Tag: burning

“Research has found that burning peatland degrades habitats, releases carbon emissions, reduces biodiversity and increases flood risk.” Which neatly summarises why yet another council that has grouse moors within its boundaries is turning on the industry. Following recent similar calls by the RSPB and a host of other northern councils (see our Moorland Burning posts), members of Staffordshire Moorlands District Council are to ask the government to introduce a ban on the practice of peatland burning by grouse moor owners. BBurning on peatlands has become an increasingly hot-button topic as estates set more and more fires in their quest to turn ever more Red Grouse into cash, leading to – the RSPB explicitly said last year – ‘the biggest identified threat to England’s most important places for wildlife’.

It’s not been a good ‘season’ for the horrible grouse shooting industry. There has been poor weather, heather beetle, low productivity, exposure of ‘wilful blindness’ on Channel 4 News, councils in England calling for bans on moorland burning, and the Scottish government giving higher protection to Mountain Hares and saying they were planning to bring in a grouse moor licencing system as patience had finally (after a VERY long time) run out at the level of raptor persecution by gamekeepers. Now, just a few months after calling for a ban on peatland burning, (and just days after shooting lobbyist Alex Hogg kept a straight face while describing grouse moors as ‘paradise for birdwatchers – see Alex Hogg knows nothing about birdwatching’), the RSPB have released news of an analysis that says – contrary to what the shooting industry claims – that – er, setting fire to Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) is not actually a very good thing at all…who knew, eh…

Ban Bloodsports on Yorkshire’s Moors has announced that Barnsley council has joined the extensive roll-call of councils and public utilities to back a ban on the rotational burning of the nation’s uplands. Burning is a tool used by the grouse industry to ensure young heather shoots for their grouse ‘farms’, but it is linked with habitat destruction, the deaths of rare reptiles, smoke pollution, flooding in communities below the moorlands, and is incompatible with the UK’s stance on the global climate emergency. We have just published a timely podcast with Luke Steele, Director and spokesperson of Ban Bloodsports here, which looks at burning as well as the option of licencing grouse shoots.

In what is starting to look like a flood (one, ironically, caused just like the downstream floods in eg Hebden Bridge by gamekeepers), yet another council in northern England has backed plans to ban the burn – the routine destruction of the uplands to engineer habitats to allow shooters to kill more grouse. Kirklees, a local government district of West Yorkshire on the edge of the Peak District ‘national park’ (a notorious raptor persecution hotspot), joins Wakefield, Sheffield, York, Doncaster and Calderdale Councils in calling for a ban. The call comes as the grouse moor burning ‘season’ opens again, with a considerable area of grouse moors in the Wessenden Valley expected to begin being set on fire by shoots. Yesterday the RSPB again renewed its own call for peatland burning to stop to protect scarce habitats and wildlife.

This is turning into a ‘join-the-dots’ good news story, as York Council has now joined the Mayor of Doncaster and Calderdale and Wakefield Councils in proposing an end to grouse moor burning and pushing Defra to impose a ban that has been in the offing for years. As the numbers of grouse on each moor has exploded (as estates seek to make as much money as possible by cramming as many grouse onto the moors as they can) columns of smoke have become as much a part of the moorland landscape as mammal traps and ‘keep out’ signs. Does that really matter? It really does….