17 March 2016
First Char Your Grouse
By J.R.Thomas
Occasionally the Shaw Sheet gets into its tattered tweeds, pulls on its muddy wellies, exchanges the bowler hat for a flat cap, and heads for the hills and dales of rural Britain. Life is different there and what causes excitements in the Great Wen raises not a flicker of concern in the deeper recesses of rurality. Two hours off the motorway very different perspectives and problems arise.
The latest problem in the cow kissed sheep mown boondoggles is a burning issue. That much will be obvious if this weekend our readers decide also to make for rural retreats, especially if near moorland. The moors are ablaze! Is this the latest sign of the Brexit struggle? Have the Out supporters decided to turn to fiery symbolism, and in the manner of their ancient British ancestors warning of the approach of dangerous foreigners, lit the burning beacons?
Well, er, no. The drifting smoke is a regular feature of upland rural life at this time of year and is, in its own way, a ritual of the season, one performed for the edification of a small number of high priests of a very elite group. Grouse shooters that is, for again, that rare species, and the rare birds they pursue, are under the spotlight.
Grouse, though wild and incapable of being reared for sporting purposes, preferring the remote moors, are not without gastronomic requirements. Leading among their preferences is young heather shoots to eat. Heather is, like the grouse, wild, and if a moorland owner wishes to keep his grouse stocks high so that come 12th August the shooting parties are happy with the numbers presented, he needs to find a way of having some young heather. The easy way of doing that, indeed, the only practical way, is simply to burn some of the old stuff so it will grow anew. Not the whole moor of course – burning the whole moor would result in a one-off supply of roast grouse, sparse commons for those remaining, and no sport for several years whilst a new colony of birds arrived.
Close observation of many moors will reveal geometric blocks of differently coloured heather. That reflects the burning of recent years and the differing years in which it was done. In early spring, large numbers of locals, who spend their autumns beating the heather and waving flags to drive the birds, get another infusion of their daily rate for a stroll on the moors, this time without danger of getting a seat full of lead shot, carrying fire forward or beating it out. The whole process is careful managed and can be done only when the moor is not too dry, not too damp and not likely to set fire to next door’s moor, a heinous crime indeed and one likely to lead to one hundred year vendettas.
Into every slow burning fire a heavy rainstorm must sometimes fall. The annoying shower on this occasion comes from The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (“RSPB”), one of Britain’s richest and most powerful charities, and a very large landowner. The RSPB, not altogether surprisingly, does not greatly care for grouse shooting, or indeed any type of bird shooting. This is maybe not quite so obvious as it sounds. The RSPB used to be understanding, even supportive of the management of the bird population of the country, accepting the managed destruction of raptors to preserve smaller birds and that keepering for sporting purposes also protected the habitat of rarer and smaller birds. In return, the RSPB had a great deal of support from country sporting types and was a popular charity.
In recent years all that has changed. The charity became split between what one might call the bird libertarians, who think birds should left in state of nature – hawk eat chaffinch, you might say – and the bird paternalists, who think human intervention would keep a balanced and diverse bird population . At the moment the anarchist wing is winning, and the RSPB view is that almost any sort of human intervention is wrong- and especially if it is in the interests of sporting shooting. Grouse shooting has become a particular bugbear in this – not least because of the conflict between one of the public’s favoured birds, the hen-harrier, and the grouse, which we touched on a few months ago in these pages.
Now, the RSPB has a new ally on the moors, the green lobby. The greens have become concerned about peat bogs – found mostly in moorland – which are a great source of carbon utilisation. Remove the bogs, or dry them up, the environmentalists argue, and the carbon absorption of the land is reduced. Not only that, the peat bogs act as holding reservoirs for sudden deluges of water, or melting snow. If they are not there to act as giant sponges then the water runs straight off into the rivers which burst their banks and cause the sort of flooding we have had in recent winters.
You may think some of this logic is a bit flawed – nobody is removing any significant amount of peat from upland bogs, in fact probably a lot less than was abstracted a hundred years ago – and the flooding of York, let alone the Somerset Levels, has a somewhat tenuous connection with moorland bogs, when the sources of their troublesome rivers are analysed. But the anti upland landlord lobby has fastened upon this as a another reason to get feudal behaviour under control, and in particular to stop heather burning which the lobbyists argue exposes the bogs and causes them to dry out, eroding and destroying their water holding capabilities. In support of this the conservationists were pleased to receive recent scientific evidence that this damage and erosion was indeed occurring, in a study carried out by the RSPB. Message: stop burning heather. Sub-message: slow effective prevention of driven grouse shooting.
But the delighted conservationists and bird lovers had overlooked one piece of scientific process; peer review. Since the RSPB published its calls to stop heather burning based on the report, the report has been thoroughly read, pondered, and considered by other scientists – the process of peer review. Now the Royal Society, the premier group of scientific expertise, is publishing a paper which pulls together the review process, and says that the RSPB has very considerably misrepresented what the original research said. Burning in upland areas is actually good for the landscape, for plant life, and for the ecology of the uplands. It helps regenerate tired plant systems and brings about renewal which is good for the insects, animals and birds which live there (apart from the ones that burn in the process, presumably). What is more, the Royal Society report says, the RSPB has commissioned, but not publicised, previous reports that confirm that the process is a healthy and natural way to keep the moorlands in good heart. On non-managed moors old heather also burns, in summer fires or when struck by lightning, but then the process can be very extensive and destructive because it is unmanaged. The RSPB, says the Royal Society, is been more driven by its urge to stop grouse shooting than adherence to any scientific approach to moorland burning.
The grouse moor owners and their supporters are no doubt pleased to have won the latest battle in this upland war, but it is a war that is far from over. The RSPB probably has public sentiment on its side – trying to justify shooting pretty birds by what are seen as rich toffs is not an easy PR win, so expect continuing clashes in the struggle of the remote places.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the Shaw Sheet
