Caring for Chicks

Grouse chicks have specific habitat requirements

As broods of young grouse begin to hatch out across the hills, it’s a good moment to look back through some of the work the Heather Trust has done on habitat management techniques for brood rearing over the past few years.

Several keepers have found that traditional grouse moor management is no longer viable in many areas, and there has been a big push to discover new and innovative ways to produce grouse. Some of this work has been undertaken by cutting heather, and this has opened up a whole new side to heather management in which carefully customised habitat design can work to reduce chick mortality and shift the moorland environment in favour of young birds.

On Speyside, British Moorlands have worked hard to keep grouse chicks safe from predators by cutting in long, narrow strips across the hillside. This means that cover and security are never far away, and young birds can quickly escape into thicker heather when predators arrive. This theory also suggests that narrow cuts through mature heather can “trap” insects which are blown on the wind, and informal studies have shown that cuts provide just as much crucial insect life for chicks as traditional fires burnt over larger areas.

Cutting through mature heather also allows chicks to get access to mature blaeberry plants which are associated with a rich diversity of caterpillars and grubs. This aligns with work undertaken by the Welsh Wildlife Trust near Denbigh which has cut through areas of mature heather to improve access to insects for young black grouse. 2018 has seen a cold, dry spring in many areas, and a general shortage of insect life may prove to be telling later in the summer when broods are being counted before the shooting season opens.

Further south in Cheshire, Heather Trust board member Richard May has been working on “Maze Cutting”, which includes customised “lay-bys” and loops in areas of managed heather so that young birds have somewhere to dry out in periods of wet, windy weather. A little imaginative thinking can really start to “tweak” wider habitat management plans in favour of groundnesting birds, and while these often feel like small details, we believe that they can deliver a big impact when seen as a whole.

The Heather Trust showcases the work put in by moorland owners and keepers in order to generate discussion around new techniques and ideas to boost productivity. A good deal of this information was fed into the Moorland Forum’s Principles of Moorland Management guidance which will soon be published to establish something like “Best Practice” guidelines for heather management.

Read our heather cutting guidance HERE and find out more information about Dick Bartlett’s work at www.britishmoorlands.com. Thanks to Dick Bartlett and Heather Trust Board Member Richard May for their input on this article.

Wildfire Risk Remains High

Wildfire at Loch Carron last night (28th May)

This weekend has seen a number of wildfire outbreaks across the UK’s uplands, most notably in the Peak District and the North West Highlands. Simon Thorp, Consultant to the Heather Trust and Chairman of the England & Wales Wildfire Forum, and a member of the Scottish Wildfire Forum Executive Committee warns that the risk remains high while “ideal” conditions prevail. 


While those in the south have been suffering from thunderstorms and flash flooding, those in the north and west have been enjoying hot, dry weather. The cold, wet days of April suddenly seem to be a long way in the past.


An unwelcome consequence of the hot, dry conditions is the increasing threat from wildfire. For a fire to start and spread, three conditions are required: dry fuel, wind, and a source of ignition. With the late Spring this year, plants have only just started to grow and therefore their moisture content is low – ideal for burning. The recent windy conditions mean fire will spread easily and the glorious sun and blue-sky conditions during this recent holiday period have attracted many people into our upland and moorland areas to provide the source of ignition. That is not to say that igniting fires is always deliberate, but it is often careless. In the words of Bruce Farquharson, Local Senior Officer at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Chairman of the Scottish Wildfire Forum, many of the fires that the SFRS have had to deal with recently were preventable.


The current conditions are forecast to exist until Friday this week, but that is not to say they will not return to the north and west, next week, or appear in another part of the country. At this time of year, the heat in the sun quickly removes any surface moisture after rain to restore the risk levels. The wildfire risk will only really decrease as the vegetation starts to provide new growth with a high moisture content.


This year wildfires have occurred all over the UK – this is not just a Scottish problem. For example, fires have been reported in: Wales, Surrey, Dorset, Dartmoor, the South and North Pennines and the North York Moors.


