Blogs

In his recent letter, Professor Arthur Morris described grouse moors as ‘ecological deserts’. This is frankly untrue. Breeding birds such as lapwing and curlew have thrived on grouse moors as a result of the management undertaken there. 

GWCT Chief Executive Teresa Dent suggests that the recent call from RSPB to ‘stop burning the peat’ seems to deliberately confuse controlled and uncontrolled burning.

Kirklees Council will be interested to hear that our knowledge of the role heather burning plays in peatland restoration has progressed significantly since the Committee on Climate Change suggested it should cease.

With lessons from Australia and California about the unintended consequences of preventing controlled winter fires to reduce fuel load, we may need to be far more proactive in preventative burning than we have been in the past, as the likelihood of summer wildfires is increasing.

Hen harriers in England have just had another record-breaking year: 60 chicks from 19 nests says Natural England, and the RSPB is reporting a further five nests. The significance of this remarkable achievement is illustrated by the fact that English hen harrier Favourable Conservation Status (FCS) is 61 pairs.

James Mawle is passionate about the red-listed black grouse. In 1998 there were only 773 males left in England, but thanks to a conservation project involving land managers on a landscape-scale and joint-led by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the decline was reversed.

We respond to a recent piece in The Guardian, in which the RSPB claim to have been flooded with reports of wildlife crime since the lockdown began.

For many years, the GWCT and others have used a figure of 75% for the percentage of upland heather moorland found in the UK. Some have questioned the basis of that estimate and we discuss it here.