it stocks grouse at 10x their natural density on the moorland they own?

Kind of like a predator-prey version of the ‘Field of Dreams’ - provide it and they will come…

Sorry, who owns the moors?

An inconvenient truth that commenters also always seem to forget when complaining about the state of the uplands and how they need ‘managing’ by people who ‘understand the countryside’ is just who it is that has been ‘managing’ the moors for centuries already. Spoiler alert: the answer is not Chris Packham…

Chris Packham is many different things to many different people, but in no version is he a grouse moor owner. It is of course the very same people trying to persuade us all that biodiversity will disappear without their particular form of ‘moorland management’ that have in fact been managing the moors ever since they turned them into grouse farms almost two hundred years ago.

It is the moor owners themselves who have burnt the moors to the ground, turned the country’s national parks into raptor persecution hotspots, and have pushed the uplands so far out of balance that generalists like corvids have found a niche they can’t help but thrive in.

And what do these commenters suppose that ‘balanced’ means anyway? A balanced ecosystem runs itself. It is self-sustaining and doesn’t need managing. Wildlife - and that includes both predators and prey - have evolved alongside each other and were managing just fine before we came along and decided we knew better.

Only moor owners don’t really want ‘better’. It’s a myth that there can ever be a ‘balance’ on a ‘managed’ commercial shooting moor because that’s not what owners want. Owners always want more grouse to sell to their clients, and that always means fewer foxes, stoats, and Hen Harriers. It means no natural plant succession and it means insects booming on ‘managed’ monocultures. It will never mean anything like the ‘balance’ that moors were in when no one managed them and they were wild and wet and not criss-crossed with 4x4 tracks and echoing with gunshots…

What does ‘too many’ actually mean?

Moorland owners loathed the way the moorland was before they came along and ‘tamed’ it. It wasn’t accessible and it was full of wild animals eating ‘their’ grouse..

It’s almost impossible for us to know exactly what the moors looked like back before they look like they do now. There are paintings and there are books, but they are largely created to fit a particular narrative. Historical records kept by gamekeepers hint at the sort of abundance there must have been back when birds of prey (and other predators) lived alongside the wildlife that lived on the moors, but there were no proper censuses and far fewer trained observers.

Which is partly why the commenters who complain of ‘too many’ birds of prey actually have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t have the data.

So where is the ‘too many’ concept coming from? It’s a frequent complaint of the shooting industry. They talk about increasing numbers of birds of prey causing ‘conflict’ (when what they mean is that raptors may impact the cash flow) and should be ‘managed’ (in other words, the industry should be given licences to remove them). Constant lobbying by landowners is what led to Natural England’s embarrassing ‘brood meddling’ of Hen Harrier chicks, the failed sop to grouse shooting landowners it discontinued this year. It is behind increasing calls for licences to kill Buzzards that are attracted to pheasant release pens.

Yes, populations of some birds are prey are indeed increasing: Buzzards have seen an 80% increase since the 1990s; Red Kites, almost only regularly seen in mid-Wales forty years ago, have benefited hugely from reintroduction programmes and have increased a massive 2232% since the ‘bad old days’ of constant persecution. But as we’ve written before, that doesn’t mean in any way at all that there are ‘too many’.

The facts are that populations of most birds of prey are still recovering from historic lows. Birds of prey are reclaiming areas that they used to occupy but were persecuted out of by generations of gamekeepers working on shooting estates. Hen Harriers are missing from huge areas of their old ranges. Golden Eagles should be far more widespread. The industry will keep repeating the mantra that there are ‘too many’ because too many people are prepared to parrot it without questioning it and because they want birds of prey gone.

Away from the loudmouths on Facebook, the public is actually massively in favour of more birds of prey. Communities from Poole (Ospreys) to Rutland Water (Ospreys again) to Rayader (Red Kites) and on to Tarras Valley (Hen Harriers) and the Isle of Mull (White-tailed Eagles) are seeing paying tourists coming specifically to see birds of prey. Raptors are - in most people’s opinions - magnificent birds, a link between us and the wildest places. Despite what the commenters might be trying to suggest, there aren’t enough of them…

Generalists and specialists

Many pro-shoot commenters seem united around the idea that all there is in the countryside are crows and Wood Pigeons. To an extent they’re right. If you look closely enough at the margins there is still wildlife left, but not a lot of it. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

That is not the fault of the crows and pigeons (or Chris Packham) though. It’s an ongoing demonstration of what happens when you manage a landscape to within an inch of its life: you tend to exclude the specialists - the species that are entirely dependent on say, one specific habitat, one food type, one set of conditions - and leave room for the generalists - the species that can thrive in a wide variety of environmental conditions and utilize a broad range of food resources.

And crows and pigeons (and foxes) are amongst the most adaptable ‘generalists’ we have left in the UK. Not quite as adaptable as the one generalist that has stolen, altered, or poisoned vast areas of the planet, exploits billions of animals, and is right now pushing the ‘climate envelope’ to the point where ecosystems simply cease to function, of course, but they are perfectly suited to the landscapes that ‘those who know the countryside’ have created. And all through the style of management our commenters seem to want more of.

