Bog Myrtle & Peat

At this time of year, Teesdale is one of richest and most exciting places to see birds in the Uk. If you’re interested in moorland wildlife, it’s a kind of paradise to be out around Langdon Beck in the sunshine to the tune of a dozen redshank calling. Lapwings shepherd their chicks to the nibbled grass, and curlews warn passing traffic of youngsters in the verges. It’s not so much the breadth of species in the North Pennines (although almost every British upland wader is present here), but the fact that every single one of these birds is so abundant. The resulting cacophony of whistles and peeping is never-ending, and out on the tops towards Cow Green Reservoir, golden plover warble and moan from all points of the compass.

Red grouse and grey partridges lurk in the rushes, but you’re more likely to be distracted by several dozen blackcock at the lek, or greyhens standing foolishly in the roadside laybys for grit. Bizarrely, there are woodcock roding over the bogs beside barn owls in broad daylight, and snipe which drum with such brazen self-confidence that you could easily forget that these birds are only a few inches long from beaktip to toe. It’s hard to overstate the excitement and wonder of a place like Teesdale, right down to the hen harriers and merlins which hunt through the waders like a blade through fabric. I periodically rhapsodise about this extraordinary place, but I simply cannot overstate the extent of its bounty and intrigue.

But it’s all hanging by a thread, and we’re fast approaching a change of government and a shift in policy which could destroy this kind of land management. The wildlife in Upper Teesdale is underpinned by grouse moors on the hills, and the waders prosper because of a sport which could soon be banned. We’ve arrived at this point after a grotesque public “debate” which has recklessly swayed between aggression, score-settling and strange hyperbole from a dizzying array of commentators, many of whom have never really engaged with the subject beyond a knee-jerk desire to “get involved”. It would be one thing to ban grouse shooting because we’ve weighed up the pros and cons and decided that it’s best to move in a new direction, but it’s terrifying that some of the leading campaigners who argue in favour of a ban not only deny or ignore positive things about moorland management – they deliberately attack them. 

In the rush to criticise grouse moors, some people have actually argued that sporting interests produce “too many waders”, and that we should deliberately deescalate conservation effort in the uplands because the hills are excessively productive. For those of us who spend our lives desperately attempting to confront catastrophic wader declines, it’s a nauseatingly barmy contortion, and it shows just how crazy the debate has become. Perhaps the arguments against grouse shooting outweigh the benefits – but to suggest that there are no benefits whatsoever is downright childish. 

Beneath the active denigration of wader productivity, critics attempt to frame wader conservation as a cynical attempt at greenwashing; that gamekeepers don’t really care about waders, and that “if curlews ate grouse chicks, keepers would kill them”. This is one of the most fatuous and meaningless arguments you’re likely to find on the internet – a hypothetical bellyflop that is designed to expose grouse shooting as morally defunct. It doesn’t need to be said, but curlews don’t eat grouse chicks – and it’s hard to understand why motives are so important to critics of grouse shooting, as if conservation is worthless unless it’s undertaken for pure ecological altruism. It’s true that waders do well because they benefit from work that is carried out to promote red grouse for shooting, but I’ve never met a grouse moor owner who didn’t love waders, and would it really matter if they didn’t? So long as they created and sustained productive wader habitats alongside sustainable efforts to encourage grouse, I’m just glad the work’s getting done.

On the other hand, I’ve certainly met several fund managers who have bought and restored extensive areas of peatland for conservation and restoration through green investment schemes. They wouldn’t recognise a bog if it swallowed them; they’re motivated to buy and manage land in order to make money and grow pension funds through schemes to offset carbon emissions. When we meet these people in the street, do we sneer at the thousands of acres of peatland they’ve restored because “they were only out to make money?” Aren’t we glad it’s happening? Even for my part, I conserve waders for lots of reasons – but principally because I love them. They make me happy. In that sense, I’m not always doing what I do for the waders. I’m actually motivated by a rather selfish desire to smile – so does that disqualify the work I do?

The anti-grouse shooting campaigners who have the ear of government are not warning civil servants about the potential damage of a ban. They’re not planning for the change or looking beyond a single moment of triumph. In that sense, they’re not conservationists at all – they’re just campaigners, and the rest of us will have to work around the far-reaching impact of their victory.

If and when a ban comes, most gamekeeping work will stop quite quickly. Plenty of things can survive a lull of indecision in land management. If you’re interested in peatland restoration, rewilding or woodland creation, you can make a start once the stakeholders have been consulted and the funding is in place. But waders depend upon continuity, and unless there’s a strategy to keep momentum going, they’ll just die out in the blink of an eye – even in Upper Teesdale where their numbers are currently so strong. 

The project at Tarras Valley Nature Reserve is a superb example of new landowners taking several years to think about, develop and implement a conservation strategy for waders… during which time waders fell to unrecoverably low numbers. We need to be thinking about waders before the transition so that birds never even notice the shift – and that’s not to worry about arguments over predator control or the desire to score points against people who love or hate grouse shooting. I increasingly feel that I don’t care one way or another about the sport; my only interest is to sustain and conserve moorland birds. In that sense, I can’t be told that waders don’t matter, and I won’t swallow vague hypotheticals about how everything will be fine without predator control or habitat management. We know that these birds don’t just stay – they have to be actively retained.

I take a specific focus on waders here and perhaps I’m being too narrow-minded – but I also believe that waders are easily lost in attempts to imagine “multi-faceted moorland management for the future”. If we try to think about everything, we sometimes risk thinking about nothing; so maybe it’s the role of people like me to be dogged and dull and repetitive, beating the drum for a single cause and staring directly into these issues with a highly focussed lens. This approach seems to work for raptor enthusiasts, and perhaps that’s a useful lesson. But if we’re actually going to ban grouse shooting, it’s so crucial that we don’t lose places like Teesdale in all their thrilling diversity and richness. The people who want this change aren’t planning for what happens when it comes. It’ll be a leap into the unknown, and the stakes could hardly be higher.