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..  

An End of Life Pathway

           

They stole you away this morning, those carers
They said that you were in pain.
They asked you if you were suffering
They asked you again and again.

They called it an 'end of life pathway', those nurses
But the rush to use it was wrong.
I begged them last night to inform me
As I needed to share one last song.

They called me to say what they wanted, those carers
To resolve your unease and distress.
Whilst I was conversing with doctors
They acted on what they thought best.

By the time that they reached me, those nurses
Ten minutes had passed and they said
That I was engaged and you were distressed;
They’d given you morphine in bed.

It did just what they wanted, those needles
They pacified you there in your bed
The things that I wanted to tell you
Will now stay forever unsaid.

I wanted a last chance to tell you, my mother
That I loved you from childhood to man
But they stole that last chance from before me
And now there’s no way that I can.

So lie there in peace, my dear mother
Befuddled, be-drugged and so frail
You know just how much that I love you
I am here for the end of your tale.


(Mum died the next morning at 8am)

I lived just 5 minutes drive away from Mum's care home. The day prior to her death I had explicitly asked the matron in charge to contact me if they felt that application of an 'end of life pathway' was necessary. (I had been concerned they seemed overly keen to apply it.) The following morning I was actually on my mobile phone to her doctors' surgery to find out more about the medication involved and to express my worries to them that the care home seemed rather "gung ho" in wanting to apply the pathway. It was at that precise moment that the care home  tried to ring my mobile. (They did not bother trying my landline). They reached me 10 minutes later, but by then they had already administered the necessary medication. I arrived at her home just four minutes later, but never managed to speak with Mum again. I knew she had been fading for days, but I had wanted to speak with her one last time whilst she was still compos mentis. I stayed in her room for the next 24 hrs, and wrote the words above some hours before she finally let go of life. Whilst maintaining my support for the concept of legal euthanasia, I felt her life was ended without sufficient consultation. She had never been in severe pain, although for some months had suffered many indignities that old age and immobility had forced upon her, despite a an otherwise sound and caring regime at her nursing home.

Open Letter to Dame Margaret Beckett MP - The Sanctuary Bird Reserve

An Open Letter to Margaret Beckett MP  - The Sanctuary Local Nature Reserve

Dear Mrs Beckett

Letter to Margaret Beckett MP
 from Derby City Council

In June 2011 you received a written promise from Paul Robinson, Strategic Director for Neighbourhoods at Derby City Council. He assured you the Sanctuary Bird Reserve, which you opened as Secretary of State for the Environment in 2004, would not be harmed by development of  a multi user sports arena (velodrome) at Pride Park. He said “we do not require any of The Sanctuary land”.  We now know this not to be true.

Here is a video of your 2004 opening speech alongside the Mayor of Derby in 2004.     
In the video you publicly praise Derby Council’s integrated approach to planning, its forethought and imagination in creating The Sanctuary Bird Reserve, and for protecting the declining habitat of the Skylark, for which your Department then had a responsibility.

May I invite you now to publicly deplore Derby Council’s current attempt to push through a planning application to build a mile-long pay-to-race cycle track on top of the very open mosaic grassland habitat for skylarks and wheatear and reed bunting that The Sanctuary was intended to protect?

I understand Council Leader Paul Bayliss has written to all the Planning Committee members to voice his support for the proposals;  so may I invite you to inform them of your own opinion on this matter? We trust the chair of the Planning Committee, who went to the House of Commons in 2005 to accept a ‘Green Apple’ award for The Sanctuary Bird Reserve on behalf of Derby City Council will not be swayed by her Leader’s remarks, or his lack of concern for biodiversity or Local Plan policies.

Everyone in Derby knows there is a perfectly adequate alternative cycle circuit location just 1.8 miles away, around the new athletics track at Derby Moorways.

Derby Moorways Athletics Track
- plenty of room for a 1.2km closed cycle racing circuit!

The muddy tracks were made by a recent National cyclocross racing
event, organised by, errm, British Cycling.

The Moorways Stadium site “scored highest against the evaluation criteria”  in an independent 2009 report, commissioned by Derby Council, but is now unreasonably dismissed as unsuitable in current planning application documents.  We do know from those documents that British Cycling is only willing to spend lottery/government money if it can build on top of The Sanctuary. Experts have shown Derby's figures of damage to be an under-estimate, and that 46% of the LNR will either be lost or so badly disturbed that skylarks and other birds would abandon it - many of them UK Priority BAP S

So a unique bird reserve is potentially set to become the first Local Nature Reserve in England to be developed and damaged in this appalling way by an Authority that previously declared the site of the highest importance for nature and for people, and which was opened to much acclaim by you.

Yet in a little over a year's time there will be a new regional outdoor cycle racing circuit built just 15 miles away at Harvey Haddon Sports Complex near Nottingham, also with British Cycling funding.

