Tag: burning

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….

In the last two weeks both Wakefield and Calderdale Councils have announced their intentions to push for a ban on burning moorland within their boroughs. Now the democratically-elected Mayor of Doncaster, Ros Jones CBE has written to the government urging Defra to deliver the burning ban “to help stop flooding in communities on the River Don”. Given the major floods in Fishlake and Doncaster, which sit downstream from the Peak District, at the end of last year, this request can only put more pressure on the government to act.