Today’s guest blog is from my old friend and colleague, Tim Melling, the RSPB’s Senior Conservation Officer in the North of England. He’s writing about a part of the English landscape that has not had the recognition it deserves.
The West Pennine Moors are one of those places that people drive past on the way to the Lake District. And while these moors may not have Cumbria’s mountains, they more than make up for this with their abundant wildlife.
For these moors hold some of the finest blanket bogs in England. 'Blanket bog' is a term that doesn't do justice to the a landscape that hosts a featherbed carpet of cotton-grass in summer, jewelled with tiny flowers of cranberry, sundew, bog asphodel and the rare bog rosemary. And underlying these is a carpet of mosses that holds water like a giant duvet on which special birds nest.
Tim Melling's evocative portrait of a curlew calling amongst the cotton grass - wildlife under threat as vital SSSI designation is delayed.
Curlews are common here, with their bubbling calls filling the spring air. And snipe too, with their vibrato notes as their fluttering wings disrupt the air whizzing past their stiff tail feathers. Rarer are golden plovers and dunlins, the real stars of blanket bog that like to nest in the wettest bits. The West Pennine Moors supports strong populations of all of these. Over thousands of years, these moors have grown slowly in height as peat forms and builds up from the cotton grasses and mosses. This happens at about a millimetre a year so it would take a thousand years for a metre of peat to form. And some parts of the West Pennines have a covering of more than four metres of peat. It helps combat climate change too, as the peat has locked up many tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over thousands of years; and it will remain safely locked up unless the peat is damaged or drained, only then will it release all the gases back into the atmosphere.
So all is right with the moors? Well, not really. The moors have no protection and already a windfarm has been built on the moors’ deep peat (we need renewable energy but the location has to be right). There are now plans to expand this windfarm and other developers are following suit, eager to build turbines in wild, remote places that have no protection.
The moors comfortably qualify for designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on the basis of the wide range of moorland birds including merlins and peregrine, as well as twite, teal and whinchat. Some of the birds even occur in internationally important numbers. And the habitats are of outstanding quality too. They support a range of blanket bog plants that exceeds the nearby South Pennines which already have international protection for the same habitats.
Natural England has been working with local people and the RSPB to compile a case for the West Pennine Moors to be protected, and all seem to agree that the moors qualify as a SSSI. All the necessary work and surveys have been done, but Natural England has just introduced another bureaucratic internal hurdle. In the meantime those merlins, dunlins, curlews and golden plovers may be living on borrowed time with developers eager to drain and damage these unprotected and undervalued moors. It's time that Natural England fulfill their duty to protect our most valuable sites for nature.
The West Pennine Moors has been a Cinderella landscape for too long, time to give it the protection it deserves. Picture credit Tim Melling
Tim has agreed to keep us up to date with progress on this important designation – let’s hope that his next post contains more positive news.
Follow me on twitter.