There wasn't much about aside from a Wren rattling from the roadside heather and a Raven cronking in the distance, though there wouldn't be at this time of year. The Heather Trust members looked out across the long heather and the self-seeded Sitka Spruce on what was once a well-known grouse moor and carried out their own site condition assessment: unfavourable declining was the general consensus.
The community land buyout at Tarras Valley was driven by a fascinating interaction between two dichotomous narratives. The first was that Tarras Valley was home to an extraordinary assemblage of upland wildlife. The skydancing Hen Harriers, the Merlin furiously darting hither and thither, the spectacle of lekking Black Grouse on frosty April mornings, the bubbling Curlew, the Golden Plover perspicaciously patrolling the tops. The second narrative was that the land and all those incredible birds needed to be wrested from the hands of those who had wrought to it nothing but devastation and ruin. This second narrative offered no explanation for how all that wildlife had ended up there in the first place, but somehow that didn't matter. The cause seemed so glorious and righteous that the rules governing the flourishment of upland species were surely going to be rewritten.
Now it's no longer a grouse moor, there's no predator control. More harrier nests will be lost to foxes, though they ought to keep getting broods away. This place should still suit them for a while, and these are itinerant birds anyway: numbers will fluctuate, they colonise new sites with relative ease, and they’d be back in a flash if conditions were right. Not like Red Grouse – once they go, that’ll be it. Curlew will linger just long enough to trick the callow and wishful into thinking it didn’t matter after all that the gamekeepers were stood down. For the Black Grouse, opportunities for food and shelter as the scrubby woodland encroaches onto the moor are unlikely to compensate for increased predation of eggs and chicks.
Tarras Valley is isolated from other upland areas where predator control still takes place - at places like Geltsdale or Mar Lodge there are broad management objectives, but they are also able to benefit from predator management carried out on nearby estates. Tarras Valley, in contrast, is surrounding by lowland farmland and plantation, which provide ample food and shelter to generalist predators. At Carrifran, another rewilding site nearby, when the site was purchased there were no open ground species of conservation interest to speak of when it was purchased - as such, they had no need to worry about holding on to anything in particular, nor a stick with which opponents could beat them. To make matters worse, at Tarras Valley there's a wealth of cold, hard data and evidence from twenty years of management trials and scientific projects on how upland bird species respond to different management regimes against which the efforts of Tarras Valley Nature Reserve will be measured.
But what's done is done; the question is what should happen now - is there space within the constraints of the public profile of the project and the objectives and ethics of the funders to manage predators? Of course there is a legal obligation to ensure favourable conditions for ground-nesting birds derived from the SPA and SSSI designations too, but the buyout was supported and promoted by various groups precisely because it brought an end to the supposedly needless slaughter of innocent animals; it will be challenging, to say the least, to now announce that the slaughter innocent animals is needed after all.
While the Heather Trust was visiting Tarras Valley, a conservation organisation based on Jersey with no experience of land management in the Scottish uplands announced that they would transition a Perthshire shooting estate to a 'nature-positive landscape' and declared that they had a 100-year plan to restore Capercaillie. No detail was offered, no indication that they understood the trade-offs involved in upland land management nor the stark situation facing Capercaillie. Jejune statements rarely solve complex problems; if they did there would be nothing left to puzzle over in the Scottish uplands.
Whatever the future is that might marry together the interests and rights of local communities with the ground-nesting birds which inhabit open landscapes at higher latitudes, and the imagination of a wider public who have been taught to yearn for change and to disdain the ecosystems in which these species flourish, it will require an awful lot more pragmatism than is currently on display. After all, that Norwegian model of land access and ownership that we are so fond of has widespread, cheap, sustainable, regulated access to hunting at it's core.
Perhaps in that pragmatic future, community ownership will be less important than tangible benefits and representation; perhaps it will be possible to manage for more species than grouse without decrying grouse moor management as some great disaster; perhaps a community-interest moor could employ a gamekeeper or two; perhaps if public subsidy reflected the benefits accruing from effective predator management, this would even be financially straightforward; perhaps one day the rights to shoot some grouse or deer might even be the property of a local community and the meat sold in a community café. Perhaps this might allow our relationship with the complex, layered ecologies of land management to become more nuanced; perhaps one day land could even be managed in a way that built bridges between competing narratives.
But for now the board and staff of Tarras Valley find themselves in an insidious position. The benefits to ground-nesting birds of predator management are so rarely communicated in the clear, unambiguous manner that the accumulated evidence deserves, it is little wonder that they find themselves boxed in by the poorly informed, unscientific perspectives which so often find succour. But perhaps no-one in particular ought be blamed for the impossible conundrum at Tarras Valley: just an inevitable reflection of the intellectual malaise suffused through our land management discourse. But at a site where circumstance, unfortunately, might be about to lay it all bare.
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