This is why I’ve lodged my petition.
Professionals managing wildlife are reducing in number.
We are losing armies of working conservationists; skilled people who work for nature at no cost to the taxpayer. It is becoming harder to operate ‘traditional’ rural businesses.
Wildlife management is getting harder. Tools are disappearing. We are at grave risk of losing snaring. Traps are being re-examined again.
Whichever way land managers turn, there are new restrictions but little sense of appreciation.
My petition gives MSPs a chance to show they value the unseen army of conservationists in our hills and fields; that they, too, may have a role in solving our Nature Emergency.
I believe they deserve a jersey for Team Scotland.
Tens of millions go to nature funds and habitat programmes.
Whilst important, these sums don’t save birds on their own.
I hear lots of talk of Recovery but we are continuing to lose birdlife.
There is no real tangible sign that what we’re spending - and the way we are spending it - is working.
Curlew, down 61% since 1995
Lapwing, down 60% in the same time-frame
Oystercatchers down 36%
Capercaillie- now only 300-500 individual birds left
black grouse down 47%
Dotterel down 60% between 1994 and 2014
Ptarmigan and Dunlin now on the red list
I could go on.
Legal control of abundant corvids, foxes and stoats is not the only answer, of course.
But I would strongly argue it’s part of the prescription.
What’s more, at the levels many ground-nesting species are at now, I would argue it’s more important than it ever has been at any point in my 40+ years in forestry and gamekeeping.
The late Dick Potts * used to say conservation was a 3-legged stool. If one leg goes, the whole collapses.
Referring to grey partridge, his recipe was that the partridge would have food, a decent home and would not be eaten. It seems simple, now you think of it.
He tested the idea on the ground. His habitat research work shaped UK agri-environment schemes.
His work also overturned the understanding around predation.
Before his work with Stephen Topper and Malcolm Brockless, it was believed predators were determined by prey numbers, not the other way around.
The Salisbury Plain experiment (1984-1990) refuted that.
Plots were tested. Some with predator control, some without. Then they switched them over and recorded the results.
There was a 75% increase in grey partridge with predator control and a 36% more breeding pairs in the years following predator control. After 3 years of control, partridge breeding density was on average 2.6 times higher than where there was no predators being legally managed.
Potts was shining a light on a very important leg of the stool which had been in relative darkness (where some would like it to remain).
The fact is: Control of abundant generalist predators (in tandem with habitat and food availability) works.
Not all members of the public might like to think about this. For MSPs maybe recognition isn’t easy.
But, like the headline grabbing restoration and recovery projects that net millions for habitat, the Parliament ought to recognise skilled legal management of abundant generalist predators, of itself, is an act of Conservation, too, and a key part of the solution.
The further we move away from that, the closer we move to silent hills, silent fields and silent skies.
Alex Hogg, MBE.
Chairman, The Scottish Gamekeepers Association.
PS: I’d like to thank every single one of you who has signed the petition. Keep sharing and encouraging others to sign. Biodiversity will be the winner. https://petitions.parliament.scot/petitions/PE2035
