Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Upland keeper
Controlling predator numbers is a key aspect of land management in this country and the sooner everyone starts to realise that, the better
Moorland managers and gamekeepers have recently been trying to negotiate Natural England’s latest maze, which goes under the guise of a licensing system for controlling predators on notified sites. Here is a classic example of what can happen when those who hold the key to management, but may not believe in managing anything, make the wrong decisions.
The Netherlands is not known for its liberal sporting laws; indeed, the very opposite. It’s not easy for sport nor predator control to function there at all.
And it was here a few years ago that we saw what a classic case of non-management, or non-intervention, can produce.
In 2018, during a very severe winter, more than half the population of 5,230 large herbivores died of starvation on a very notable reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen. This included ancient breeds of Heck cattle and konik horses, as well as red deer.
These are major top-line grazers and, due to the policy of non-intervention, they had reached numbers that were far too high for the area to sustain.
To watch more than 2,500 animals die like that is shocking, in my eyes at any rate. As they were fenced in, they had no choice but to starve to death. This policy of doing nothing is a dangerous one when man has become the manager of the natural world.
Cuddle
Equally, the notion that real animals are like their animated cousins seems to have embedded itself in the minds of far too many people. Foxes and rabbits don’t cuddle one another. Real animals eat others, animated ones don’t.
Hundreds of thousands of living things are killed and devoured by others in this country every day. This is not something you see on the latest wildlife documentary. Storks picking up young flamingos and gobbling them down, or hyenas pulling down a young wildebeest, seems to be accepted by the majority as ‘nature’.
In this country, sparrowhawks and buzzards pull prey to pieces while it is still alive. Stoats eat rabbits and other prey while it is still breathing. Foxes wipe out poultry flocks and the domestic cat will ‘play’ with an unfortunate piece of prey until it dies of stress. The cat’s not hungry, merely displaying what nature put it here to do — to survive by killing.
This is nature, red in tooth and claw, but it can only function as it was intended where there is still some semblance of a natural habitat. What the Dutch managers
“No one in power seems to care whether we pass on natural assets to our children”
did not consider when they had no top-line predators in their reserve was the inevitable. They would not even consider intervention by the highest of all the predators — humans.
As the Dutch found out to their cost, areas like those in Africa that are large enough to sustain a natural balance, including predators, are few and far between. This country is no exception.
Our moorlands are about as close as we come now to large areas of seminatural habitat and they are man-made. Unmanaged, the majority would revert to scrub. They are also not remote enough to be exempt from daily infiltration by major predators and it’s here that Natural England should accept that management is a necessity.
The daily journeys made by members of the gull family and corvids of all shapes and hues will in 2021 — as they did in the spring of 2020 — remove countless eggs and chicks of wading birds, whose populations cannot sustain these losses. These birds may not be fenced in like the deer, cattle and horses in the Netherlands, but they have an invisible fence around them in the shape of really unfavourable habitat.
There are precious few wading birds breeding successfully outside the moorland rim and, when it occurs, it is due to a few dedicated individuals providing habitat and security for the waders to breed. The same could be said of the situation with the capercaillie in Scotland, where the pine marten will render it extinct before too long.
What are we going to do about it? I simply don’t know, but what I do know is that no one in the seat of power seems to care whether we pass on our natural assets to our children. They still allow Government employees with, on the face of it, no wildlife management skills — and rather too much of a Disney approach to wildlife — in on the decision-making process.
This is a Government, let’s remember, that has allowed the use of a pesticide that is banned in the EU and has been shown to do unimaginable damage to our bees, both wild and domesticated.
KEEPA has been running well so I am going to reduce the amount of retrieving he is doing and add some other exercises to keep him motivated. Hunting is something he does well, but holding an area can be a challenge for him. I am lucky that he does not care what he picks and will hunt for anything. Having a dog like that can be a real asset in terms of making simple games fun.
I am fortunate enough to have trained with some working trials handlers in the past who train their dogs to hunt a 25-yardsquare box. They have to hunt and bring back tiny items such as a bit of material, a pen lid or even a cartridge.
While this isn’t ultimately what I want Keepa hunting for, it will encourage him to hold an area confidently even when he cannot see an obvious dummy or retrieve. I am going to use small disc dummies and key-ring dummies. These are pretty small and easy to hide.
I mark the box out roughly with some small sticks. This means I can see the area