Today marks one-year since mountain hares in Scotland were given protected status. RSPB Scotland Senior Species and Habitats Officer James Silvey reflects on how we got here and the work that still needs to be done to protect nature in our uplands.
The 1st of March 2022 marks the one-year anniversary of protected status for one of Scotland’s most iconic animals, the mountain hare.
Protection was brought in for the species due to concerns that the population was declining and that unregulated culls were seriously impacting the species’ conservation status. There had been concerns for many years that annual, unregulated culls carried out across many intensively managed grouse moors were having devastating impacts on the species’ population. In the build up to protection a closed season was brought into force and this was followed up with a call to land managers for voluntary restraint from the Scottish Government, however both were ineffective and each winter pictures of dead hares would be published killed under the guise of “management”.
Whilst these pictures were clearly emotive what was needed to enact change was evidence that populations were declining, this evidence for this came in 2018 with the publication of two papers.
The two independent papers[1][2] used different data sets to come to the same conclusion, that mountain hares had declined, and in the case of the Watson 2018 paper these declines had been most apparent from the late 1990s in areas of the country predominantly managed for grouse shooting.
This evidence was used by Scottish Government to report to the EU that the conservation status of mountain hares was “unfavourable” and was arguably the catalyst that was needed for the introduction of protection in 2021.
Although protected, mountain hares can still be killed legally under licence, but only for very specific reasons such as the protection of young tree planting. How many hares have been killed under licence over the last 12 months remains to be reported, however it will undoubtedly be much lower than the estimated 25,000 that were killed annually before protection was brought in.
The protection of the mountain hare was a landmark moment in the story of the uplands. Previously, like most of the uplands, they had been under intensive management that was completely unregulated and therefore unaccountable.
Despite the Werritty report on grouse moor management acknowledged this and made recommendations for the species’ protection, it was the Scottish Government that went further and by bringing in legal protection ensured that the future management of mountain hares would be both responsible and transparent.
We hope other areas of upland management such as muirburn will also benefit from the same attention in the near future.
The Scottish Government has promised to introduce licencing of muirburn and of driven grouse moors within this Parliamentary term “as a matter of urgency”. We look forward to seeing detailed proposals for these schemes and hope that lessons can be drawn from the experience of introducing legal protection for mountain hares.
Our uplands are unique spaces for nature, climate and people but they are in crisis. Years of harmful land management practices has pushed nature to the fringes of these wild spaces across Scotland. If we are to tackle the climate and nature emergency then the Scottish Government must take action at scale and at pace to protect these landscapes and the species which call them home.
[1] Massimino, D., Harris, S.J., Gillings, S. 2018. Evaluating spatiotemporal trends in terrestrial mammal abundance using data collected during birds surveys. Biological Conservation 226: 153-167
[2] Watson, A,. Wilson J.D. 2018. Seven decades of mountain hare counts show seven declines where high-yield recreational game bird hunting is practised. Journal of Applied Ecology 55.6: 2663-2672
Photo: Ben Andrew (rspb-images.com)