Are you inspired by Hen Harriers in the PDNP?
Would you like to be?
Then this is your opportunity – complete the consultation by the end of July.
The whole plan is very weak on biodiversity preferring to talk about people all the time.
I’ll come back to this.
Many thanks to Bob Berzins for pointing it out.
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“The whole plan is very weak on biodiversity preferring to talk about people all the time.”….Obviously. It’s a National Park.
“They are independent bodies funded by central government to:
Conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage.
Promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of national parks by the public.” ……… In that order.
This is encouraging..from the preamble:-
“From the 1995 Environment Act, the purposes of designation are to:
•
conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural
heritage; and
•
promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the
special qualities of the area by the public.
If there is a conflict between these two purposes, the Act states that
conservation takes priority. In carrying out these purposes, the National
Park Authority must also seek to foster the economic and social well-being
of the local communities within the National Park.”
THE ACT SAYS THAT CONSERVATION TAKES PRIORITY.
“conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural
heritage…”
The Yorkshire Dales National Park (Authority) don’t seem to have read the first bit. All they appear to care about is heritage, access and planning. I see little difference in our other National Parks. (I live in The Yorks Dales NP by the way). Yes there’s bits of ‘conservation’ work that goes on, and a decent team on the ground that is helpful when wanting advice or applying for grants, but then when you look who the movers and shakers in our NP Authority are, and their ‘other’ interests, it’s not surprising they won’t conserve & enhance the natural beauty really.
That is one hell of a vague plan.
Where i live there was a plan for a community forest with all the perfect goals for community and wildlife including a native broad-leaved forest. Forestry Commission Scotland awarded the undermangaed forest to the charity becasue they couldn’t viably get the timber out. (As i understand it SFC can’t get grants).
What happened? The charity clear felled 690ha in one go, spent £2.25 million (almost the entire profit from the timber) on a special road through a beautiful glen and are now planting almost entirely Sitka Spruce. This was partly paid for by taxpayers grants. It looks like they are going to use neo-nicitinoid treated trees because the management plan was so bad and they may also spray again with neonics in the first few years.
Some of the local community are getting organized to stop the neonics (Gazelle) but it looks like the Sitka Spruce plantation is unstoppable unless a new charity takes over.
There is not one statutory body supporting us, in fact FCS appear to be forcing the use of neonics because the fallow years permitted is not sufficient to allow the die back of the pine weavil. Coincidentally a high heidyin in the FCS is also a high heidyin in Tillhill, the forest company providing the neonic trees and which also felled the trees and built the road. Tillhill are heavily involved in the promotion of Gazelle for Bayer and we are a test run. Hi ho.
The Scottish EPA don’t care about contamination of at least 26 community water supplies and SNH don’t care about the potential loss of the incredibly rare and protected Slender Scotch Burnet colony within a stones throw of the woodland or the contamination of the oyster farm directly below the forest or the effect on the waders and fish in the estuary and small enclosed sea loch.
I have yet to see what the Scottish Charity Commission thinks about the breach of aims.
I didn’t make it clear that the road was a timber extraction road not for the public. It runs parallel to the public road so apart from the environmental damage is an eye-sore and constant visual reminder of the monumental fuck up.
What a shame. How often good schemes get infiltrated by the greedy and uncaring. Or by those with a hidden agenda. Charities can be very vulnerable to this. I wonder how the Hawk and Owl Trust are doing these days?
I gather that the person who wrote the original application for the land resigned presumably when he saw the U turn ahead. it was started in good faith and then ‘managers’ took over.
This National Park plan keeps mentioning ‘balance’.
I have become very suspicious of that word.
Balance in this context implies equal priorities which i find irreconcilable with other claims of giving conservation the first priority.
Isn’t this the problem with so many strategies in this day and age? Strategy should be about making choices and decisions about relative priorities. Instead it often turns out to be a process of trying to keep as many stakeholders as happy as possible.
Heres my letter to PDNP:
Peak District National Park Authority.
Dear Sir or Madam
It was with great interest that I read your consultation document, issued recently regarding your future (post 2017) five-year plan. Much has happened in the last 5 years within the Peak District National Park (PDNP) and I will talk about these things later, before suggesting a vision for future Peak District management.
