Kick the Butts out of Kinder Scout!

This article also appeared as a Guest Post on Mark Avery's Blog

I awoke last Friday morning to two wonderful things.

Curlew -one of the birds that is tolerated and does well on managed
grouse-shooting moors, like Kinder Scout SSSI, SAC, SPA.

It was 5:30am. Overhead the piping call of a curlew roused me from my slumber amongst the soft bilberry and heather of Kinder Scout's plateau; the night's rain and wind had finally passed over, and my bivouac bag had weathered it well. I had arrived late on Thursday night, just as darkness fell at Crookstone Knoll, and had made a low impact - albeit slightly elicit - stopover on Kinder's extreme eastern end. I'd come to see for myself how grouse shooting was impacting on the landscape here.

Shooting Butt on Kinder Scout SSSI
below Crookstone Knoll at SK14408833

The second wonderful thing to wake to was news on Twitter that the National Trust had just announced it was terminating the lease of one of its shooting tenants in the Hope Woodlands Estate (the bit I had been sleeping on!) This amazing news came after the release of a video of a camouflaged gamekeeper with a gun and plastic hen harrier decoy on land owned by the Trust. Pressure on the organisation to act had mounted over recent weeks, not only on my old colleague, Jon Stewart, who now works for the National Trust, but also on Helen Ghosh, the Trust's Director-General, who many people had contacted to demand action. To their immense credit the NT had finally come out with a statement (reproduced here) in favour of evicting this untrustworthy shooting tenant on the grounds that their activities were no longer compatible with the Trust's vision for the Dark Peak moors. This was wonderful news indeed. The long process of seeking a new tenant would begin in 2017.

A post marking the top of a line of shooting butts
on Kinder Scout SSSI - owned by the National Trust 

All week I had been saying that I felt the next Hen Harrier Day on Sunday August 7th in Derbyshire needed a stronger, more clearly defined and achievable focus. And here now is the opportunity to ask (demand?) that the National Trust go one step further than their surprisingly wonderful statement last Friday.

We need to tell the National Trust to remove all the shooting butts from their land in 
the Dark Peak SSSI/SAC/SPA (Special Protection Area). Kinder should be the start.

It makes no sense to me to spend immense sums of money on gully-blocking, re-wetting and restoring the western side of the Kinder Scout plateau, whilst on its eastern arm the shooting tenants (now presumably given notice to quit) have continued to burn the deep peat just to encourage heather for their grouse, and then dig pits for their trays of medicated grit to keep the birds healthy (prior, of course, to being shot by well-to-do lines of gunmen hiding in grouse butts after 12th August each year). I earnestly believe there should be no shooting whatsoever on any part of the Kinder Scout part of the Dark Peak SSSI/SPA. I would then like to see management for grouse-shooting removed from all National Trust land within the Dark Peak.

So, as I offered myself up as breakfast to the multitude of moorland midges, I made a note of the damage being done on Kinder in the name of driven grouse shooting. Below me at Crookstone Knoll, the biggest symbol of this was the line of grouse-shooting butts that emerged through the early morning mist towards me from the Snake Pass road. These symbols of greed, folly and moorland mismanagement really have no place at all today on the slopes around the Kinder Scout plateau. This part of the Dark Peak SSSI is one of our most heavily cherished ecological habitats, given special UK and European protection as an SSSI, an SAC and an SPA. Yet all around there were signs of moorland habitat mismanagement - funded by HLS payments - but that seemed to me to run totally counter to the good work being done elsewhere on Kinder by the National Trust, the Peak Park, and the Moors for the Future project. Numerous areas of burnt heather and white-tipped posts marked the location of plastic trays of medicated grit, many placed into holes dug into the ancient peat. Just look at the vast swathes of burnt moorland on the eastern side of Kinder on this Google satellite view.

Moorland burning on Kinder Scout plateau west of Crookstone Knoll

Kick the Butts Out Of Kinder Scout!
No shooting on this part of the Dark Peak SSSI/SAC/SPA

It was 1932 when the  Kinder Mass Trespass took place. The common man demanded access to the wild landscapes that had hitherto been denied them. Today it is the gamekeepers and shooting tenants who are now the trespassers here. And this time there is no place for them - they have no moral right here, even if some do still have a lease. With their guns, their medicated grit, their moorland burning, their snares and their stink pits - and sometimes even their poisons and snipers - they trespass onto these landscapes and do our wild places no good. Evidence of the damage that intensive grouse farming causes was all around on this, the extreme eastern arm of Kinder Scout SSSI.