Curlew. Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

‘Ground nesters’

Many birds nest on the ground, including it’s important to note in the context of the shooting industry, grouse, pheasant, and partridges. The ‘ground nesting’ birds that are now lionised by shooting, like Curlews and plovers (which are not the ‘ground nesters’ they really care about), used to breed across vast areas of wet grassland. Lapwings primarily inhabit grasslands, wetlands, and farmland, particularly preferring open landscapes with short vegetation and areas near water. Breeding Curlews are moorland and farmland birds, nesting in hay and sileage fields. Both have lost out heavily with the intensification of farming (which is often ‘managed’ by the same people who ‘manage’ the moors). Curlew populations, particularly in intensively-managed lowland areas, decreased by 51% between 1995 and 2023, according to BTO.

Curlews are just about hanging on in trashed, almost sterile, dessicated moors like Moscar in the Peak District. These birds have become extremely useful symbols for grouse shooting. The argument goes that if every predator on a grouse moor is killed, it benefits Curlews, Lapwings, and Golden Plovers. It really benefits the moorland owner of course who have more grouse to sell, but the way shooting tells it without their particular hammering of upland wildlife Curlews will be lost forever.

The situation is of course complex. Declines or successes depend on a whole series of interlocking processes, and we can’t cover them in depth here. But whether or not you love Lapwings and Curlews (and we do), at its most basic do we really want to give carte blanche to moorland owners to annihilate one suite of animals (predators) to support another (ground-nesting birds)? Should ‘conservation’ really trade the lives of hundreds of thousands of Red Grouse and countless numbers of foxes, stoats, weasels, corvids, and (in some cases) birds of prey, for small numbers of iconic shorebirds?

What if there is a better alternative? There is: habitat improvement. It will take time. It will require government buy-in and “evidence-based monitoring, adaptive management, research and innovation”. But it demonstrably works.

Curlews in Northern Ireland, for example, have already benefited from habitat improvements on farms. According to an RSPB article on ‘World Curlew Day’ in April this year, “funding supported farmers to manage rush and scrub on their land, creating suitable habitat for Curlews to feed and breed. It also supported the creation of scrapes – wet, muddy areas providing soft ground for chicks to probe for food. These interventions improve the biodiversity of the land without impacting on sheep farming.” The article went on to say “The four-year Curlew LIFE project demonstrated how nature-friendly farming can help these struggling birds.”

Nature-friendly farming doesn’t just help Curlews and Lapwings of course. Rewetting land from lowland farms to upland grouse moors helps increase biodiversity in numerous ways. If the habitat is ‘good’ for Curlews it is also good for a whole range of invertebrates and plants. Other birds and small mammals (including Water Voles) benefit too. In other words, improving habitat for one specialist benefits other specialists too. Facebook commenters take note…

Taking the land back

Aside from nature-friendly farming there is also another option: taking the land back for the benefit of both local communities and biodiversity.

Community buy-outs are extremely small-scale at the moment (the Langholm Initiative that bought the Tarras Valley in Scotland is a rare example), but impetus is building. The Sheffield-based Reclaim Our Moors (ROM) is a good illustration. Fed up with smoke from ‘muirburn’ choking their city, and seeing for themselves just how little wildlife there is on the moorlands on their doorstep, ROM has offered the Duke of Rutland, Moscar’s owner, a token £1 to take the moor off his hands.

The Duke hasn’t responded yet, but he can’t be hanging on for the shooting - the conditions are so poor on Moscar that there has been no shooting for the last two years and perhaps won’t be any this year either. Could it perhaps be because figures from Natural England show that Moscar has received an average annual subsidy of £175,400 since 2012 under the environmental stewardship scheme? The funding, which is managed by Defra allegedly aims “to secure environmental benefits, including habitat restoration and carbon sequestration.”

Commenters on Facebook, undoubtedly fed by the shooting industry, like to say that grouse moors are privately-owned and run through the generosity of their owners - the truth of course is that, as so often, the taxpayer is doing the heavy lifting…

Taking the land back into community control won’t necessarily help Curlews of course. That takes specific, well-funded action. More likely will be the land being allowed to find its own natural balance through rewildling.

At its best, rewildling doesn’t set out with conservation goals in mind. Rather than managing the land, it aims to reduce human influence on it. It aims to increase biodiversity, but doesn't try to determine what that biodiversity will look like. It is the polar opposite of the ‘management’ that has created the barren, wildlife-deficient moorlands that the shooting industry has given us, but whatever the outcome it will be kinder, gentler, more inclusive, and will benefit far more wildlife and far more of us.

A different vision

As we pointed out at the start of this article, the well-worn trope that only the shooting industry can rescue the moorlands is of course being peddled to coincide with the start of another ‘season’ of grouse killing. But the ‘season’ is revealing that - as climate change bites and intensive ‘management’ and predator ‘control’ fails to produce the ‘surplus’ of Red Grouse that moor owners crave - shooting has it all wrong.

Shooting is not about ‘conservation’. It is about profit, selfishness, and destruction. The myth of ‘good management’ by the shooting industry is just that - a myth. A different vision is urgently required.

Despite what shooting’s vociferous but fact-light supporters ‘below the line’ think, there are better things to do with such vital and scarce habitats than farm birds for the gun.