Bog Myrtle & Peat

When windfarms first arrived in the hills, developers were slopping with cash. The industry was heavily subsidised by the government, and no price was too high for the new kids in town. Acknowledging that not everybody welcomed the idea of turbines, money was used to paper over the cracks of local dissent. Community consent was acquired through the construction of new village halls, play parks and cafes, and a range of conservation projects was delivered alongside the actual construction work to offset any harm or offence caused by the new machines. It’s ironic that foresters were never bound to do anything like this kind of mitigation work for their own activities, and when new proposals are brought forward by woodland developers these days, we’re simply told that it’s for our own good. But renewables are for our own good too, and there’s an uneasy mismatch between expectations placed upon one industry and not another.

In those early days, black grouse were offered as a flagship species for conservation projects associated with windfarms. Twenty years ago, most of the sites where turbines were being considered in Galloway still had a few black grouse kicking around, but in the face of massive national declines, the birds had been designated as a conservation concern. It made perfect sense for developers to pitch their mitigation work as a mission to save the black grouse. Dozens of projects set out to balance black grouse conservation against sustainable development, and plans were laid to accommodate the birds beneath the turbines. There wasn’t much data about black grouse conservation around windfarms in those days, but ecologists reckoned that it would simply be a matter of planting up some native woodland and watching the black grouse rebound accordingly.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that black grouse require more than a few small woodland plantations to reverse their fading fortunes, but the credo persists that trees are the go-to solution. We now have so many case studies to show that, even at best, little bits of native woodland are only part of the answer – and new trees installed to conserve the birds are only useful for ten or fifteen years. It can be frustrating to see the same old proposals wheeled out to protect black grouse when they have so obviously and repeatedly failed to save the birds in the past, and yet wherever black grouse are threatened by new developments or proposals, the solution is always the same.

The jury is out on whether black grouse can prosper alongside wind developments. There are sites in Perthshire where the birds have been unaffected by the change, but declines in many parts of the southern uplands suggest that black grouse were already too far gone to be saved, even if a full suite of measures had been deployed. In time, developers stopped using black grouse as their flagship species because it’s embarrassing when you set out to do good and find that you’ve failed. Nowadays, they talk more in terms of broader habitat work which will support a less specific assortment of wildlife. They focus on peatland and riparian planting, not just because these are good things in their own right, but also because they’re much easier to deliver and quantify.

Having failed to vindicate renewable energy developments, black grouse have recently become the poster-birds for rewilding projects – and there’s some reasonable logic in this. Where livestock is withdrawn and natural tree regeneration succeeds across large enough areas, it’s sometimes possible that black grouse numbers will increase. This works because these proposals gave scale that small plantings do not, and the projects which are most likely to succeed for black grouse are based in places where there were a reasonable number of the birds in the first place. That’s great, and given that black grouse are a striking, attractive and obvious species, they’re more likely to win the limelight than other beneficiaries of early succession scrub on moorland; birds like the forgettable willow warbler or the tiny siskin. But some strands of rewilding are decidedly antagonistic and triumphalist in their claims, and they’re not content with improving things. In order to raise funds and kudos, some individuals are determined to show that their way is not only good but profoundly better than all other kinds of land management – which, by definition are stupid, corrupt and short-sighted. 

During the summer, I met a rewilding consultant who claimed to have “the biggest black grouse lek in the UK” on rewilded land which he oversees. He didn’t give a figure, but the comment was offered as a boast of superiority… and it struck me as a silly one. Leks take place all across the Highlands, and while many will never be counted or recorded, some will never even be seen by human beings at all. In order to be “the biggest”, we have to know how big all the other ones are – and we just don’t. Added to this, in certain weathers, two big leks of forty birds might combine to create one of eighty – and when conditions change, those eighty birds might break off into thirty groups of two or three. Laying claim to “the biggest lek in the UK” is like bragging about having “the busiest bee in the garden”, but it’s an undeniably exciting soundbite.

More importantly, any increase of black grouse on rewilded land is likely to be short-lived. The same principle of age and stage of new woodlands applies to large holdings too, and as scrub matures into forest, its value diminishes for the birds. In the true, primordial wild, black grouse move across vast areas in search of habitats which are transitioning between woodland, moorland, marsh and meadow. If black grouse respond to a site that is being rewilded, it’s not surprising that you’ll see a boom in their numbers. But it’s inherently temporary, and the unknown factor is what the birds will do when that habitat continues to transition into something else.

In the small, fragmented case of modern Britain, only a careful kind of rotational moorland management (underpinned by agricultural and sporting interests) has kept the birds anchored to certain spots for decades at a time. In global terms, British black grouse are unusually static and stable birds; they don’t move around much, largely because conditions delivered through burning, cutting and grazing simulate those ancient natural transitions for them. They don’t have to move, and in the absence of massive, region-wide swathes of naturally dynamic and transitional wilderness, it’s likely that these man-maintained “hotspots” are the only way forward for the birds in this country.

Rewilders are often keen to dismiss conservation that is based on individual species. Their entire ideology is based on transition, change and complex interactions which smoulder unseen beneath the surface of an ecosystem. When they “claim” black grouse as an example of their success, they must be doing so against their better judgement – because even if you’re convinced that the true power of rewilding lies in holistic, anonymous wonder, the general public is naggingly insistent on simplified, feel-good narratives which relate to the rise and fall of specific species. Black grouse are being used as the bonnie, crowd-pleasing indicator species again, and the birds really do make a compelling and attractive package for fundraisers. But it’s important to remember that in rewilding terms, their success is only the first and least complicated step along the road – and the next step may finish them off altogether.