Our National Parks are rubbish for wildlife? Who knew...
...anyone paying attention for a start.
An article in today’s Guardian by Phoebe Weston discusses the recent ‘Protected Areas and Nature Recovery’ report by the British Ecological Society (BES) and opens with the following paragraph: “The UK’s national parks should not be considered “protected areas” unless the way they look after wildlife radically improves, according to a new report.”
She is of course quite correct, but quelle surprise, or 'No shit, Sherlock' will be the response from anyone who has looked objectively at our so-called ‘national parks’ in the past few years.
Back in 2019 I wrote a blog for the War on Wildlife Project looking at grouse and pheasant shooting in what was described at the time on the UK’s National Parks website, as “some of our most breath-taking and treasured landscapes. From the rugged wilds of the Cairngorms in Scotland and the ancient woodlands of the New Forest in southern England to the golden shores of the Pembrokeshire Coast in Wales, all of our National Parks are truly special places.“
Colour me sceptical, but there are two statutory purposes for national parks in England and Wales (The Broads has an additional purpose to protect the interests of navigation):
Conserve and enhance natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage.
Promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of national parks by the public.
Can those purposes be delivered when shooting and the habitat destruction and trapping/snaring that goes with shooting activities are actually commonplace in our ‘national parks’?
Commonplace? I’m exaggerating surely. Not a bit of it.
The website of the North Yorks Moors NP acknowledges, for example, that “Commercial shooting in the National Park is available on privately owned land and consists of seasonal grouse and pheasant shooting, with small volumes of partridge and duck shooting also available”.
The vast majority of the land in the Peak District NP is privately-owned. The Park’s website stated at the time, “More than 95% of land in the National Park is in private ownership. The National Park Authority has no legal or statutory role to regulate shooting other than on land it owns, which comprises between 4-5% of the National Park”
Unregulated shooting, especially in the northern part of the Park known as the Dark Peak, brought with it so much illegal persecution of birds of prey that the RSPB felt compelled to release a damning report in 2018 called ‘Peak Malpractice’ highlighting the problem.
Many of Scotland’s most notorious wildlife crime ‘hot spots’ are in national parks, huge areas of which are controlled by shooting estates. The influential Raptor Persecution UK website has detailed many instances of destruction and wildlife crime in the Cairngorms National Park, for example.
Wildlife is protected in a ‘national park’ though, surely? A 2020 blog by the now shuttered Parkwatch Scotland, on the release of non-native ‘gamebirds’ into the Cairngorms NP, stated that “Much of the National Park is now just one big game farm, pheasant and red-legged partridge on the lower-lying areas, grouse on the moors..” Millions of native mammals (especially foxes, stoats, and weasels) and birds (especially corvids) are shot, poisoned, or killed in legal traps and snares every year in ‘national parks’, solely to ‘protect’ those pheasant, partridge and Red Grouse for shooters.
And while traps and snares are still legal here in the UK, that doesn’t mean they are somehow animal welfare friendly. A 2019 report from Revive (a coalition for Grouse Moor reform in Scotland) titled ‘Untold Suffering‘ “documents the extent to which animals are being killed and subjected to negative welfare impacts to ensure grouse stocks are kept artificially high to be shot for entertainment.”
Our ‘national parks’ aren’t protecting natural habitats in many instances either. Fences and tracks (to allow shooters to drive up to shooting butts, for example) criss-cross ‘remote’ areas. Huge numbers of sheep graze national parks (stripped hills led to George Monbiot coining his now-famous description ‘sheepwrecked‘). Widescale burning of moorland is also routine in many of our ‘special places’, roasting “reptiles, small mammals, insects and tree seedlings” and contiuing despite (weak) recent legislation to control it.
The destruction is so bad that Kevin Cox, chair of the RSPB, was quoted in The Independent in March 2019 saying that, “National parks are not delivering for wildlife and are often in worse condition than areas outside the park”, and that even calling them ‘national parks’ was “misleading because practices including farming, tourism and grouse shooting were doing so much damage“.
It’s a sentiment also expressed many times by noted conservationist and campaigner Dr Mark Avery. Mark contributed to Chris Packham’s ‘A People’s Manifesto for Wildlife‘ as Minister for Upland Ecology and said in a podcast I recorded with him in 2018 that, “our national parks are national parks in name only” and should be downgraded until their problems are sorted out.
When I wrote that blog three years ago, figures weren’t available to say exactly how much of our so-called national parks was given over to (especially) grouse shooting and was being run solely for the benefit of a tiny minority of shooters and their lobbyists.
In August 2021, though, Rewildling Britain (the charity set up to “expand the scale, quality and connectivity of our native habitats”) produced research which did just that.
In a blistering press-release Guy Shrubsole (who joined Rewildling Britain as policy and campaigns coordinator in January that year), wrote that:
A total of 852,000 acres – an area more than twice the size of Greater London – of Britain’s national parks are devoted to intensively-managed grouse shoots.
44% of the Cairngorms National Park comprises driven grouse moors, as does almost a third (28%) of the North York Moors, a quarter of the Yorkshire Dales and a fifth (21%) of the Peak District. Driven grouse moors also cover 15% of Northumberland National Park and 2% of the Lake District.
Of the six national parks that contain grouse moors – which are found only in Scotland and northern England – almost a third of their combined land area (27%) is devoted to driven grouse shoots, which keep the land in a degraded state, contribute to climate breakdown, and prevent significant recovery of wildlife.
A rather prescient sentence in the report (given where we are now with Partygate and Boris Johnson mired in investigations into whether he is a serial liar), went on to say. “The Prime Minister’s pledge to protect 30% of Britain’s land for nature – and count national parks towards this total – rings hollow when you realise that vast areas of our national parks are dominated by these nature-impoverished and heavily-managed areas.”
In 2019 the State of Nature Report ranked the UK 189th out of 218 countries for nature, with some 56% species in decline and 15% threatened with extinction. Intensive agriculture, pollution, climate change, the spread and proliferation of non-native species (which includes pheasants released for shooting) all impact biodiversity, but in what world would intensively-managed grouse moors, their heather regularly burned to produce fresh shoots for young grouse (a process that often damages underlying peat soils, the UK’s single largest carbon sink) and rampant illegal persecution of some of the UK’s most protected wildlife, be considered compatible with the term ‘national parks’ anyway?
That would be right here in the UK, unfortunately…
Which brings us back to 2022 and today’s Guardian article, which points out that while protected areas such as national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONBs) make up 28% of UK land, only about 5% is effectively being protected and that “the UK’s national parks should not be considered “protected areas” unless the way they look after wildlife radically improves”.
I’ll say it again: No shit, Sherlock.