While the damage to moorland and upland vegetation might be minimal in the longer term, as it normally recovers quickly, we must not forget the risk to people and property from the fire and to the firefighters who are called upon to put it out, or at least contain it, with the associated costs. We have been lucky in the UK that no-one has been killed recently in a wildfire, but we should not be complacent; there have been some close calls and someone’s luck will run out one day.


It is an accepted fact that most wildfires are started by people. The discarded cigarette is the catch-all ignition source but there are many others, including barbecues. Until conditions change, the message must be for anyone working or visiting our moorland and upland areas to exercise extreme caution and avoid starting fires.

Health and Harmony … and Heather

This Tuesday was the deadline for responses to DEFRA’s Health and Harmony Consultation on the future of farming and rural support post-CAP.  Although we are not a lobbying organisation, so important is farming and rural development policy to the UK’s moorlands and uplands we put in a response and we also contributed to the Uplands Alliance response as well.  

We focussed our answers on the questions relevant to our areas of interest and expertise, so the agricultural transition, public money for public goods and resilience in the uplands.

The consultation document specifically recognised that the UK’s uplands and other remote rural areas have specific challenges around fragility and are less resilient economically, but that they are places rich in natural and cultural heritage and have a character of “wildness” that is loved.  

It is clear DEFRA understand that they need to think carefully about the impact of policy changes on the uplands since these areas will find it more difficult to adapt, but they also know they need a deeper understanding of why this is the case.  The Heather Trust were, just last week, down in London as part of a group of uplands interests that met DEFRA officials to provide that insight.

The main points we were able to communicate at the meeting and in our response were -

•  A welcoming of the desire to create a more rational approach to agricultural and environmental support;
• Concern with the premise that Direct Payments for agricultural activity should reduce to enable transition to environment payments - because, in upland and moorland areas, it is often the farming activity itself that provides environmental and cultural public goods;
• Acknowledgement that more can be done to deliver for the environment in upland and moorland areas, but that the activity that will deliver these outcomes will be different in the uplands compared to the lowlands and approaches must be tailored to reflect this;
• A desire to see government push on with trials and pilots so that the many questions about how change might affect the uplands can start to be answered;
• ... and trials and pilots should come before direct payment reductions, not least because farmers and land managers are coming together to propose pilots, and that impetus must not be lost over worry about potential temporary funding shortfalls;
• An outline for the new approach which sees strategic objectives for public goods set by national government, but with delivery prioritised regionally and deliver plans agreed with individuals and collaborative groups – top-down strategy, but bottom-up design and delivery;
• The importance of much longer-term agreements but with regular reviews, so that farmers and land managers can agree variations to delivery where they see a better outcome is possible.
• Support for a focus on outcomes, airing a note of caution that payment by results needs to take account of the factors that might impact results, but which are not within the control of the farmer or land manager.
• Highlighting the need for facilitation and “the honest broker” role to assist collaboration where this is needed.

Spring Beetles

Beetled heather, which was then frosted in February-
This plant will probably recover

There haven’t been many sightings of heather beetle as they start to disperse for the spring this year. Cold winds have made for a cool March and April and held back the warmth that beetles need to fly, but a few individuals have been sighted in Derbyshire and Argyll - the beasties are on the move.  In the article below, the Trust’s Project Manager, Patrick Laurie gives his own experience of heather beetle on a piece of moorland he owns near Dumfries.

As part of a livestock exclusion experiment, a single acre of our hill ground was fenced off in 2010 to learn more about grazing pressure. After a year to recover, heather grew very strongly in years two and three. It looked like the entire fenced-off area would grow into a uniform spread of heather, but heather beetle struck in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Heather beetle has long been associated with wet ground, and this seemed to be proof of that old wisdom. Many heather plants were killed, but plenty of vegetation bounced back after some pretty severe damage.

Wetter moors are often challenged by invasive grass species, and the uniform heather coverage was soon broken up by tussocks of deer grass and some early signs of molinia growth. Rather than manage the damage on a single acre, I decided to leave things alone to see what would happen next.