At the 11^th hour another Local Wildlife Site called Alvaston Scrub (DE053) has been offered as compensation for loss of bird habitat. As well as being totally inappropriate land to offer in compensation, existing leisure and recreation routes run right through it, and no ecological evidence or funding offer has been submitted to show how scrubland could be modified to create equivalent undisturbed habitat needed by the rare bird assemblages found on the open mosaic habitat, now about to be lost or disturbed by cycle racing and mountain biking at The Sanctuary.

The national precedent being set of a Local Nature Reserve being unnecessarily built upon, and thus having to be de-declared as an LNR has led wildlife broadcaster Chris Packham to call it ‘a vile act of wanton vandalism’. [worth reading the cylists' comments on this link]

This is a far cry from your speech in 2004 when you described The Sanctuary Bird Reserve as ‘a feather in the cap of the city of Derby’.

Will you prevail upon Derby’s Planning Committee members to consider which statement they believe to be the most accurate and, unlike Cllr Bayliss, to consider the alternative location as the best option for Derby and for urban biodiversity?

- ENDS - 

This letter was sent 29th January 2014, and cc-ed to all nine members of Derby's Planning Committee.

Related blog posts:  

Will you be riding rough-shod over nature? 20 Jan 2012

A Sanctuary - but for how long? 23 May 2011(First open letter to Dame Margaraet Beckett MP)

Store Cards - just a one way flow of information?

Image: Martin Bodman (Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this week Tesco stores issued a food recall of their own brand of ice-cream cones because painkillers were found in them. You can read the national news story here or here.

But I'm sure you already knew this, because doesn't everyone check the Trading Standards Institute's website everyday for product recalls like this one?

No, I didn't think so. TESCO - and no doubt all the other big corporations - rely on us finding out somehow via newspapers, or in-store notices tucked away somewhere.

But it struck me we hear so much about our exact shopping habits being tracked by the use of our loyalty cards that here was the perfect reverse use of that data. Surely stores like TESCO uses would use all that data amassed from their ClubCard to tell shoppers of the dangers of eating contaminated product. After all, they know the names of everyone who buys a product with a store card. Wouldn't they write or email them all?

Well, that's what I assumed. So I thought I'd use Twitter to ask if anyone knew if this is, indeed, what happens when a food product is found to be seriously contaminated.

Well, @TESCO heard me and kindly replied, but they rather appeared to have missed the point. So I asked again, but have so far received no response.

It's a shame. We give them so much of our shopping data with which to build their profits. You'd think when it came to a contaminated and potentially dangerous own-brand product they'd think it appropriate to contact their loyal ClubCard users to warn them of the risk.
Well, wouldn't you?

Sounds like a 'No'.

Just to clarify, I didn't buy Tesco's contaminated Ice-cream
cones with my ClubCard. But had I done so,
would they have contacted me? Do anyone?

British Gas - a shocking bill

After more than 25 years as a British Gas customer, I finally decided last month to leave for a cheaper and greener supplier, OvoEnergy.  The process seemed to be going really smoothly until I received my final electricity statement a few days ago.

It was good news in a way. You see, I'd been slightly overpaying every month and my account was almost £73 in credit. I was due a refund. (Hooray!) Somewhere around £62 it seemed. But then I looked again at the statement from British Gas.

"Your adjustments"  debit: £50.13  

So you'll only get £12.70 from us. (Booo!)

British Gas adds on a trumped-up, five-year old charge of £50 for work that was never done

But hold on. I was on a standard tariff, dual fuel. There are no fees for cancelling any contract, because I simply don't have one. I was confused; where did this £50.13p charge come from?

A chat to their call centre staff revealed that I wasn't alone in being confused; they simply couldn't tell me, either, "We'll have to refer it upwards", the man said. "We'll get back to you with an answer on Monday."

Monday came and went, so on Tuesday I rang again and repeated my question. It turned out that back in 2007 I'd enquired (note the word "enquired") about the cost of changing  my dual rate meter (i.e. economy 7) to a single  rate meter. They said they had overlooked billing me for changing the meter,  "so we'd  like it now, before you leave us, please!"

Not only is it shocking to think that British Gas can dredge up an unpaid bill from five years ago, it's utterly appalling that they try it on because my electricity meter was never changed. The work was never done. It was just an enquiry I made in 2007. Yes, my meter did eventually get changed some years later, but at British Gas' request, and when the engineer turned up to do the replacement, he only had a single rate meter with him. I didn't realise this until it had been installed.  But I've been happy with it; the costs have been about the same.

But I'm not at all happy at British Gas trying it on by trumping up an unpaid bill for work that was never done. And to add on a fake 5-year old fee just as I am leaving them seems petty in the extreme. OK, they have agreed to delete the "adjustment" and reimburse me the full amount I overpaid. But next time you hear British Gas offering to "Fix Your Prices"  you'll know just what that could mean!

 And if that's not a good reason to change supplier, I don't know what is.

What British Gas promises it will do for you!

Addendum: After receiving five more paper printouts of my "final bill", I finally received a cheque for £62.83 - but it was made out, not to the person who's been paying the bills for the last 25 years, but to my wife!