4 days ago
On this Glorious Twelfth, let us mourn the vanishing world of the grouse moor
When it comes to the countryside being misunderstood, misrepresented, and frankly maligned, there is no thornier topic than grouse shooting. Critics, many of whom have never been up onto a managed grouse moor, will tell you that they are barren dead zones. That they are devoid of almost all wildlife, save for Lagopus lagopus, which bloated gents pay tens of thousands of pounds to shoot on the Glorious Twelfth (it's actually 'inglorious' they cry). What geniuses, eh? Grouse shooting is madly expensive. But as for moors being barren dead zones, it doesn't figure.
Some years ago, while researching my new book, Uncommon Ground, I spent a morning with the headkeeper on the Barningham Estate, in County Durham. I was there to talk to him about humans disturbing wildlife. He transpired to be a remarkably thoughtful man who saw the world in a very nuanced way. There's room, he reckoned, for everyone. But what really stays with me is that to visit Barningham is to get a glimpse of a world that hardly exists anymore.
At dawn, as the fog rose, there were wild grey partridges scratching around where grazing rolled out into heather and the abundance of waders was extraordinary. There were curlew, there were lapwings, and the keeper told me again and again that red shanks are his favourite. 'Don't know why', he said when I pressed him, 'just always been.'
It's essential to note that almost all of these species are doing badly. There were once black grouse in every English county, curlew (which are fast vanishing) were so plentiful that wildfowlers shot them, and tens of thousands of lapwing eggs were picked every year to be sent to London restaurants. Since then, the lapwing population has collapsed by about 90 per cent.
The reason they were doing so well on that grouse moor is because the land is managed – the grass sward is kept short, which suits lapwings, the predator population (from foxes to crows) are kept down by the gamekeepers. And because of the income the shoot brings in, the moor owner has no interest in destructive land uses like commercial forestry.
Grouse keepers, across England, are going to hate me for this. But why not write to one of them, or why not write to the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, to see if somebody can spare you an hour to show you a managed grouse moor in May when everything is starting to breed – you will see a world that is fast disappearing.
Not because of grouse shooting but in part because of a lack of it. There is, at the same, no shying away from the truth that keepers in the past (and sometimes even now) have persecuted the likes of badgers and hen harriers illegally – hen harriers were pushed to extinction and eagles (at the hands of sheep farmers too) went much the same way.
It still goes on and it shouldn't, but it's essential to note that birds like the hen harrier have bounced back. The population is at its highest level in over a hundred years and much of their range is moorland managed for grouse – some keepers have taken up diversionary feeding. They put dead mice out for raptors to give them an easier meal than a grouse.
There are keepers I know well who recognise that grouse moors can and should provide a home for raptors, a home that is ever more important in a country where agricultural intensification is the order of the day and the Government is hell bent on building across every bit of land, whatever the ecological cost.
There are plenty of people who would like to see grouse shooting gone. A lot of them are socially and culturally motivated. I suspect they wouldn't like Goodwood much or Glyndebourne either. As it happens, I'm not very sure Glyndebourne would be for me. But I've nothing much to say on Glyndebourne because I really know nothing about it all. What I do know about is shooting, and I know that without gamekeepers our uplands would be much quieter places.
