On August 10th, I joined the “Reclaim Our Moors” walk on Moscar Moor near Redmires Reservoir (which was looking extremely depleted). This is an annual event which precedes the “Glorious 12th, or the Inglorious 12th as I prefer to call it, when people start again to pay £2000 each for the privilege of shooting Red Grouse, an amazing bird that is only found in this country.
It was a lovely walk in super weather, but on the Grouse Moor, what is most noticeable is the lack of wildlife. Not a bird in the sky and hardly any insects either. The company was great, with fellow walkers from organisations such as Extinction Rebellion, Action on Plastic, The Green Party, Stop Rosebank, the RSPB and many more.
When we reached the pond, we sat down and had a sing-along, with traditional songs such as The Manchester Rambler and This Land is our Land, with new lyrics addressing the multiple problems of grouse shooting.
This was followed by speeches. There was much hilarity when Maggie was demonstrating the use of snares, now illegal in Scotland but not so in England. This cruel device tortures badgers, stoats, foxes and weasels who get caught in it, continuing to tighten until the animal dies from infection, starvation or is put out of its misery by a gamekeeper’s shotgun. But they have been known to catch fell runners, and just as Maggie explained this, one ran past! She assures us this wasn’t planned.
Maggie explained how the owner of the Moor, the absentee landlord, the Duke of Rutland, who lives in Belvoir Castle, claims around £200,000 a year from the Government, paid with our taxes, to manage the moor. This work doesn’t benefit wildlife or the environment. It’s to benefit the grouse shooting industry, and that is the sole purpose. The work includes rotational heather burning, which creates new green shoots that the grouse like to eat. Reclaim Our Moors has offered the Duke of Rutland £1 to buy the Moor, as they campaign to bring it back into public ownership.
A petition to ban grouse shooting recently gained more than 100,000 signatures, forcing a debate in Parliament, which was held last month in one of the meeting rooms. Sadly, only one MP, Olivia Blake, opposed grouse shooting. She was on her own and was opposed not just by the opposition but by a fellow Labour MP. It was absolutely shocking.
Botch explained about the ecology of the grouse moor and how it takes thousands of years for the peat to build up in height, sometimes as much as 7 metres. But when landowners drain the moors to make conditions ideal for the grouse, the peat dries up, releasing the carbon into the atmosphere, and the amazing ecology of sphagnum moss, carnivorous plants and wetland birds is destroyed. The dry conditions are ideal for heather, which grouse eat and sleep in. But it means we’ve lost the Curlews, the Lapwings, the Golden Plovers, the Merlin, the Hen Harrier and the Short-eared Owls.
Sarah, from Parents for Future, made a very moving speech. A moorland burn in October 2023 caused thick smoke to blanket Sheffield. The incident exposed her young daughter and much of the population of Sheffield to air pollution five times the legal limit, a particularly dangerous situation for vulnerable groups like asthmatics. She argued that this harmful practice is an unacceptable risk to children’s health.
Sarah noted that degraded moors worsen flooding in nearby communities, and landowners continue this destructive practice for a “sport”, which is an unjust and outdated use of valuable land.
Charlie from Protect the Wild had travelled from Wiltshire for the event. He passionately argued against driven grouse shooting and the normalisation of killing a unique, endemic bird species. The Red Grouse (Lagopus Scotica) is found only in the UK, making it one of the country’s two endemic bird species. Charlie noted that grouse shooting, introduced by Victorians, has been so normalised that the shooting industry successfully “othered” certain birds by calling them “game birds,” removing them from the public’s perception of protected wildlife.
This was evident in the parliamentary debate where politicians, briefed by the shooting lobby, focused on job losses rather than the ethics of shooting a native bird or the job creation possibilities in restoring the grouse moors to their natural condition. Charlie criticised the RSPB for being “neutral on the ethics of shooting,” which he sees as a concession to the industry. Charlie also rejected the idea of licensing because it legitimises the harmful practices of grouse shooting, such as habitat degradation, burning, and killing of other wildlife. We need an outright ban to stop Grouse Shooting and enable the reclamation of the moors.
Charlie concluded, “You cannot accept licensing. You cannot accept the smoke. You want the land back. And at the same time, please, I just make a plea for all of us to remember, at the centre of this storm is a bird that is found nowhere else in the world but here in the British Isles, and that is the Red Grouse.”
The write up from last years event is here.
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