It always amuses me that so-called ‘countryside sports’ supporters routinely attack Wild Justice (WJ, the not-for-profit company set up by Dr Mark Avery, Chris Packham CBE and Dr Ruth Tingay, which uses the legal system to get a better deal for UK wildlife) for being ‘anti-shooting’. In fact, I’ve known all three founders of WJ to varying degrees over many years, and none of them has publically (or - to me at least - privately) called for a full ban on shooting.
What they have done is (correctly) question eg the system of General Licences which has for decades allowed anyone with a gun licence to shoot wild birds with little or no oversight or scientific rationale; the legality of the free shooting of Badgers on the grounds that it is inhumane; and the unlicenced release of pheasants which they showed should be licenced to control ecological damage to wildlife sites protected by the Habitats Directive (pheasants are relatively big birds with big appetites - and the Habitats Directive is important European legislation which just a few weeks ago Defra’s George Eustice was reported saying ‘was bureaucratic and fundamentally flawed on multiple levels’).
The nuances of these debates appear to go right over the (bone)heads of shooting lobbyists who instead see everything as an attack on their ‘rights’ (since when has killing for fun been a ‘right’?). I wonder then how they will greet the latest message from Wild Justice - which (in my opinion) rather than calling for a ban actually endorses the shooting of Woodcocks?
Please sign our new petition. We are asking for the shooting season for Woodcock to be shortened to give much better protection to the UK breeding population. (Wild Justice, 12/July/22)
Before I get into considering this, two things.
Firstly, I generally support Wild Justice, I admire the individuals that run WJ (including the wonderful lawyers at Leigh Day), and I more often than not support their stance. I don’t however wholeheartedly support this petition though I have signed it, and I will explain why later in this blog.
Secondly, not everyone reading this blog will even know what a Woodcock is, so that is where I will begin.
Woodcock are fabulously dumpy, long-billed birds, the cryptic ‘Snipe of the Woods’, ‘shorebirds’ that have evolved to breed in woodlands. They’re crepuscular, feeding at dusk and dawn, moving slowly head down as they probe the soil with their long bills. They weigh about 300 grams (on average) and have feathers like fallen leaves and huge, glistening eyes positioned near the back of their heads like a hare. You don’t really appreciate how utterly beautiful they are until you can get a really good look at them – preferably while they’re still alive rather than bloodied and dead - and if you’re careful – really careful – you can get a REALLY good look at them. In fact, sometimes you can get so close to them you can almost pick them up because they rely so much on camouflage that if you pretend not to notice them they’ll pretend not to notice you until you’re so close they’ll spring up at your feet like a big brown grasshopper whirring away before dropping down a few seconds later and disappearing into the background again.
Woodcock breed locally in Europe & N&C Asia, wintering south to N Africa & SE Asia: a wide range, but according to the BTO, they are no longer found in many former breeding areas here in the UK. Precisely why they are declining isn’t known (recreational disturbance, the drying out of natural woodlands, overgrazing by deer, declining woodland management, and the maturation of new plantations are possible causes), but the species has been put on the UK Red List: they are still listed as Least Concern across the rest of its large Eurasian range though. In plain English, they’re in no immediate danger of extinction globally, but extirpation or local extinction as a British breeding bird is possible.
The science, then, says that like so much of the UK’s biodiversity Woodcock are disappearing before our eyes. In the light of ‘shifting baselines’ it’s worth noting that generations ago the croak of a roding male Woodcock on its batlike display flight would have been as familiar as the purr of a Turtle Dove or the ecstatic song of a NIghtingale – now all three species have largely gone along with flower meadows full of butterflies and bees and village ponds jumping with frogs. The danger is that today’s generation think that’s ‘normal’ - it isn’t.
It’s iniquitous to ‘evaluate’ or compare species that don’t need to justify their existence in any way (especially by borrowing the deeply flawed reasoning of the ‘predator’ or ‘pest’ arguments used by the shooting industry), but Woodcock are utterly inoffensive birds. They don’t damage crops, they don’t take pheasant chicks, they don’t poop into our drinking water. They don’t do very much of anything at all except creep about looking for earthworms and minding their own business.
So what possible reason could anyone give for continuing to smash this little bird - and underneath those feathers is a small bird - out of the air?
When talking about Woodcock, shooting writers or estates talk about ‘excitement’ and adding ‘adventure’ to the day. Shooters shoot Woodcock because they’re ‘hard’. They fly fast and they jink through the air before diving into the earth and vanishing. They’re a ‘challenge’ – if you’re the sort of person who thinks that using a state-of-the-art gun to slaughter a small bird that didn’t even know you existed until a few seconds before they exploded in a puff of feathers is a challenge…
It’s ‘fun’ to kill Woodcock - which frankly is a pisspoor (in quotes) ‘reason’ to shoot a bird that has evolved over millennia to be as unobtrusive as possible.
However, current UK law says Woodcock can be killed, though it limits when shooters can feel that momentary thrill of blasting lead into yet another wild bird. The current window to kill Woodcock in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland is 01 October to 31 January. In Scotland the season opens in September, giving shooters there another month to gun down these beautiful birds.