The shooting butts should not be here at all; 

they make a mockery of the moorland restoration efforts being done further west on Kinder.

It would take just a few hours with a sturdy crowbar to Kick the Butts Out of Kinder Scout. We should seek to scatter these stones, or turn these places into simple cairns - monuments to the folly and anachronism of intensive grouse farming on what is undoubtedly the Peak District's most well-known and valued wild place. We need the National Trust to take this further action  in order to demonstrate a desire never to see grouse shooting on any part of the Kinder Scout SSSI again. It should create at least one shooting-free area on its land-holdings, and to do so on behalf of the vast majority of its members who, like me, care about a better landscape, rich in wildlife and delivering healthy ecosystem services for everyone's benefit. Carbon sequestration by the peat; the retention of water and reduction of flooding downstream in the cities of Derby and Nottingham are just two of many services a more healthily managed moorland will deliver.

Burned heather and holes dug in the peat
for trays of medicated grit on Kinder Scout.

If you want to contact The National Trust you can email Dame Helen Ghosh, or Jon Stewart, and praise them for their action thus far, but why not also invite them to Kick the Butts out of Kinder Scout! and make this the first bit of the Dark Peak SSSI/SAC/SPA to be a completely lead-free zone?

If you want to join Hen Harrier Day 2016 in Derbyshire, do watch out for further details here, or follow the Hen Harrier Day Twitter feed for news and updates.

With Natalie Bennett from the Green Party attending Hen Harrier Day in Edale this year, as well as our new Police and Crime Commissioner, Hardyal Singh Dhindsa, now is the ideal opportunity to both publicly applaud the National Trust for taking a firm line with one of their wayward shooting tenants, but also to call for one more small, but achievable action: Kick the Butts out of Kinder Scout!

I want to see all moorland management for grouse-shooting halted on National Trust
land within the Dark Peak SSSI/SAC/SPA.
Removing all 53 of the shooting butts around Kinder Scout should be our first goal.

http://peakhhday.blogspot.co.uk/
http://nomoorshooting.blogspot.co.uk/

The Flora of Derbyshire

“Everyone has a book inside them”, someone once said. Well, if that’s so, mine has seen an 18 year gestation - with birth now very imminent!

For the last 12 months, quite literally, every spare waking hour when not at work has been spent at home, feverishly putting the finishing touches to my book, The Flora of Derbyshire. I did manage a two week summer holiday away from the computer, but that was all. After nearly 20 years of recording and data manipulation, it took a solid year to get to the point of posting off a CD to our publishers (Nature Bureau) last October, and now being on the verge of publication.

The pre-publication offer period ends on May 13th 2015, and our launch event and book signing will be held at the University of Derby the following day. Last week I received the first batch of books from the printers, and how weird it was to see multiple copies of a book I and my co-author at oe time wondered whether we would ever get to print. Over the years I have written a large number of papers, journal articles, booklets, trail leaflets, newsletters, press releases and even some award-winning calendars, but this was my first ever book. And what a book - all 464 pages of it! It was an amazing experience to see the results of half a lifetime's efforts there in front of me; copy after copy, smelling of crisp, clean print and looking amazing. Peter Creed, the botanical expert and designer from Nature Bureau had done an amazing job.

We lost the race with the Derbyshire Ornithological Society who for years were also working simultaneously on their own amazing “Birds of Derbyshire”, published in 2014. But births, death, redundancy and some intensive local environmental campaigning added to delays on my part, in what now seems to have become almost a lifetime’s work, along with that of my co-author and BSBI county plant recorder, Dr Alan Willmot.

Ours will be the first new Flora to be produced for Derbyshire since 1969, and will describe and map the occurrence and distribution of all the 1,919 wild flowers, trees, conifers, ferns and horsetails ever known to have grown in the county. It is illustrated throughout in full colour, and spans the last 400 years of Derbyshire plant recording, with over 850,000 individual records analysed and mapped.

Leadwort (Noccaea caerulescens) Rose End May 2005 Photo N Moyes

An Introductory chapter describes the 'Landscapes and Vegetation of Derbyshire', with further sections on the 'History of Local Plant Recording', the 'Conservation of Derbyshire’s Flora', and 'Where to See Plants in Derbyshire'. We aim to give the reader a useful and practical background to botanising here, so we have listed 70 sites scattered right across the county that are worth visiting and are all publicly accessible. We also provide a slightly corrected copy of our Derbyshire Red Data List of the most threatened plants in the county which should be a valuable resource for naturalists and conservationists. Just two weeks before being sent for type-setting, we learnt of the newly published England Red Data List of plants, and spent a frantic fortnight incorporating these important new IUCN threat codes befoer finally sending off the text..