Beetle was absent in 2015, but returned again in 2016 and 17. Last year’s damage was lighter than usual, but it has been interesting to see heather recover and restore itself year after year. Heather is no longer dominant in the fenced-off area, and wet ground has also led to a slow invasion of star moss.

This has been an interesting little project for all kinds of reasons, but it’s worth writing about the plot now because while much of the beetle-damaged heather currently looks wretched and tatty (this wasn’t helped by some heavy frosting/windburn in February), it will soon be greening up and springing back to life again. This picture was taken on Saturday and could hardly look less hopeful, but plants like these have looked worse in previous years and gone on to have flowers in July.  

It's hard to draw big-picture conclusions from a single small plot in isolation, but it makes me wonder 

1) whether beetles are one of several mechanisms which drive heather loss on wet ground; 

2) whether heather will often recover from beetle damage provided there is light touch, adaptive management;

and 3) would the heather have recovered if there had been livestock grazing in this fenced off area?

Some interesting food for thought.

Peak District Visit

Anne Gray and Geoff Eyre at Hope, Derbyshire

The Trust headed south last week so that Anne Gray could meet a few of our supporters and contacts in the Peak District. We’re lucky to have some strong ties in this fascinating place, and we would like to build on these connections over the next few years.

Every area of moorland is different, but the Peak District faces some unique challenges around heavily degraded peatland and high visitor pressure. Many of the rules which govern land management further North simply do not apply in Derbyshire and Cheshire, so it was useful to drop in and visit a handful of contacts on the ground for updates.

·      Moors for the Future: Fascinating to catch up with Chris Dean and the MFF team in their office at Edale where we were shown around the project offices and learned about recent peatland restoration work, bird surveys and public engagement in the “bogtastic van”!

·      Geoff Eyre: Geoff is always a mine of information and enthusiasm, and we were thrilled to head out for a look at some of his bracken management and heather reseeding work on the high ground above Hope. Geoff has been pioneering new moorland management techniques over the last thirty years, and we owe a great deal to his innovative, practical approach.

·      Richard May: Richard has been a valuable part of the Heather Trust’s Board for several years, and it was useful to see his moorland restoration work at Piggford and High Moor near Wildboarclough. Richard raised some interesting ideas about what comes after moorland restoration, and there is great scope to explore these two moors as a case study focused on upland farming after Brexit.

·      Crag Estate: The Trust has been running a heather beetle study at Crag Estate and Combs Moss near Buxton for the past five years, and we paid a quick visit to the monitoring sites which compare various treatments for beetle damage. It was interesting to catch up with Kath Longden of Penny Anderson Associates who is carrying out the ecological survey work, and also to meet with Richard Bailey, one of the gamekeepers from Crag Estate.

We hope to be back in the Peak District again soon!

People and Nature

Anne Gray, Director of the Heather Trust

For my first blog as Director of the Heather Trust, I was going to talk about me!  My background, why I think I’m right for the Heather Trust, and what I hope to achieve.  Then I saw that George Monbiot was once again making his case for rewilding in last week’s Guardian, this time berating our National Parks for not presenting him with the type of land he wants to see, and I thought a response to that would be much more interesting. 

Mr Monbiot’s perspective is of course something he’s perfectly entitled to, but it seems to jar with what The Heather Trust is about – integrated management of land – people and nature, not people or nature.  

In his attack on National Parks, he points to other countries as exemplars.  Countries more vast than our own that have the space to have parks as true wilderness areas.  That’s only one model of a National Park however.  In the UK national parks represent both natural and cultural landscapes, they cater for visitors and the people that live and work there, they recognise that economic as well as conservation activity takes place in them - and that is okay.  In fact, it might be a very natural, since it recognises human beings as part of the ecosystem.

