War on the moor
The RSPB’s campaign to make driven grouse shooting a thing of the past is raising temperatures in Scotland’s countryside
here’s an undeclared conflict happening on Scotland’s grouse moors. This is no phoney war; it’s a propaganda battle that is red in tooth and claw; one which pits landowners and the shooting fraternity on one side against the RSPB and its fellow travellers on the other. Most of all, though, it is a battle for the hearts and minds not just of Scotland’s public, but of its politicians.
The first casualty of t he conflict was a high-profile one: the truth. Both sides have twisted veracity, often to breaking point. Sins of omission and exclusion have been committed on an epic scale; hubris and hidden agendas are rife.
Yet it is little wonder because this is an existential battle between those who believe that grouse shooting is morally unacceptable and will therefore employ virtually any means to shape public and political opinion to their own cause, and those who believe that grouse shooting is an integral part of the rural economy without which many would be left without a livelihood.
For those who depend upon grouse shooting, it is easy to see why they are so concerned. Hare coursing has been banned since 2004, with the sight of tens of thousands of spectators who watched the Waterloo Cup on the plains of Altcar in Lancashire each year for almost two centuries now a relic of the past. Fox hunting has been neutered. Three-quarters of Scotland’s salmon rivers have had compulsory catch and release imposed upon them. You’d have to be blind not to see the direction of travel.
The RSPB, and supporters like campaigning
often that it is in danger of becoming accepted as fact. Rogue gamekeepers may occasionally kill raptors, but there are the resources in place in the form of Police Scotland’s National Wildlife Crime Unit to catch offenders, and laws that will punish t hem accordingly. Indeed, Scotland has some of the strictest wildlife legislation in the world, including the concept of vicarious liability which saw Galloway estate owner Ninian Stewart convicted at Stranraer Sheriff Court on 23 December 2014 and fined £675 despite there being no suggestion that he knew his gamekeeper had poisoned a buzzard.
The publication of an RSPB report on the eve of the Glorious 12th which alleged the death or disappearance of satellite-tagged eagles, harriers and peregrines, including eight golden eagles which the RSPB claim have disappeared in the Monadhliath mountains in the last five years, has notched up the pressure to act on the Scottish Government. The RSPB’s unsubstantiated assertions of raptor slaughter have sometimes been wide of the mark – in 2014 12 red kites and four buzzards were poisoned in one cluster at Connon Bridge on the Black Isle, with gamekeepers immediately being blamed, only to discover there are no shoots within 50 miles – but the Scottish government has called for the review of satellite tracking data. ‘Grouse moor management does help species such as curlew and golden plover as well as generating much needed rural employment and income,’ said Roseanna Cunningham, Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, ‘but this cannot be at any price.’ Despite elements of the SNP exhibiting a kneejerk prejudice against landowners, the £240m shooting brings into the rural economy each year and the 13,000 full-time jobs it sustains have provided pause for thought, even to the point where the SNP voted to retain snares. Yet the RSPB’s Scottish Director Stuart Housden remains hopeful that his pet project, the licensing of Scottish sporting estates by the Scottish government, which would retain the power to revoke licenses where estates engage in criminal persecution of raptors, may soon become a reality. But as the persecution of Angus landowner John Dodd proves – he was never found guilty of wildlife crime yet had his single farm payment withheld on the suspicion that he might be – this is a slippery slope that will make the running of grouse moors in Scotland an increasingly unattractive prospect.
There is, however, a compelling case to be made in favour of grouse shooting, one which ironically has some purchase among the RSPB’s more enlightened members. Wader species such as the golden plover and curlew are 3.5 times more likely to raise a chick to fledging on moors managed by gamekeepers, while the black grouse’s comeback is largely down to fox control. So, too, is the steady rise in the number of that most contentious of birds, the hen harrier, a ground-nesting raptor which loves eating grouse but which is displaced by foxes. It is common sense that it has a better chance of breeding successfully on keepered ground or areas like Orkney where there are no foxes.
That case won’t be made by the BBC, however. The Corporation was damned in a 2014 independent review which found that Auntie’s news reporters had an unhealthy reliance on the RSPB’s slick press team and daily briefings for its views on the countryside.
The BBC should take more care because the RSPB has a habit of making unfounded claims in pursuit of what it sees as a laudable outcome. When pushing for the reintroduction of sea eagles to Scotland, it insisted that the birds do
‘ Grouse shooting generates muchneeded rural employment and income, but this cannot be at any price’
‘The polarised, politicised nature of the debate makes even the simplest co-operation impossible’
not predate live lambs, only for a motion-sensitive camera near an eyrie in the Lorn area of Argyll to show that over a year a pair of the eagles ate more lambs than fish. Just to prove the point, a photographer in Ardnamurchan captured a sea eagle in flight carrying a lamb, while crofters on the Gairloch peninsula lost 200 lambs to sea eagles in a single season.
When the owners of Lochter Activity Centre near Inverurie insisted a buzzard had killed one of their osprey chicks, the RSPB insisted they were wrong, that such behaviour was impossible, only for Lochter’s nest-cam to catch a buzzard killing another chick the next year.
There are other examples of double-standards, such as the call for protected pine martens to be culled to protect the capercaillie, or the RSPB’s application to site wind turbines at Loch of Strathbeg in Aberdeenshire after successfully objecting to other turbine applications for the same piece of land. And what of the RSPB’s culling of wildlife – in one year 241 foxes, 77 mink, 241 red deer, 270 roe deer, 6 muntjac, 98 sika, plus rabbits, rats, mice and grey squirrels were exterminated on its 216 nature reserves.
There are certainly issues to be explored sensibly in order to make grouse shooting more sustainable. Questions need to be asked about the practice of heather burning, and over the retrograde, costly, fenced-in monoculture pioneered by Mark Osborne which has proved very effective – and popular – in the Angus glens. The scarring of moorland by ugly paths is also an issue, even if some other accusations routinely thrown at grouse moor owners are red herrings (chief among these are the accusation that the drainage ditches moor owners were paid to dig in the 1970s, and which they are now furiously filling up, cause floods).
Landowners and the RSPB should be joint stewards of the land, yet such is the polarisation and politicisation of the debate that even the simplest co-operation now seems impossible, with the RSPB even recently pulling out of the widely-praised Hen Harrier Joint Action Plan. The decision by Natural England to allow 10 buzzards to be culled has fanned the RSPB’s righteous indignation despite the fact that buzzards are now ubiquitous throughout Scotland. Claim and counter-claim rage back and forth, with no solution in sight, and the only victim is the countryside.