Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s a rumour going round that pheasants kill curlews. It’s not a case of direct combat or predation, but rather a theory that because pheasants are released into the countryside for shooting, foxes have more to eat. So it follows that in a world where foxes are doing well, curlews will inevitably start to do badly. It’s not an outrageously daft idea. It’s potentially true in some parts of the country, but it hasn’t been proven and it’s hard to see how pheasants could ever be more than a regionally variable contributory factor in the decline of wading birds.

I suppose the issue gathers momentum when you realise just how many pheasants are released into the British countryside for shooting each year. It’s an astronomically high figure – something like fifty million individuals, and if one of the questions curlew conservationists ask is why there are so many foxes and crows in the countryside these days, it’s only fair that shooting should go under the spotlight.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty appalled by the number of pheasants I see in the countryside these days. This is not the sport I grew up on twenty five years ago – it’s super-charged, and the some of the biggest shoots hide behind a traditional image of shooting as a “one for the pot” family day. In reality, they’re commercial monsters with little accountability and no capacity for self-regulation. The system’s broken, and shooting itself is strangely unable to address its own woes. But even as I creep down this rabbit hole, I’m getting further away from the idea of curlew conservation – and it’s important to stay focussed there.

Game releases might have a part to play in curlew declines, but it’s daft to imagine that pheasants are driving curlew declines in the UK. We know there are hundreds of factors at play, and many of these vary according to geography. It’s a recurrent strand in conservation that people are inclined to extrapolate what they’ve seen at first hand in order to construe a national picture. I understand why that is, but the truth is that nobody has a clear enough overview of the entire country to present anything more than the shakiest pattern of trends.

If what you’ve seen on your own patch has led you to believe that pheasants are a problem for curlews where you are, I bet you’re right – but you also have to concede that you only hold a single piece of a puzzle so large and confusing that it makes your head spin. Similarly, if you’ve seen curlew chicks munched up by silage mowers, you’re inclined to say that “silage production is the problem”. For my own part, I’ve found evidence to suggest that badgers are “the problem” – but while small-scale, personal observations are valuable, they mustn’t be allowed to grow out of proportion and dominate narratives which are applied to entire nations. The situation is confusing. There is no one answer, and if you think that fixing your part of the problem will fix the entire problem, you need to think again.

The pheasant argument gains particular traction in some quarters because it harms the shooting industry. If you hate shooting, the argument is doubly popular because gamekeepers are forever bragging about their conservation credentials; it’s nice to pull the rug from underneath them. Shooting folk claim they’re doing good by carrying out predator control, but the implication is that there would be no need for predator control if there was no release of pheasants for shooting. Some anti-shooting commentators are deliberately maximising the impact of pheasant releases on curlews because they love the mayhem it causes. For them, the primary objective is a ban or restrictions placed on shooting – regardless if that costs us the curlew. To this end, it helps them to conflate predator control with game shooting, and to confuse the narratives so that every British gamekeeper appears to be engaged in a fruitless, brutal war on wildlife.

All the science shows that predator control improves curlew productivity – it’s one of a few management techniques which might prevent these birds from becoming extinct in this country. But as the pheasant argument has gathered steam, people are steadily less able to regard this management technique objectively. Rational thought has gone out of the window. It’s become more about partisan ideologies, and sometimes the cynical expression of ulterior motives.

Chairing a meeting on predator control for the English Curlew Recovery Project last night, I was amazed by how many people were using these ideas to argue that curlews will be saved by a ban on shooting. Not only does this approach hinge upon a theory which lacks data to support it, but it also offers to simplify the entire conversation into battle lines which were established elsewhere in other conflicts. By the end of the session, the audience was largely divided into two groups – those who support pheasant shooting, and those who don’t. There was also a degree of background grumbling about driven grouse moor management from people who perhaps would not have been able to explain how that fieldsport differs from any other. Curlews had become a secondary concern, and the upshot was that instead of linking curlews to predator control, aspects of the conversation descended into one side shouting “shooting’s evil” and the other side shouting “no it’s not”. I think we had a valuable session last night, but it wasn’t pretty or comfortable.

I understand that my life is transacted in a distant corner of a very sheltered field, and I rarely mix with groups outside my own. Perhaps it’s for that reason that I came away from this meeting with a bewildered sense that curlew conservation is nothing like so easy it as it seems on the ground, and there are some enormous mountains to climb if we’re serious about keeping these birds.