As with the Birds of Derbyshire, we have taken a landscape approach to describing our county, and were aided in this by the detailed work of the County Council’s ‘Landscape Character of Derbyshire’, which was also revised and published online last year.

You can find out all about the publication of our new book on our Flora of Derbyshire website, and keep up to date with development on both our Twitter page and on Facebook.

For anyone contemplating producing a similar book for their own county, I would offer this advice:

a) Do not have children! 

b) Do not “Get a life!” 

c) Press 'Save' every 10 mins! 

This article is based on a piece written by the author in the Autumn 2014 edition of Derbyshire Biodiversity News 

http://craftyandarty.blogspot.co.uk/

How much does it cost to NOT build a cycle race track on top of a Bird Reserve?

So how much did Derby City Council actually spend trying to build an outdoor cycle race track on top of The Sanctuary Bird Reserve and LNR at Pride Park?  The skylark, the snipe and the wheatear whose habitat was bulldozed away earlier this year probably don't care. But today we found out  it was £147,000. (see this Derby Telegraph article)

Bulldozed open mosaic grassland habitat at The Sanctuary LNR
with the new £27m Velodrome. 

It would be a shame - but not a surprise - if an attempt is made to place blame for this waste of resources at the door of the conservationists. It was we who tried first to work with the Council in 2011 to find an effective compromise solution, and then who rallied together over the last three years to fight and defend this designated Local Nature Reserve from 40% loss or disturbance. It was and still is city's first Bird Reserve, and was opened in 2004 by the Secretary of State for the Environment, no less! Watch her giving her speech here)

But it is a shame that so much local taxpayers' money was wasted - and so much damage done - on pushing through a scheme that quite seriously flouted many of Derby City Council's own planning policies, management plans, and even National Planning Policy guidelines. We knew it was wrong - even their own planning policy staff advised them it was wrong. And even the High Court felt there was a case to answer. So when Derbyshire Wildlife Trust bravely took out an injunction and a date was set for a judicial review of how the process had been handled, our coalition knew we stood a good chance of having the planning permission rescinded that the Council had managed to grant itself. But then the Council suddenly announced that the costs of the scheme were already too high, and pulled out, blaming the inevitable delays on costs rising even further. So the impending legal action was withdrawn, and the injunction lifted.

To some extent, this waste of money is also the fault of Sport England and British Cycling who were set to grant aid the cycle circuit costs. Their promise of funds must have been a great temptation to those senior figures at Derby Council who were pushing through the adjacent velodrome development (see top picture). Had these national funding bodies taken their responsibilities more seriously, they would have asked a simple pre-application question: 

"ARE THERE ANY BIODIVERSITY FEATURES, SITE DESIGNATIONS OR OTHER MATERIAL CONSIDERATIONS WHICH MIGHT BE AFFECTED BY US FUNDING YOUR SPORTING DEVELOPMENT?" 

Two minutes to fill in a form, and they  would have realised straight away that "YES" there would be a planning problem, and this sorry saga would not have happened the way it did. Had advice from Derby City Council's own planning officers and policy advisors also been heeded (and we know it was given) we would not be where we are today, either. 

But we are where we are. It cost £147,000 to get here, and a large part of The Sanctuary LNR has been bulldozed into massive heaps of topsoil  and rubble that obstruct the views across the reserve, and do nothing in return by way of offering future habitat. The flat open mosaic habitat used by ground-dwelling birds has gone. They need wide open spaces to feel secure. It won't come back until the mounds are bulldozed back down and leveled off. We really do need Derby City Council to undertake to do this quickly (it will be cheaper for them whilst there are men and machinery at the adjacent velodrome site, too). Our coalition of conservation groups and their members are really keen now to help the Council manage the LNR into the future. We'd be happy to organise litter picks around the outside, or run birdwatching days for the public and velodrome users to see the Little Ringed Plover chicks or the nesting Sand Martins and Lapwing. We'd help out with conservation days to meet the council's recently published management plan objectives for this amazing little bird reserve. And we'd love them to fix the fencing to keep out the intruders on what still remains a 'contaminated site').

We have written to the Council Leadership three times in recent months to offer our help and support. It is disappointing not getting any reply - but the offer stands. We know Natural England is growing concerned to learn  when the damage to the LNR will be restored. And all those people who petitioned, campaigned, lobbied, and twice demonstrated outside the Council House are really keen to know, too.  We all want The Sanctuary go forth as a viable, valuable resource for biodiversity in this city and to work with the relevant people to help make this happen..