Four years ago I announced that the RSPB had taken the serious step of making a formal complaint to the European Commission raising our profound concerns at the state of our finest designated wildlife sites in the North English moorlands - sites protected on paper as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) but which have been failing to deliver for nature for too long.
Our complaint related specifically to the failure of DEFRA, through its statutory agency Natural England, to take adequate measures to tackle serious and persistent damage to one site in particular, Walshaw Moor in the South Pennines. Subsequently the complaint broadened to cover the other Northern English moorland SACs - focussing on the issue of burning the heather and vegetation on the areas of deep peat soils – soils that should be supporting healthy blanket bog and the wildlife that depends on it.
The management of many of these places has been intensifying in order to produce more and more red grouse to support the driven grouse shooting industry see here, a land use that has shaped our hills, influenced some of our most iconic landscapes and had significant impacts on our wildlife throughout many decades stretching back into the 19th Century.
Today we have learned that our complaint and a separate complaint submitted by Ban the Burn have led to the European Commission beginning legal action against the UK Government by issuing a Letter of Formal Notice. This is the starting gun of a full infraction procedure when the Commission considers a Member State has not applied the relevant laws properly. From the limited information we have it appears that the Commission share our wider concerns over bad application of the Habitats Directive with respect to the blanket bog habitats that are meant to be conserved by SACs in England. We will update our page dealing with this case (see here) later today.
We welcome this move wholeheartedly. These are serious matters and much is at stake.
Moor burn by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)
For anyone following these issues over the last four years it will not have escaped your notice that positions have become entrenched. This has manifested itself by, on one hand, repeated calls and petitions to ban driven grouse shooting in England and on the other vigorous defence of the role driven grouse shooting plays and especially the 'benefits' of burning.
We want a resolution.
We have been calling for reform of the way our hills are managed with proper regulation of an industry whose unfettered ambitions to produce ever higher red grouse numbers for the gun are causing growing concern over the direct and indirect impacts on wildlife, including hen harriers and other raptors, the ability of our moorlands to cope with increasing rainfall and to play a part in reducing the risk of catastrophic floods downstream, and the impact on deep peat soils that lock up carbon and prevent its release into the atmosphere and into our drinking water.
Over the coming days we will see an intensification of the rhetoric from both perspectives. I fully anticipate repeated and sustained pressure for the RSPB to join calls for a ban.
That is not our position.
We will probably hear more from our critics, funded by backers linked to the grouse industry, who wish to deflect us from our purposeful work. Will these be direct or via the pages of supportive newspapers?
But now through the Hen Harrier Action Plan and this European Commission led process there is a chance of real progress. The challenge is now with DEFRA, Natural England and the driven grouse industry to respond constructively to the growing evidence that change is needed, and to do so positively - we will be returning to this critical issue regularly both here on my blog and on Saving Special Places.
And I want to hear from you. If you are frustrated that the RSPB is not supporting calls for a ban or if you are outraged that decades of traditional management for grouse are being challenged by our actions or if you are in a place where you see scope for a constructive way forward please let me know your views.
Walshaw Moor from the air
Well done for taking action on Walshaw Moor. I look forward to seeing how this case progresses and sincerely hope that the residents of Hebden Bridge are pleased with the final outcome.
In terms of Hen Harriers and the Action Plan - RSPB are clearly doing everything they can to keep the landowners at the table, but look at the statement issued by the Moorland Association, after an armed man was filmed hiding near a plastic Hen Harrier in the Peak District. If the MA cannot bring itself to at least describe those images as suspicious, as all the other agencies involved did, then I fail to see how they can be a part of the solution.
A major weakness of the Plan is the fact that it includes no targets. Without a set number to work towards, shooting representatives can talk about a ‘positive trend’, when we’re actually still in single figures for successful nests in the whole of England. Was the lack of a concrete population target informed by the experience of the multi-agency Peak District Birds of Prey Initiative, which was last year forced to report that it had not met its expectations for numbers of breeding Peregrine Falcons, Merlins, or Goshawks?
It’s understandable that shooting interests are keen on the lowland reintroduction element of the Hen Harrier Action Plan, because that would see English numbers rise, even if they don’t increase in the northern uplands. The GWCT are quite open about this: –
“There may be areas where a high game interest predominates, as is currently found… on some upland areas, where contiguous properties are managed principally for grouse. In these regions some predators could be scarce as a result. We see nothing intrinsically wrong in this, provided it is offset by good numbers of the same predators in other regions”
(www.gwct.org.uk/.../predation-control-and-conservation)
The GWCT want gamekeepers to have the right to cull Hen Harriers – “limited culls, target predator densities and other mechanisms should be used to serve the long-term interest of the predator as well as the game population”.
So, any agreement with driven grouse shooting representatives is working towards an endgame where Hen Harriers eventually have to be ‘controlled’, in some way. As allowing the birds to be killed legally could never be acceptable, we’ve been presented with ‘brood management’ – and the RSPB will continue to be pressured to agree to this (and pressured not to agree to it, too).
I would be interested to read Martin’s views on the second of the Plan's two ‘success criteria’, which states that the Hen Harrier population should ‘coexist with local business interests and… contribute to a thriving rural economy’. It strikes me that it’s the UK’s job to have a thriving rural economy that operates without excluding legally protected Hen Harriers, rather than it being the Hen Harrier’s job to create economic prosperity for people!
We need to see many more Hen Harriers breeding successfully in the uplands and they should be joined by many more of our native raptors - including Goshawks, Peregrines, Merlins and Golden Eagles. And as the Walshaw Moor case demonstrates, raptor persecution is just one part of the story when it comes to reviewing the environmental impacts of driven grouse shooting.