The trouble, as I see it, with a lot of what is termed rewilding, is that human beings are largely absent from landscapes and ecosystems other than as visitors to them.  The vision seems to be of a UK where urban and lowland dwellers visit nature in the uplands on high days and holidays, but not living as part of them and deeply connected to them.  Other species, through going about their daily lives, would engineer these landscapes, but our own species would be prevented from doing so.  I have to question if that helps us humans in any way face up to and manage the biggest dilemma we’ve ever had to deal with – how to live within the resource limitations nature imposes.  Segregation – we do nature over there and we live over here - does not seem to be the answer.  Surely it is only by living alongside nature on the land, that it will be possible to find a balance that allows us to meet our needs without taking so much that it degrades nature and impacts future generations.  

What our countryside – and particularly our upland areas, for they are always the most contested - should look like is very complex indeed. What should they be used for? What do we want them to deliver?  How do they help us meet our needs as UK citizens in 2018?  It is a conversation society as a whole needs to have, but there is a lot more to it than simply saying economic activity is bad and wilderness is good.  

Last week also saw the launch of DEFRA UK’s consultation on the future of farming policy in England.  If we need to have a conversation about the countryside, then this is a pretty good opener.  The eventual shape of farming policy will matter to many, many more people than just those who farm, but it is vital that those who are currently heavily reliant on income from the CAP, engage with this consultation now, and give it their full attention.  

Michael Gove has been trailing much of what is included in the consultation since July 2017.  He has been clear in his message that direct support for agriculture will go, and that in future money from the public purse will be for public goods, primarily for measures that enhance the environment.  This might be good news for the uplands – they are where many valuable environmental services are delivered - and there is definitely potential to help achieve the balance discussed above.  But, there is little in the way of detail yet, so we just don’t know.  What it signals, is change,  and one of the things I am keen to ensure is that the Heather Trust is able to help moorland and upland farmers and managers with that change to achieve uplands that work for everyone.    

Change of Director: The Last Word

I have the decanter - time to go!

Yesterday was my last day at the helm of the Trust and Anne Gray takes over, first thing on Monday.

We have travelled a long way during my era and it is more than time that some else took over to move the Trust forward.  It will be for Anne to determine how the Trust's particular mix of strengths and weaknesses can best be brought to bear on the myriad of challenges that face us.

I will be continuing to support the Trust as a consultant from the HT back benches, and I will be leading on some projects, until there is an opportunity to hand these over.

So what of our successes during my tenure:

• Our strapline that the Trust is 'Promoting Integrated Moorland Management' seems to be more relevant now than it was when first adopted, early in my time.  
• The use of a collaborative, partnership approach to issues has become central to the way that the Trust operates.
• The Trust's independent position has allowed us to be accepted as a facilitator / coordinator / safe pair of hands in many roles.
• Some reserves have been built up to provide the Trust with a little financial flexibility.

The standout area of less success is that the stand off over raptor persecution has continued and the vitriolic debate around this issue runs unabated.

• Until a way can be found to sort this issue, or at least find a way round it, progress will be restricted.  The trenches seem to be as deep as ever.
• The grouse moor fraternity must find a way to root out the few bad eggs that jeopardise the hard, often exceptional work of so many others.
• The bird lobby must be prepared to compromise to encourage change from others.
• Progress will benefit all interests.
• I remember well my thoughts on leaving a meeting of the North of England Raptor Forum where I had given a presentation about burning.  My view was that I had not met such a knowledgeable, committed enthusiastic group since I had been at a gamekeepers meeting.  Why can we not all pull in the same direction?

This is my last post on the Heather Trust blog.  Anne Gray will takeover as the author from Monday.  I have set up a new blog VallumVoice where I will continue occasional ramblings - please join me.

Thank you to all who have supported the Trust during my tenure: the HT Team, Board members, HT members and the others that have supported the Trust's work in many ways, such as through the Country Market & Sporting Sale (still looking for Lots for 2018) or by attending our events. There is much still to be done and with your continuing support The Heather Trust will be in the thick of it.

Finally, my thanks go to Anne Gray for rising to the challenge.  I wish her well.