Waders on the fringe goes on tour

At the end of last month, with help of the Moorland Association and the Countryside Alliance, we were able to attract substantial audiences to a series of presentations and grouse moor visits across the north of England. The idea was to explain the results of our eight year Otterburn Upland Wader Experiment to conservationists and moorland managers who are generally not involved with grouse. We aimed to give them an insight into grouse management, but most especially to explain the rationale behind predator control and explore the results from Otterburn. These results showed that predator control for grouse substantially increases the productivity of waders like curlew, lapwing and golden plover. We believe that this explains why we find dense concentrations of these waders on the grouse moors of the Pennines that form most of a large European Special Protection Area for these birds. Furthermore, at Otterburn, our study areas without a gamekeeper had such poor productivity that one wonders whether any populations without some predator control can be self sustaining in the long-term.

About 140 delegates attended four events in the Peak District, the mid Pennines, the north Pennines and the North York Moors. Those attending included staff from national park authorities, water utility companies, Natural England, RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology, the National Trust and local wildlife trusts. Blessed by fine weather, everyone was also able to see at first hand the work that the estates are doing on managing habitats. On a wide scale these moors control invasive bracken and rush, clear poorly sited plantation forestry, burn heather and are now blocking many of the eroding drains or grips that were unwisely encouraged and subsidised in the past.

The challenge for the uplands is how to transpose some this methodology practised on the grouse moors, that is mostly privately funded, onto large tracts of upland country where biodiversity is poor and where the habitat is degrading into hillsides of bracken or poor quality grass.