The appalling slaughter of a declining species is justified by shooting lobbyists who say that “Current evidence suggests that over 90% of woodcock shot here migrate from Europe where breeding numbers appear stable”. So killing perhaps 150,000 Woodcock a year is okay because where these unfortunate birds come from they’re still relatively common? How pathetic…
That 150,000 figure comes from industry estimates based on ‘bags’ returned by shooters. It may be an underestimate. In fact, figures of exactly how many Red Listed or declining birds are being shot in the UK (whether they breed here or not) are difficult to obtain. If no one knows how many scarce or declining birds are being shot, shouldn’t we just stop killing them? An excellent article by Julian Thomas for BirdGuides which discussed this in August 2021 concluded with these words: “If the number is tiny and insignificant one might justifiably ask what is the point of them remaining on the quarry list, but if the number is significant then it would be a cause for real concern. Either way, perhaps now is the time to apply the precautionary principle and give protection to all these Globally Threatened or Red- or Amber-listed species that are currently targets for the shooting community”.
Indeed.
All of which should surely make most rational people ask a simple, question: why is there a ‘season’ to shoot Woodcock at all?
There is a season because shooters want one, and because conservation organisations (and WJ are not a conservation organisation, I’m thinking of the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts here for example) have never stood in their way. They have fiddled around the edges, asked for ‘self-restraint’ in harsh winters when the ground is frozen and Woodcock can’t feed using enormous amounts of energy just to survive the night, but not said, ‘Our remit is to protect birds and we disagree with killing them’. Not even Red Listed ones like the Woodcock - because, they say, it’s not the UK Red Listed breeding birds that are being shot, but Least Concern eastern European ones that are still relatively plentiful…
Which is the highly unsatisfactory halfway house that - it seems to me - Wild Justice also now occupies.
I should say at this point that I haven’t spoken with any of WJ about this (and they certainly have no need to explain to me anything they do anyway), but I read the background to this petition as follows:
the individuals behind Wild Justice (who are all birders to some degree) like Woodcock but it’s legal to shoot them and WJ is actually not opposed to shooting per se, just opposed to bad laws where they relate to shooting.
Pitching for a total ban is not what Wild Justice does, but (as I copied and pasted above) using the legal system to get a better deal for UK wildlife is.
Therefore proposing a shorter ‘season’ - which to quote WJ is “what the science demands” - is a sensible position to take…by then more European birds would be here for the winter so statistically it’s less likely a British bird would be killed, and perhaps fewer birds overall would be shot.
Which is where the notion of a ‘modern conservation dilemma’ I used as a subtitle arises.
Conservation is not about protecting birds from being shot. It is about weighing up measures to stop or delay extinction. But I am pro-wildlife and against shooting. If I sign Wild Justice’s petition (which is based on conservation, not ethics) I am effectively endorsing the shooting of Woodcock by agreeing to a legislated ‘season’ in which they can be shot - and also supporting the argument (which is also put forward by shooting lobbyists) that British birds will be spared at the expense of European ones.
My problem with this approach is of course that I don’t believe there is any justification at all - none - for shooting any Woodcock at any time or wherever they come from. Validating the killing on the grounds that it’s okay to shoot non-British wintering birds is in my opinion a disgraceful use of semantics. Birds don’t understand or recognise arbitrarily-drawn borders, and neither should we. A bird is a bird is a bird.
Climate change is rapidly altering the world so declaring the fixed-point start and end of a shooting ‘season’ based on a calendar established centuries ago is ridiculous and anachronistic anyway.
And I don’t believe that fewer birds will be shot overall either: it’s entirely possible that shooters who enjoy killing Woodcock will simply prioritise the days they kill Woodcock over eg killing Pheasants and the same numbers will be killed over a shorter period.
In my opinion, any complaints by shooting lobbyists about WJ’s ‘shorter season’ suggestion will be a knee-jerk response and just because it comes from WJ. Nothing would really change as far as shooters are concerned, and three important figures in UK conservation (three figures routinely castigated by shooters as being ‘anti-shooting’) are endorsing the killing of Woodcock.
So, should I sign WJ’s petition or not?
I may have changed my mind by tomorrow morning, but as I said at the top of this blog I’ve signed it. I disagree with its aims, but it’s broadly preferable to retaining the status quo. It’s a step in vaguely right direction (though not the one I want, which is an outright ban on killing Woodcock) and launching it will hopefully see more debate about shooting Woodcock taking place. As an aside, I don’t think that the issue here is the same as the licencing of Driven Grouse Shooting (DGS) which I will always be opposed to - even though the numbers of each species being killed are roughly similar, DGS envelops many other abhorrent practices like widespread trapping and snaring and the shooting of Mountain Hares, and also depends on habitat destruction and raptor persecution which killing Woodcock thankfully doesn’t.
So that’s where I stand, I’m open to being persuaded that I should withdraw my support (but not open to allowing the killing to continue as now) and I’d be very interested to hear from anyone reading this what they think. Thanks.