I am writing this submission on behalf of myself and I believe my children, who hopefully will one day continue the tradition within my family of visiting the PDNP, primarily to seek rest and respite from the industrial environments of NE Derbyshire. Currently we are regular users of the PDNP, visiting on a more than weekly basis, primarily for leisure, walking and trying to enjoy the local wildlife.
This is actually a family tradition that goes back as far as I know to my grandfather, who spent a great deal of time out walking on the moors above Burnley in Lancashire, where he documented the landscapes of the area mainly in watercolour. His love of the British uplands has passed from him, to my father and thence onto me and my siblings, who all love to use the PDNP for similar walking and wildlife viewing activities. As such, my family and I have used PDNP as a “common leisure resource” for generations.
What concerns me most about the PDNP is the total amount of land dedicated to driven grouse shooting, mainly vast swathes of the Dark Peak Area. Heather moorland has been upheld as a particularly quaint feature of this area. The recent intensification of driven grouse shooting within the Dark Peak Area (DPA) has led to the degradation of other vitally important wildlife habitats, particularly blanket bog, scrub and forest. It is my opinion that this needs to be rectified. The mosaic of habitats between blanket bog and climax forest would be a normal feature of the natural succession between the two extremes and indeed the recovery of climax forest from fire damage. If you compare a heather moorland to the kind of moorland featuring varying degrees of tree cover you will notice the rich diversity of plants and animals supported by the latter and barren nature of just heather. Off course there is good reason to maintain limited areas of heather coverage, heather moor being in itself a habitat worthy of protection.
The last 10 years or so have seen the ever-increasing intensification of driven grouse shooting with estates competing to provide for their customers larger and larger bags of birds to shoot at. When grouse populations become too dense they start to suffer from worms and other diseases and to stem these they are treated with excessive amounts of medication, be that anhelmenitic drugs in medicated grit, or other therapeutic agents. Additionally, when populations become too dense these birds become a food source for a range of predators. Predators with boosted populations then go on to deplete populations of other birds and wildlife. To stem the excessive populations of predators, essentially caused by feeding them with red grouse chicks, the estates employ people to cull them. They cull just about every living thing on a grouse moor that is not a grouse or heather, including badgers, foxes, stoats, weasels, moles, hedgehogs, mountain hares and brown hares and all species of predatory birds (corvids, ravens, gulls, hen harriers, peregrine falcon, goshawk, short eared owl etc), often illegally. There is widespread documentary evidence of this.
To provide fresh heather shoots for the grouse to eat, the estates employ people to burn the heather and all other wildlife contained therein. This practice is carried out well into April when many ground nesting birds are setting up territories. This is hardly a regime that supports diverse ecosystems or indeed any wildlife.
You may hear claims about the populations of golden plover or other wading birds benefiting from this burning regime but this is simply misleading. These birds are well documented to thrive on unimproved grasslands and semi-improved grasslands. That they may use heather moor is probably due to nest sites elsewhere having been ploughed up for silage and ryegrass. There is clearly also a place for areas of agriculture within the PDNP, but not agriculture that has been intensified to the extent that it has been permitted in the last few years. I would therefore suggest the importance of in-bye land and the intensification of farming thereupon, as another issue that needs to be looked at. I would like to point out the success of a number of environmental stewardship schemes, that I have had the pleasure of visiting. Indeed, I was upon one last night, listening to the mewing of long eared owl chicks.
There is an ever-dwindling body of wildflower meadows within the PDNP, be these on acidic or alkali soils. There is an urgent need to protect those left and restore many of those damaged by agriculture.
But perhaps most importantly, there is a chronic shortage of climax forest within the PDNP, especially the dark peak area. The PDNP should undertake to allow large areas of the Dark Peak Area to recover naturally. In so doing the PDNP could create a diverse mosaic of habitat, a genuine wilderness, much more suitable for the leisure desires of the vast majority of stakeholders, the visitors to the park. This will obviously take some enlightened leadership on behalf of the national park authority, but I am sure you will be able to find someone to step up to the mark. May I suggest you appoint Mark Avery to the chairman of your board.
Yours sincerely
Gerard
Dr Gerard Hobley